So you can setup GA but you can't check your web server logs?
332 karma · joined December 16, 2021
I think for most use cases users would want to know if their content is consumed/read. Maybe how long someone spends on it and where they came from. For this sort of stuff you can write a small script to parse your logs. I did something along these lines to parse Caddy logs to get some idea of how many people visit a link. That's really all I needed and the great part is that I run it whenever I want an update, so it's not consuming resources constantly. The logs are cleared and the output is saved before logs are cleared so I know Article 1 had 39 views (or less!) and Article 2 had 5 views and so on...
So I think we're overdoing it and we would benefit from taking a few minutes before going down the rabbit hole of analyzing EVERYTHING.
The 7a has poorer battery life than the 6a/7 so its a poorer choice for my personal use case but ymmv. Otherwise the 6a runs about 3 days for me (got 4 out of it initially but I use my phone very little) or 2 days when driving and needing more usage out of it.
A generation that grew up with Wordpress et al. will have dificulties getting that really all there is to a website is some html. I switched from a Spring Boot web app that used Thymeleaf for the templating engine, with a MySQL db on a Linux vps and Heroku (I did it to learn/practice) to a Hugo blog that I publish locally then scp to a VPS with Caddy setup to serve the static content. Nothing to hack/maintain/worry about.
As an extra point I would even complete the suggestion with adding direct HTTP not S, support. Your page will load even faster and you're transmitting some static content anyway.
I really don't want to see this normalized, although it seems to become BAU.
Even if an item is cheaper as a one off purchase, if I have to buy 3-4-5-10 more of the same, am I not paying now for the same higher quality product, but in the meantime the waste I generated is there, pilling up somewhere "else" where it doesn't bother my Western sensibilities.
The research part doesn't work that well either. I spent days researching a variety of products we have around our house and a bunch of different items a few friends asked me about. It's brutal.
Days of reading reviews, days of looking for the faults, days for trying to find the factory that doesn't abuse people or pay them garbage forcing them into slavery. For nothing. Some products work out, some don't, I pay more than the average guy to get maybe an extra year out of the "thing".
I used to have a Logitech MX518 (the original one that came out in 2006 if I remember correctly) and it still works. One of my parents is using it. It handled over 5000 games of Warcraft 3, over 4000 games of CS 1.6, easily 2500-3000 games of Dota and about 16 years in total of browsing websites and general usage. I replaced the skates once and that was about it. The new M590 I bought to keep quiet around the house had a faulty left switch within months... It also cost about half, but that would mean it should work... 8ish years then.
I had an O'Neill backpack bought in the early 2000s and used it for almost 20 years. It's currently being used by a friend who needed a small and simple backpack. I recommended another backpack to a friend, it fell apart in 10 months after costing 100$+. Twice the price of the O'Neill...
I'm tired. I'm tired of having to spend days to figure out if your product will fail within the year. I'm tired of having gone through about 6 milk hand-held frothers until I found a manual one that is a piece of glass and a handle... I had gone through 2 coffee grinders until I found a manual one made out of glass and metal.
Just...
My family was poor, but luckily due to a number of circumstances, we had a place to live and we had access to a gas cooker and grandparents that could provide the raw ingredients for food - the beans, flour, meat that people keep quoting. Without those, we couldn't have made it through many months of me growing up. I was also fortunate enough to have access to those as I know the importance of a healthy diet for a child growing up. None of the vegetables we got from them or the meat was processed, filled with pesticides or other chemicals or any growth hormones or antibiotics.
Remove this safety net which was obtainable through hard work (it's a lot and I really mean it, a lot of work to grow plants and vegetables when almost all farming is done using manual tools) and I might've suffered from the same problems some of my classmates at the time - overweight, underweight, etc...
While most raw ingredients can be cheap, even cheap is relative. Through an even darker period in life, I had the chance to see first hand what it meant to not have enough money to even get to the next month. When all outgoings are 120-125% of your monthly income, there is nowhere else to go. I used to smoke (a lot) smuggled cigarettes (couldn't afford buying them at the shop) because it was cheaper than eating and they are appetite suppressants. So instead of spending money on buying food (let's say 5 dollars per family in my part of the world per day) we'd smoke (1 dollar per day) and live of whatever we could get for free. It generally meant one meal per day (not nutritious at all because surprisingly most foodbanks aren't filled with organic avocados).
