Going Metal

This is my first tech blog post for... almost thirteen years!!! Oh my goodness me has a lot happened since then.

I'm still on linux, but switched over to arch when I realized I had never successfully upgraded Ubuntu on my laptop, and then to CachyOS when I realized it was faster.

I am still very interested in music technology like SuperCollider but I started making my own system from scratch.

I no longer identify as a PHP programmer. I guess I'm an all-sorts-of-languages polyglot now but my go-to is now programming in Nim. I could go on and on about it but it's just genius, does it all- high level, low level, making binaries, scripting, and about as fast as you can make C. It doesn't get much better. And it made me better- normalizing ambition makes you more ambitious, an it shows in the projects.

And another big change is I finally got confident enough to put everything I have online on real servers- "bare metal", as it's called! I'll go into it more in upcoming blog posts, but you won't find me recommending Amazon products any more. Everything I do know runs on physical machines, at the time of writing leased from Hetzner. Everyone said it's too hard- but I think that's just a meme created by amazon, if you have everything on your own system, it's absolutely remarkable how much easier your life gets because you no longer have any friction. Everything is right there- and it's not that hard to run. I made the switch and never looked back.

I went metal!

Here's the stack:

Email

• Postfix mail server
• Dovecot IMAP server
• Snappymail webmail
• Rspamd spam filter

Chat and calls

• Prosody XMPP server
• Conversations android XMPP client
• Dino XMPP client on Linux (works on Windows too)
• Coturn STUN/TURN server

Websites

• Nginx web server
• Nim web applications (blg blog, runs this site, smplcmts comments, frueh email collector, pharao script hoster)

System tools

• Gatus monitoring
• Healthchecks to keep backups running
• Borg backups (2 independent sets, with Hetzner storage boxes)
• Wireguard networking (secure single network ties everything together)

Marketing tools

• Listmonk newsletters
• Rybbit analytics

Personal tools

(these are on or connected to a separate server at home)

• Syncthing file sync
• Immich photo sharing
• Filebrowser file access
• Davis calendar/task/contact server
• Tasks.org android task app
• Fossify Calendar android calendar
• Khal command line calendar
• Todoman (forked to add alarms) command line task program

Now that's a lot of software. I couldn't be happier- once set up, most of these just hum along. No subscriptions, no servers all over he world, no slowdowns, no data breaches, nobody scanning my stuff for AI, no logins with captchas, nothing- everything just works.

I'll be going into these from time to time.