Wow, I've had a scrap for this post lying around for years (since May 2022?). I guess it might be time to update what I'm doing with this server and how it works, particularly since I've been rather active with releases on GitHub. I've had some massive changes to which software I use, reflecting how I've changed my relationship to technology in my life in general. Since I don't do a podcast anymore, this might be the only venue to share this.

I have an older Moto phone. At some point, I stumbled upon LineageOS and installed it. I made sure to install the MindTheGapps package so I could still feel comfortable. Without any bloatware apps (and who knows what else) that I couldn't delete, it ran much faster. I loved it!

At some point, I discovered that the Kindle Fire I had lying around could be hacked to load LineageOS. That blew away all the Amazon software on it that slowed it down. However, the Google apps were rather heavy, and I didn't use them often, so I decided to redo it without Google. Now, it's fast enough to be a pleasure to use!

I don't watch TV, so I live blissfully ad-free. But sometimes, I'm using something that doesn't have an ad-blocker. For those rare situations, I've installed Pi-hole. It's is a DNS server that refuses to serve addresses to domains that serve ads. If your software doesn't know where the server is to load the ad on it, you won't see that ad. Neat! In addition, I use NewPipe on Android and FreeTube (everywhere else) to watch Youtube ad-free.

When the world changed forever, I wanted to play music on my surround sound system while I worked. My receiver has an ethernet port and a DLNA client. I installed minidlna (now ReadyMedia) on my server. This works well with my receiver, but I resorted to playing music on that de-Googled Kindle with VLC and external speakers, so I can control it easier.

However, DLNA will only work at home. After toying with a handful of media streaming servers, I settled on Funkwhale. It's supposed to transcode music, but it somehow didn't for me, and would happily throw FLACs around the internet, even on 4G. I discovered ffmpegfs. It's a program that presents a filesystem that can transcode files that you point it at. So I put that on my music directory, and I configured it to spit Opus out on the other end, which I point Funkwhale to. Neat! But where's my playlists? I looked at the database schema (it uses Postgres!), and wrote a script for that.

But Funkwhale needs its own domain name to work, and I had Payara running on the web ports to serve this blog. I needed some kind of 'gateway' web server to route data coming in. Payara is not designed for this. After considering things like Apache and nginx, I settled on HAProxy. It's designed for just this use case. I set it up to terminate/encrypt/decrypt HTTPS, route requests based on domain/sub-domain names, and even cache things. When TLS 1.3 support appeared, I turned it on, so this blog could use it, because I wasn't held back by support in Java and Payara. Same thing with HTTP/3. I'm dying to get official 0-rtt support, because it could be useful to further improve load times.

Because we were all couped up in our homes at the time, communication was important. Zoom was free to use... for 45 minutes at a time. That annoyed some of my friends, so I searched for alternatives. I found Jitsi, and set it up. It worked well on desktops and laptops, but it nudged phones towards the Jitsi app. That makes things more complicated, so I found out how to disable that, but people complained that it made their phones hot.

But along with other indie communcation software, I also installed Ergo, an IRC server. Since IRC also needs clients to connect, I also installed KiwiIRC, a web-based IRC client, and pointed it at Ergo. Both support the chat history extension, so one doesn't need to be connected at all times to read old messages. It also supports videocalling through Jitsi. It's like I setup an indie alterative to Slack and Discord. Neat! But no one I knew needed nor wanted any of this, so I turned Kiwi, Ergo, and Jitsi off.

Ever since Snowden aired the government's dirty laundry, I had been using DuckDuckGo. I appreciated that it didn't invade privacy and track people. When Russia invaded Ukraine, DuckDuckGo started "downranking" things that they thought were "disinformation". By that time, people were using "disinformation" as shorthand for "ideas I don't like". Many recommended Brave Search instead, so I switched to it.

Since I own my own domain, I decided to set up an email provider for it on Fastmail. I moved all my accounts from all over the internet from my gmail address to my theandrewbailey.com address. Well, addresses. Since Fastmail has a wildcard alias feature, I like to make up email addresses on the spot and give out a unique one for different accounts and purposes. I've implemented a canary trap with email addresses, so if I get spam on one, I should be able to tell who leaked it.

I had been using Firefox as my primary browser since 2005. Even when Chrome came out and took over, I still used Firefox. (I only used Chrome to test this blog with, and watch Youtube.) Firefox's developers, Mozilla, have been open about wanting to delete people from the internet. That's not news I want to hear from my browser vendor. Mozilla has a lot of other projects besides Firefox, but despite cutting some of them, Firefox isn't more competitive, yet their executives keep getting paid more. They've been taking public donations and US government funding (money that it goes into debt for) over and over. All I wanted from Mozilla was a browser. All I ever wanted from Mozilla was a browser. You wanted to create a programming language with improved safety features to support your browser but could also be used for other things? Ok, sign me up! But I never wanted them to fund leftist pet projects in the third world.