This then brings me to the last point which is - you might not know how to cook it, you might not have time to cook it (I had worked a job at a point where I would start at 6 AM to 10 PM to make enough to get some food) and you might just not have money to buy those things. A recent scheme to place immigrants in the UK places them in modified hotels. Your average hotel room doesn't have a kitchen so that means you can at most cook something in a microwave. Pot noodles (one pack per day in a good scenario) is what most people eat in that scenario. Your 50 cent organic bananas each can be a pack of instant noodles (36 cents at walmart for beef noodles) which can hide your hunger and maybe leave you enough for your children or to pay those pesky electricity/heating/gas bills.
Never forget the fact that having a shelter, food and safety are privileges. We like to think that they are rights, but if that's the case, we failed more than half the planet. Be happy for being able to sleep with a full belly, in a warm room and a locked door, a lot of people can't afford those things.
I then decided that I won't be progressing with it at this rate (I would wake up at 5, study for 3 hours, go to work, work for 8 hrs, come home, eat, study another hour or two). So I just decided to not study for a week (it felt extremely stressful at the time because it felt like I won't be progressing with the coursework unless I'm staring at the screen figuring it out).
I came back and finished the entire coursework a week after that in one day. I went on to complete the remainder work within a couple more days for the other courses. Since then I've been trying to remind myself that trying to do the same thing over and over and expecting different results is very much the definition of insanity. I also understood that sometimes the problem needs a different angle, maybe you need to just wipe the slate clean and go for a walk/run. You need to switch the context and let your brain wonder a bit.
Once you do that, you might open yourself up and become more receptive to new approaches and new ideas. Sometimes it's better to map out a problem in your head, twist and turn it on all of its facets and then decide how to proceed. This idea that you're not productive unless your Teams activity icon is green and you're moving your mouse and typing away furiously, is ludicrous.
For those who play games, I used to play Warcraft 3 (semi competitively). A friend said that APM (actions per minute) = skill, so the higher the APM the higher the skill level of the player. And that to reach level 50 (the max at a point on the ladder) you need APM 300-350+. I said that it doesn't matter if you have 500 or 100, how you spend those actions is more important. We played a series of games, he ended up averaging 380-390 APM and I averaged (on purpose below my average) 180 APM. I won 5 games in a row and we left it at that. Looking busy does not equal being productive. Seeing "stuff happen" doesn't mean its useful stuff.
It's been a few months and I must say that it's what I've been looking for in a Linux distro. Something predictable, stable, that has good out of the box defaults and runs great for some games as well. For anyone looking to switch from Windows, I can't recommend it enough. Anyone else using the desktop/laptop also feel right at home starting up a few programs, editing a document or a picture and watching videos and pictures (that's really what most average users do anyway). It's also really great to be able to switch between tiling and non-tiling modes with one keyboard shortcut, which gives me a lot of the things I loved in i3wm/regolith while keeping it usable for average Joe (I'll never forget the confusion on the face of a friend opening up a picture and trying to resize the window as it was taking up half the screen next to Firefox).
Great job to the Pop Os team!
I used DO because I had gotten some free credits as a student and they were valid for a year, so it gave me time to experiment. Once I went through the guides, I started researching the topic further, each time expanding on anything I didn't know or understand.
To go from Heroku to home server, I spent about a year all in all doing the research, learning what needs to be done, what hardware, what security considerations and so on. Before buying the server hardware and doing that, I setup a VM with the Linux distro I wanted to use, mimicked the storage setup and then went about doing the whole setup from start to finish and documenting things along the way. Installing, setting up users, changing login policies, adding drives, formatting them, hard drive error checking and automated notifications, setting up docker containers, docker container backups, container updates, limiting access of containers, setting up network shares, LAN sync, multimedia playback, software backups and automated server backups.
