I can spin up new VMs on the server in my living room and install software on it. But it's more complex than just installing the software on a baremetal server. Fortunately for me, cloud technologies such as opentofu, cloud-init, and ansible can let me spin up and configure local VMs in seconds.| ergaster.org
Thib is a nonprofit strategist and an open source program manager. He currently serves as the Director of Program Development at the Matrix.org Foundation, and as a Program Manager for the GNOME Foundation.| ergaster.org
According to Emma McAdam, micro habits build up and lead to depression. But they can be unlearned to get us back a happier and more fulfilling life. Here is a list of behaviors that will reinforce depression, and what to do instead.| ergaster.org
After years of self-hosting on a VPS in a datacenter, I’ve decided to move my services at home. But instead of just porting services, I’m using this as an opportunity to migrate to a more flexible and robust set up.| ergaster.org
A colleague was able to spot that a long string of gibberish was base64 encoded json. I couldn't believe he was base64 decoding on the fly without tools, so I asked him how he did it. It turns out that everyone can spot base64 encoded json.| ergaster.org
When working on my homelab, I regularly need to pass credentials to my tools. A naive approach is to just store the token in clear text, but there's a better alternative. Let's see how direnv and the Bitwarden password manager's CLI can be hooked together to let me keep my infrastructure credentials safe, in a simple, sturdy setup!| ergaster.org
I self-host services mostly for myself. My threat model is particular: the highest threats I face are my own incompetence and hardware failures. To mitigate those risks used to rely on podman containers to "standardize" my services, and on ansible to automate the deployment on my VPS.| ergaster.org
I self-host services on a beefy server in a datacenter. Every night, Kopia performs a backup of my volumes and sends the result to a s3 bucket in Scaleway's Parisian datacenter. The VPS is expensive, and I want to move my services to a Raspberry Pi at home. Before actually moving the services I wanted to see how the Raspberry Pi would handle them with real life data. To do so, I downloaded kopia on the Raspberry Pi, connected it to the my s3 bucket in Scaleway's datacenter, and attempted to r...| Thib's Blog
A program on my Raspberry Pi was reading data on disk, performing operations, and writing the result on disk. It did so at an unusually slow speed. The problem could either be that the CPU was too underpowered to perform the operations it needed or the disk was too slow during read, write, or both.I asked colleagues for opinions, and one of them mentioned that htop could orient me in the right direction.| ergaster.org
When Signal introduced Stories, I didn't understand why. To me, Signal is all about giving as little information to as little as possible but still being able to have a social life. I started using them, and now I get why it matters.| ergaster.org
I'm usually not a huge fan of personal growth books. I think most books of this genre are 300 pages long when all the content would fit on 20. I read _Deep Work_ by Cal Newport, with an open but skeptical mind. It turned out to be an insightful book that I would recommend reading.| Thib's Blog
If my phone is making me miserable my constantly nagging me for attention, surely the solution must be to ditch it and take a dumb phone that can only place calls and send texts?Except calls are particularly intrusive interruptions, and the only texts I receive are from couriers. My family and friends use iMessage or Signal. And what about the pictures I can snap in a few seconds by pulling my phone from my pocket? What about GPS navigation? What about those parking lots where you can only pa...| ergaster.org
I've struggled with focus earlier this year. I felt pulled in all directions, overwhelmed by the world, and generally miserable. I decided to abstain from using social media for a week to see if anything would change. The Joy of Missing Out was so strong that I ended up staying off social media for 3 whole weeks. I realized that engaging with social media harmed my mental health, and I could develop strategies to improve my relationship with it.| ergaster.org
Tech takes a central place in our lives. Banking, and administrative tasks are happening more and more online. It's becoming increasingly difficult to get through life without a computer or a smartphone. They have become external organs necessary to live our life. I believe computers & smartphones have become prosthetics, extensions of people that should unconditionally and entirely belong to them. We must produce devices and products the general public can trust.| Thib's Blog
Most of our organizational and operational knowledge at work is stored in a Bookstack instance that we completely control. Bookstack is a great tool for this purpose, but it's not a silver bullet when it comes to document editing. Its most notable limitation is that it doesn't handle concurrent editing really well.| Thib's Blog
I took a few days off to visit Copenhagen with my wife. We spent our days walking, sightseeing, snapping pictures, hunting for the best restaurants for our budget, and just having a good time.| Thib's Blog
In the 2000s I spent a lot of time with headphones on. Most of my pocket money went into CDs. I bought them, ripped them, loaded them into my music player and listened to them countless times. This changed, and owning my music is how I've meant to fix my relationship to music.| Thib's Blog
Open Source funding is still an unsolved problem. It shares many traits with traditional nonprofits. Many of them are on a mission and don't have much to sell but still need money to run. So what can we learn from them?| Thib's Blog
FOSDEM is a place where the nickname can become faces. People are almost always kinder offline, when they remember the human. Because it's the largest OSS conference in Europe FOSDEM is a good opportunity to meet people from friendly and competing projects alike.| Thib's Blog
It is now possible to buy tickets for Paris Métro or even charge a pass from your phone, and it works surprisingly well| Thib's Blog
As someone who likes to travel light, I try not only to bring as little as possible with me but also to pack it as tightly as possible. To that end I've found compression cubes to be a good way to organize my clothing and to, well, compress them to they take more room. [!check] I am happy with those compression cubes, but I don't know if better alternatives exist. Why I got it If I'm completely honest I picked the EagleCreek compression cubes because they seemed to be durable, capable, and ha...| Thib's Blog
One of the most important activities to make Matrix a mainstream protocol is lowering the barrier to entry for the general public. The Matrix.org website is a critical step of the onboarding. The Foundation doesn't have the resource to tackle user testing on the matrix.org website for now, although it would love to do it eventually. Fortunately, there is a much more affordable solution: web analytics.| ergaster.org
I don’t want to self-host, and even worse: I think most individuals shouldn’t host services for others. Yet, I am self-hosting services and I even teach people how to do it.| ergaster.org
