I’m just this guy, you know?

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Cake day: Jul 07, 2023

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Yet again I’m asking the Fediverse: What do they think a good economy should look like?




I think it has more to do with maintaining a manufacturing base for defense than it is about jobs or the economy.


I was a teenager who wanted to be a 1337 haxxor so I found out what warez were, and then wanted to play a bunch of games for free.


I remember those days. Except back then you had the added challenge of finding space for it on your 1.2GB hard drive


I’ve worked for a couple startups and you’re absolutely right. If you make a profit you pay taxes on that money, so startups like to spend most of the money they bring in. They also want to show revenue growth, since that’s what investors like to see. You grow revenue by getting more paying customers. And you do that by doing what your customers want.

When you go public, your goal is to increase shareholder value. So you do this by reducing costs and finding ways to wring customers out of revenue. You find ways to nickle and dime customers out of revenue so much you develop an entire branch of law devoted to you suing your customers


So what? It figured out The Answer, big whoop.

Get back to me when it figures out The Question.


There is, but since color printers are the ones that were used in counterfeiting most black and white printers don’t do that sort of thing. Plus I don’t know how you’d encode that much information in black and white without making it visible on the paper.


Only color laser printers put those yellow dots on paper. The black and white ones don’t because they can’t: They don’t have yellow toner.

So get a black and white printer and you’ll be fine.


Three day special bridge rebuilding operation


I bet the restaurants would do a lot better if everybody got a raise.


I’m definitely going to watch it now, and also find a torrent of it so I can seed in perpetuity


Databases need tuning for your workload, and most people just think it’s a big box where you can dump anything you want and it will work. And then when it chokes on a terrible query they blame the DBA.

This makes DBAs very cranky.


Having written PHP for many years, all I have to say about it is T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM


It’s pretty telling that you don’t say what protest you’re talking about. Is it the stupid truckers?



I’ve been looking for something like this for a while. Calibre is great for managing it on a personal machine, but I want something that I can use on the web and then, with a click, send a book to a Kindle or whatever.


All the ones I’ve seen have been in the credits. Putting it in the middle of a movie is kinda shitty, but guarantees the ads are at least seen.


“What excuse could we use for this cost-cutting measure?”

“Uh, we could just say that people don’t need it anymore.”

“Johnson, get that man a promotion!”



Wait! Those torrent clients are written with programming languages! We should sue the people who made the programming languages for encouraging piracy!



A Space Force meme? I thought I was the only person who watched that show


Pausing Gluetun might do that, or it might route the Torrent traffic over the regular network, in which case you might see a blip in the download rate before it goes up again.

Personally I prefere this docker-ized torrent client, since it’s got the VPN built right in, and I don’t need a VPN to do anything other than torrents.


Also from that site: “Configure your domain name details to point to your home, either with a static ip or a service like DuckDNS or Amazon Route53” - I assume this is what Cloudflare is for instead of Duck or Amazon? I also assume it means "tell Cloudflare to take traffic on port 80 and 443 and send it to NGINX’s 80 and 443 as per the previous bullet) - but how?

Yes, this is configuring Cloudflare’s DNS to point to your home IP address. You shouldn’t need to tell it which port, because that’s on a different layer.


First of all, is that all correct or have I misunderstood something?

There’s a couple things you’ve got a bit wrong:

I think I’m correct in saying that mysubdomain.mydomain.com is actually an IP address and a public port, so something like 123.456.7.8:443, then Cloudflare - which is the reverse proxy - gets involved (somehow? how?) to say “ah, 123.456.7.8:443, you obviously want to go to funkless.raspberry.pi:NGINX (or rather something like 987.654.3.2:443)” and then NGINX - which is the proxy-proxy, not a reverse-proxy - goes (somehow? how?) “ah, 987.654.3.2:443, you obviously want to go to 987.654.3.2:8096 which is jellyfin”)

I’m not sure what Cloudflare product you’re using, but I use it as a DNS server for my domain. If you’re doing the same thing - you’ll have configured A records and such if so - then what’s happening is this:

  1. You request subdomain.mydomain.com. Your device needs the IP to connect to, so it asks Cloudflare for the IP address. Think of this like calling information to find a phone number.
  2. Then your device initiates a request to the IP address it gets back. This is where TLS gets used, and encrypts your connection to that IP address. It also includes the domain requested in a header for the request.
  3. Nginx (which is a reverse proxy, meaning it handles incoming rather than outgoing connections) receives the connection and looks at the domain header. Then it looks in its configuration for the IP and port it should connect to, and forwards the request

However, if you’re using some other thing at Cloudflare to make a VPN this might be entirely wrong.