Each new step would highlight a new learning opportunity and would raise new questions. It's really interesting and I went ahead and installed Pop OS (initially I used Zorin os pro) on all my devices which gave me a place to test out small scripts to automate a system reinstall/setup. My next goal is to collate all of this information and organize it into a guide that explores this setup from start to finish, but that's a few months out.
After that I want to move away from a single Linux install running to a Proxmox install on my home server, a couple of VMs running my services and space set aside to allow me to start a new VM when I want to test something out. I also want to build my own router using Open BSD. Hope this helps!
However, I think we shouldn't forget that we have no real way of knowing if any of this works in all regions, what sort of access/blocks people there need to go through to connect to even basic services. So maybe instead of being worried ONLY about these issues (which are more in line with our skill set), we should try and pressure our own elected officials to take some measures, any measures to help people there.
You can setup an Ansible playbook and automate the whole deployment without any issues. Most VPSes cost a few cents a day to run and could serve a lot of people. The technology aspect on our end has never been the bottleneck or the problem, but rather how to disseminate these bits of information to those who need them the most and how to actually stop this from happening yearly/monthly across the world.
So I guess what I'm trying to say is thank you for your efforts, keep it up and if you know people there who can spread information about these solutions, even better! We don't know for sure the restrictions we need to fight through, so it would be great to know more about that... And in the meantime, drop an email if nothing else, to your local representatives/elected officials and ask them to do something, anything at this point, to support people exercising their right to protest. Because it's quickly becoming an optional extra even in the West.
It's very easy to blame an application, but the problem with the modern ecosystem is that it's all very interconnected. Signal makes a point of having a setting that sends a request to the keyboard to disable personalized learning, but even that is a request. There isn't a guarantee that it complies.
Companies that deal with data will not use a single source of information, but a huge variety of sources and your smartphone is like a huge vacuum that is pulling in everything it can gather from you through any means possible.
Lastly, it could also be observation bias as others have mentioned, but to truly be able to regain control, you would need to take a variety of steps to make this change.
Also, 2FA will still trigger even when you turn it off. I had turned off 2FA because I don't care about this account and because I kept having issues with it due to the countries I lived in over the years. I logged into a machine that got a fresh install and got prompted to go through 2FA and get a text. But this was turned off.
So I'm sorry to hear about this, it's a real big issue and I ask everyone here who cares about privacy and who cares about a better tech environment to push their friends and family or followers to move towards more privacy respecting alternatives that HAVE support, that WILL assist you if something like this happens. Even in a worst case scenario (all emails being lost), getting back access to the account itself can make a huge difference... So please, support those who hit on issues if you can somehow and promote alternatives for those who can afford them (and most people in the west will generally be able to afford the 1USD/1GBP/1EUR a month some services will charge).
I don't find any real hurdles here and the only thing running on the server is Caddy to serve the content on https/http. Anything that's not a valid path returns a 404 custom page I made and that's it.
To get my HTML I use Hugo locally, but I'm not a huge fan of Hugo itself due to it's documentation which cannot be followed linearly and I plan on writing something to do just this - convert some markdown files and a folder structure to an HTML. I'm sure such a tool already exists but I'm curious about building something like this myself.
I think the hurdles appear depending on what you expect or want to do with your static page, but the base setup is I think pretty straightforward.
A lot of things from it made their way to The Matrix for me visually and thematically and I was so sad that the movie never got the recognition it deserved. It felt the closest it would get to something that had that negative feeling and vibe that I get whenever I watch Ghost in the Shell again. Anyway, I'm really looking forward to this black and white edition!
I might want to have a method called SetPrice(APIPrice price) and there I do a check to see if it's a valid value as far as my code is concerned. I had a situation like this handling pricing information taken from a variety of indices but I want a calculation to still work out to something usable. Also, most business users don't understand what NULL * 3.5 would mean, but they would understand 0.0 * 3.5.
That's the main one off the top of my head.
And I can't blame them. So they will use whatever argument gets Joe Average to vote for an MP that will then enact these measures.
I also am not a huge fan how Verge (and a few other reviewers) complained by saying "well, what if they are gone next year?". Then you'd have a laptop similar to all the other laptops you can't buy parts for, except that you can still pick up ram/storage (which you can't for a lot of the other laptops out there.)