It's clear to me that Mozilla wants to do anything other than develop a web browser. I feel that they have betrayed the values that first drew me to them. I had enough, and switched browsers to Brave. Their recent actions have validated my choice.

By the time 2023 rolled around, I was tired of logging into my server, only for Ubuntu to nag me about Ubuntu Pro, because I had the balls to run Ubuntu 20.04 in 2023. Along with other shenanigans that Ubuntu pulls (like snaps), I installed Debian 12 on my server. I have a script to backup configurations so I wouldn't need to re-create so much.

When Windows 11 released, I was cautious. If you can't tell, I like privacy, security, and being able to control how I compute. I've been aware of the telemetry and ads that has been in Windows for a long time. When Microsoft went full retard on AI (along with the rest of the tech industry), they built an AI feature that you could ask for your credit card info. Info that it gathered by taking screenshots every so often. Nope, I'm out. I remember when Windows 10 was going to be the last version of Windows, but Microsoft will end Windows 10 support in October 2025. What happened? Where would I go? I didn't want to be a boomer clinging to an unsupported version of Windows with the help of hacky patches and workarounds, because of disliked features in the next one (some of which, the old prized one probably has, too).

Apple is woke (and recently affirmed it), and so is Microsoft for that matter. I'm no stranger to Linux, so what's available? Red Hat is so woke they're getting sued for it. OpenMandriva made a statement that it's affirmatively not woke, so it captured my attention and started trying it out with a spare drive. Valve has been doing God's work in providing game compatibility in Linux for over a decade, and the rest of the programs I use run natively or work fine through Wine. In January 2025, I blew away the Windows 10 installation on my desktop, and installed OpenMandriva. I've had some issues with surround sound compatibility, but it's mostly been great!

Unfortunately, Debian is a little woke, too. I've known about Rocky Linux for a while, but I'm not sure if they're woke. Devuan made a similar statement to OpenMandriva, but feels more stable, so I might replace Debian with it.

And I hear you ask: "What do you mean by woke?" Something is woke if it promotes or platforms (or likewise, shuns or excludes) people based on immutable characteristics, like race, sex, or sexuality, instead of doing it on merit. It doesn't matter which specific characteristic is being targeted.

Over the past year or so, I came into possession of my brother's and my mom's old phones. Since they're compatible with LineageOS, I put that on them, to delete what was on them before, and post them for sale. I realized that I had not updated my phone for years, and decided to do likewise. Since running without Google on my Kindle worked well, I wanted to do the same for my phone. As soon as I upgraded, I noticed that I couldn't make calls or send texts, and saw "Baseband: <not found>" during boot. I've never seen nor read of such a problem, but I'm pretty sure that the baseband has the transcievers that talk to cell phone towers.

Over the course of a day, I reflashed my phone probably 20 times, trying to solve this. I ended up with a less out-of-date LineageOS version, but still upgraded from what I had before. I prefer F-Droid for apps, but I also have Aptoide. I installed FFUpdater and installed Brave. The Google keyboard has a swiping feature that I love to use, but most other keyboards don't, but without Google, I would need to look elsewhere. FUTO Keyboard supports swiping, and has no cloud features, so I use it instead. I already use KeePassXC for passwords, so I use KeePassDX on Android. I've been using Cx File Explorer for years, because it has SMB and WebDAV functionality, so it's installed. Grayjay is like Youtube, but lets you follow people across platforms, but I've yet to use it. It's another FUTO product, so I've installed it anyway.

Before I had a smartphone, I knew there were apps that generated TOTPs. Since I like easy to use security features like that, I figured that would be the smartphone killer app for me. When I got a smartphone, the killer app turned out to be Google Maps. But, again, without Google apps, what map app would I use? I found HERE WeGo and OsmAnd. In order for either to tell you "take the next exit" while you're going down the freeway, it needs a text-to-speech engine installed on your phone. I found SherpaTTS, which lets you download a speech model to use for this. After that, my maps talk to me! Neat! I think I'll use OsmAnd more because of it's offline and privacy features.

I have largely screwed the MMAAANN (Microsoft, Meta (that's Facebook), Alphabet (that's Google), Apple, Amazon, Nvidia, Netflix) out of my personal data. If your computing preferences are flexible enough, consider living outside of big tech. We got telephones out here, but not telemetry.

I can't help but see that today's technology is overwhelmingly predatory, manipulative, and subversive. Can't we rewind to when technology was exciting and optimistic? Remember when we didn't want to be evil? Many departed from that mantra, and have erred in their business models. There's still a part of me that thinks 2020 will be the bright shiny future that will solve all our problems, but the other parts know that 2020 kicked off the dark future where all our dreams died.