How does mysubdomain.mydomain.com know it’s me and not some random or bot?

Unless you’ve implemented some kind of filtering or authentication in Nginx, it doesn’t. I got around this by configuring HAProxy - which is like Nginx - to only allow requests from my local network except for specific domains that I want to be public.

Is this step “port forwarding” or “opening ports” or “exposing ports” or either or both? (I don’t understand these terms)

Exposing or opening ports is something you do with a firewall. The purpose of Nginx is to make it so you only have to open 1-2 ports, and Nginx will handle redirecting traffic based on its configuration.

If my browser when accessing mysubdomain.mydomain.com is always going to port 80/443, does it need to be told it’s going to talk to cloudflare - if so how? - and does cloudflare need to be told it’s going to talk to NGINX on my local machine - if so how?

If you’re using Cloudflare like I described above, you will only need to tell Cloudflare the public IP address of your Nginx server. Generally you do this by telling your domain registrar (where you buy domain.com) to use Cloudflare’s “nameservers” and then configure Cloudflare to point to your public IP address.

How do I tell NGINX to switch from local:443 to local:8096 (assuming I’ve understood this correctly)

You edit the Nginx config to add something like this:

server {
    server_name subdomain1.example.com;
    location / {
        proxy_pass       http://hostname1:port1;
    }
 }

Then, when Nginx receives a connection request for subdomain1.example.com for any location, it will proxy it to the configured hostname (or IP address) and port.

Is there a difference between an SSL cert and a public and private key - are they three things, two things or one thing?

There are two parts to an SSL cert: A public key and a private key. How SSL works is… complicated, but suffice to say the public key is shared with the connection, and the private key is hidden on the server. You can encrypt data with either one, and only the matching key can decrypt it. This allows both sides to trust the connection and for nobody else to see the data.

Doesn’t a VPN add an extra step of fuckery to this and how do I tell the VPN to allow all this traffic switching without blocking it and without showing the world what I’m doing?

The Internet is like an ogre: It has layers. HTTP and DNS are on one layer, VPNs are a different layer. HTTP and DNS traffic can travel over the Internet, or your local network or over the VPN.

If you’re just setting up a local Jellyfin server, you technically don’t need Cloudflare. Your home router will probably let you hard-code a DNS entry for a local IP address, which will keep all of that traffic on your local network. And if you do that right you won’t even need SSL.

Gluetun just looks like a text document to me (compose.yml) - how do I know it’s actually protecting me?

I’m not familiar with how Gluetun works, but it’s not just compose.yml. When you start it with docker-compose run it will download and extract the code to run Gluetun, and configure networking and other things.


It’s that over the years distributors have gotten greedy (ads on a paid service, like cable did? Fuck you), and are telling us “buying ain’t owning” by removing things we’ve paid for.

Not to mention they just eliminate shows and movies from their services without any regard to what the artist wants. I’m still mad about Final Space.


Exactly, we’re not paying for the art, we’re paying for a limited license to view art that has already been made.

Not to mention I don’t mind paying when I know the artists who do the work will get a bigger cut than the guy who owns the servers they’re hosted on.


When you’re dealing with a bunch of systems that communicate with each other, especially database clusters, having the time synchronized is essential. Without his work the sort of massive clusters of systems we use - deliberately or second-hand - would not be possible. He’s as much a contributor to the modern web as Tim Berners-Lee.

RIP Time Lord



  1. I don’t run any of my containers as root
  2. Dockerfiles aren’t hard to read so you can pretty easily figure out what they’re doing
  3. I find managing dependencies for non-containerized services to be worse than one messy docker directory I never look at

Plus having all my services in a couple docker-compose files also means I can move them around incredibly easily.



Get used to it. As a progressive you will never be happy with the democrats but you have to vote for them because the alternative is even worse.

I suggest you learn useful skills like foraging and first aid and wait for it to collapse under its own weight.

But the main thing is to give up on being satisfied with the government.


We could call them the Buchanan Court.

Shout out to my fellow history nerds for getting that reference


“Ooh that’s really cool” is not what I’d expect to hear after saying I’m a software engineer