Great on Framework for delivering, great to see the upgraded specs and I am still planning on picking up a mainboard for a personal NAS build I've been thinking about for sure!
The resources are nice and they can easily run a small page or be useful to try out hosting things, deploying apps and general server maintenance/deployment/etc. However, anything you will be running on them shouldn't be essential to you. For ex, the ARM VPSes will actually switch off/get disabled at the end of the first monthly trial and I believe (feel free to correct me on this) that you will need to get some support to enable any VM you setup in the trial. Although the resource is always free, the first month is treated differently for whatever reason and you end up with a disabled VM. You can create new ones within those limits again, just fyi.
The entire platform is also unnecessarily convoluted, but I'd argue that's the case with most of these cloud providers - felt the same way trying AWS for a project and I feel the same way every day using Azure. However, out of these offerings, Oracle's is the most generous free one, just keep in mind it's just that - free. So you do get what you pay for.
Pixel 4a with Graphene OS, only GCam Services Provider (https://github.com/lukaspieper/Gcam-Services-Provider) to be able to use Google Camera. Implementation is super simple and it shouldn't take long to see that it actually does nothing.
Browser:
Firefox - followed https://blackgnu.net/firefox-hardening-guide.html; Fennec on Android
Search - https://searx.space/ (plan on self hosting one)
Youtube - https://docs.invidious.io/instances/ (plan on self hosting one)
Passwords:
Bitwarden - backups done regularly to encrypted external storage and encrypted rclone mount
Email:
Tutanota/Protonmail + custom domain
2FA:
Aegis
Messaging:
Signal - easiest way to setup for non-technical friends and family. Used to use a few different apps, but only use this right now. I also use https://meet.jit.si/ occasionally for calls on the laptop/desktop.
VPN:
Mullvad - currently working on setting up my own.
Maps:
Organic Maps on Android/Open Street Maps on desktop/laptop.
Sync:
Syncthing - syncing desktop, laptop, a few phones to my home server on LAN only.
Notes:
Markdown files kept on devices, synced through syncthing.
Media:
Emby - had issues with Jellyfin, but might revisit in a few months as I have some plans there.
Airsonic - music
Adblocker:
Mullvad + ublockorigin
Calendar:
Tutanota
Analytics for website:
C# console app that parses caddy logs and clears logs after parsing.
Cloud:
Create encrypted mount with rclone and dump backups there when needed.
It was a slow process to get here and I am lucky to have friends who followed me on this journey to be honest. The first step came while working for my final project at university and building something around my heavy dislike for Facebook. Once I had to research the subject more in depth I started to realize how wrong I was all these years entrusting troves of data to the highest bidder... I had a friend who had asked me about these things and I am sorry for not listening to him sooner, but I felt that he never went past "bro, you shouldn't trust google!". Which is I think what most of us do.
I am trying to have conversations about this with everyone and try to adjust my language to their level. It's good because it highlights how little I know and it works both ways as I have to learn myself a bit more about any given topic. It's quite nice. It's even better to have people who have followed me on this path, moving to devices with no google services at all on them, moving away operating systems and so on.
If you think you're stuck, try to get rid of an app or two and see how it goes. Most of them add little to NO value to your life and your tech stack so trust yourself and delete them. It took me about a year to fully get rid of any google related stuff (and I include micro G here to allow me to run stuff like WhatsApp/YT/Gmail/Maps). And I knew it's bad, so I imagine it's a lot harder if you don't think there are risks.
Some things are more difficult, but my phone is now a tool that quietly sits on a desk somewhere in the house and I use it to do something specific. It's also reassuring to know it's not constantly feeding off me to send info to whoever is interested in my particular demographic.
As an afterword, please, all of you who suggest open source alternatives, also keep in mind that most of these projects have very little financial support. A few dollars, euros, pounds might not mean much to you, but it could make the world of difference for all these people working to keep our data safe and our devices useful. Stop recommending people stuff and starting with "it's free" and phrase it with "it's private and secure...". Start introducing the cost early on. Without our support these alternatives can and will vanish or will morph to attempt to keep themselves alive.
TL;DR for the article: 1. Any technical solution will be imperfect and can potentially lead to hundreds if not thousands of cases being raised 2. Difficulties in clearing your name in the case of false flags (not to mention how this would actually be implemented) 3. No clear guidance on how such a system would work 4. A death to encryption services since any system that would entail some for of media transfer would be in scope 5. A grey/dark market place for custom software that will still allow encrypted communications run on VPSes/servers that might restrict UK access but could be accessible through VPNs that exit outside of the UK and thus wouldn't fall under the legislation (I think, feel free to correct me on any of these points ofc). 6. A host of other issues from overworked law enforcement trying to deal with the flood to the migration of individuals involved in any illegal activities far far deeper and thus more difficult to detect.
This is a clear as day example of what happens when people with no understanding of these topics (and many others, I'm sure economy, education and law enforcement is managed by people with no real world experience in said fields...) are allowed to legislate.
Retailers would a lot of the times not do additional security checks because those cost money. If someone buys something for 5-10$ the retailer doesn't pay for additional verifications to the bank and they are then liable for the loss. Sometimes they won't even pay for that for larger amounts OR that they avoid doing those checks because it breaks the transaction flow and the customer might just cancel the transaction - most of us are impulse creatures and if we're adding additional checks then the impulse could be stopped.
Banks also still use SMS messages for verification. SMS is horribly insecure[1] and it's shocking to see it's still the last line of defence between your life savings and a potential attacker. Yet having worked in this field, I know that the decisions are taken from a purely financial/time frame point of view. "We have 6 months to implement this, our devs have done this before and thus an SMS carousel is the easiest to implement. TADA". Or "we have already the contracts setup, we have done this for this other account type, so we're going to reuse it". There are very few incentives to use anything else and it goes back to adding friction in transactions. If our world wouldn't be obsessed with buying quickly and easily, more defences could be added.
Lastly, banks are horrible at talking to people. They don't know how to do it at all, so they cannot make communications clear. The biggest impact to fraud prevention would come from nationwide campaigns were users are shown some of the most common ways these attacks occur. Common sense suggestions also seem to lack entirely - "if you're ever unsure, pick up your credit/debit card and call the number on the back of it. That's your bank's contact number, it doesn't need a website, you don't need to call a number from a message, just call this one number". One bank I worked at did this small communication exercise and over the next few months it accounted for a significant decrease in phone-related fraud.
It's a very complex issue and I'm seeing Europe being the next big target from what I have seen regarding anti-fraud processes in European companies (a lot of them rely on outdated tech that cannot handle checks fast enough). European banks also move a lot slower than UK banks, transfers move slow, security checks are poor and in general they seem to spend A LOT less money on fraud prevention... Cybercrime is on the rise[2] and we're horribly unprepared.
Blaming people is the worst approach. We can all fall victims to these types of attacks, but we should spend time to educate those around us and exercise a bit of caution, yet understand that we can all be victims.
[1] - https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/03/can-we-stop-pretending-s... [2] - https://risk.lexisnexis.com/-/media/files/financial%20servic...
The other big advice is taking the lane. Especially in intersections, it is essential to be the middle of the lane and making yourself as visible as possible. Its a few dollars for a high visibility jacket that's water and windproof and it will make a huge difference in other drivers noticing you.
The general rule is that you need to be a bit more brave and you should take extra care because while helmets help, most of your organs are kept in a bag of skin which won't do much if a car runs into you...
I cannot believe the discussions occurring here surrounding professional musicians, people who have trained for years to hone their skills. I cannot believe that the attitude towards a union -"wouldn't they all be better now since they'd still be employed"? These are statements made by someone who never had to face the reality of the fact that sometimes a job offers so little money that you are BETTER off not working. The reality in many poor countries is that you could work for 5-10$ a day, but people choose not to work jobs but rather to engage in subsistence farming as that offers them at least food to survive, whereas the 5-10$ a day wouldn't. I cannot believe the narrow mindedness of such statements...
I found it offensive that I used to make more than someone playing in a symphony as someone working in retail. I found it offensive that I made more money in a week than they did in a month and all I did was peddle more garbage for people to buy to make themselves feel better about their empty pointless and gluttonous lives...
I feel sad that at this point this is where art is headed. Its shocking to see that art is potentially returning to the same dynamic that we saw in the Middle Ages - where some wealthy benefactor is needed to allow artists to continue their activity. Each time something like this happens we lose big chunks of what and who we are as a species. We're normalizing the death of art, of imagination and of beauty and assume that everything needs to have a monetary value attached to it, that everything needs to yield ROI. It's repulsive...
The biggest change was moving to a phone that ditches all Google Play services. This included microG and other variations. The only play services emulator that is running is https://github.com/lukaspieper/Gcam-Services-Provider, which doesn't do anything really but simulate the presence of google services for the google camera to work. You can navigate the source, it's really short. I use it to get the Google Camera working.
I got a Pixel 2 a couple of years back and more recently a Pixel 4a. Then I installed Graphene OS (you can run that or Calyx OS, people might get into heated discussions, but for the purpose of this, you would install either of them with nothing Google related anyway, it's just whatever is completely stock and barebones).
Once you're at this point, you are forced to change your behavior, so the choice goes from "which of these apps should I use as there are SOOOO many of them" to "which apps do I need to add to the phone". After a few months I'm down to:
Signal, Fennec, Aegis, Mullvad, Tutanota, Termux, Unlauncher, Gcam port for my phone, Organic Maps, Syncthing. The background is black, the font is red. A big shoutout to all the persons working hard on all of these applications, do support them through donations or any help you can give them btw.
To get here I had at a point microG, google maps, YT Vanced, Dropbox and the usual slew of things, but I still kept picking up my phone and scrolling mindlessly. I think this is the first thing you should do. I know people might suggest going outside, watching movies, subscribing to your favorite blogs and other things like that, but the reality is, you need to change the association you make with your phone first. This goes for all your devices btw, not just your phone. It needs to revert back to being a tool that obediently sits somewhere away from you and is picked up to perform a specific task and then put down again. Constant entertainment shouldn't be our goal in general, but I digress.
Once you get the change (you can pick up older Pixels pretty cheap used - which is also great for the environment btw!), the next step is to look up 3-4 sources of information (I go with 2 or 3 that lean the same way I do politically and 1 that is the complete opposite) and assign let's say an hour in the morning or one in the evening when you might go through those articles.
I afterwards realized that nothing really changes by me going to several places to look up things. It doesn't matter if you read about something on CNN/Fox/The Guardian/The Atlantic/BBC/Al Jazeera, at the end of the day, it happened and 5-10-20-40 different sources will really talk about the same event. Will this event impact you? Probably not. If it does, i'd recommend you look for a source of news that's closes to you geographically, they might have some more localized insight. Chances are if cycling legislation changes in Berkeley, a local website/paper might have more relevant information than Al Jazeera (which, chances are, won't cover that event anyway). So this was the next step, once you start weaning yourself off of the endlessly repeating news cycle, look for something closer to you. Maybe at this point, you can do a quick read over some of the big topics once a week - how's the humanitarian crisis in Yemen? Is there anything you can do to help (pressure your elected officials/gov/etc, join an NGO and help that way)? This is, in my view, essential to being a good citizen. Once that's done, you can check maybe what happened locally, which will, invariably, impact your life to a greater degree than what happens half-way across the world.
First of all, congrats you're still here, you're doing well!
At this point I check HN a couple of times a day (this is one of those occasions), I look for anything that I'm interested in, try to limit it to 2-3 articles and that's me. This whole process probably took around 5-6 months from start to finish. The slower you go along with it, the better chance things will stick. I feel a lot better now than I did a few years ago when I was one of those people with a couple of screens of apps. I have more time, I look up what I'm interested in, I feel more connected to my local community and my local government. I have time to research a topic I'm interested in with greater focus instead of being devoured by a slew of panic inducing titles or gifs/videos that keep me scrolling endlessly.
We (and here I mean most tech/knowledge workers) are stuck in front of screens all day... We should by now have figured out that when they aren't helping you, they are DEMANDING your attention and they give very little in return. So the best mentally healthy apps are those that you don't use. Those that you uninstall and those that give you time back. Sorry for the long rant, hope it helps!