My "production stuff" is listed at https://github.com/alexpdp7/alexpdp7/blob/master/README.md#other-usable-projects-of-mine
Exactly one year ago, on 30th December 2024, I laid the foundation of FediMeteo.
I took a VM, installed FreeBSD, and set up the first jail to support Italy. The goal was to create a tool for my own use, support a few countries, and announce it.
Unexpectedly, the enthusiasm was incredible. That pushed me to keep going, support more countries and cities, and turn it into what it is today.
FediMeteo now supports 38 countries and 2,937 cities, with more than 7,700 followers in the Fediverse alone, not counting the many people who follow via RSS feeds or visit the web pages.
If you are curious to read the story and some technical details, you can find it here:
https://it-notes.dragas.net/2025/02/26/fedimeteo-how-a-tiny-freebsd-vps-became-a-global-weather-service-for-thousands/
Today is also Tuesday, a #ThankYouTuesday, so I want to say thanks to:
* OpenMeteo - @openmeteo - for providing accurate, high quality data, without which FediMeteo would be far less useful
* @grunfink - creator of snac, who made all of this possible using very few resources, on a 4 euro per month VM
* FreeBSD, which thanks to the efficiency of the OS and its jail implementation made it possible to run this service in a stable and efficient way with minimal effort
* FediFollows - @FediFollows - that periodically spreads the word about cities, countries, and the enthusiasm around the project
*All of you*, who suggested, encouraged, corrected, and celebrated this project
And forward toward supporting more countries and other interesting features already in the works.
Happy birthday, FediMeteo! 🎉
#FediMeteo #HappyBirthday #Meteo #Weather #FreeBSD #snac #snac2 #OpenMeteo #Fediverse
In a previous job, I joked about people wanting to increase Nagios check_ping thresholds to over five seconds to reduce the volume of alerts.
I replaced Tinc with Wireguard, and I think *I* misconfigured something, but I am seeing some bizarre ping metrics from check_ping, I think the biggest one has been 17.5 seconds.
(Running check_ping in a Germany datacenter to a wireless access point in Barcelona in a domestic ISP connection through Wireguard.)
Oh, nice, seems that @tonofcrates started working on Bene again two months ago!
Demo: https://nota-lang.github.io/bene/?preload=portable-epubs.epub
As I'm against paged documents, glad to see this moving forward!
Having some thoughts about coercing PostgreSQL logical replication into a system for real-time UIs:
https://gist.github.com/alexpdp7/af4cadef3a27bbae7827b4884aed1242
(Curious about "provable" reasons why this is a horrible idea.)
RE: https://infosec.exchange/@tychotithonus/115789615747200172
Raskin’s First Law (emphasis mine):
A program may not harm a user’s data or, through inaction allow a user’s data to come to harm.
If you want people to trust your software, read that law and fully internalise it.
RE: https://hachyderm.io/@fasterthanlime/115730529166857536
For a little bit of historical context: the GitHiub Actions Runner is a fork of the Azure Pipelines Agent. The back-end infrastructure is similar. Azure Pipelines had some nice features that GitHub lacks, such as the ability to trivially connect an Azure Scale Set to dynamically control runners, but it also charged you for self-hosted and hosted runners.
The simpler (and cheaper) pricing was a big part of the reason that even internal teams moved off Azure Pipelines and onto GitHub.
GitHub Actions charging per build minute for *self-hosted-runners*? Shit's about to hit the fan lol
Self-hosted GitHub Runners were too good to be true. One of my main reasons to defend GitHub usage is gone. https://github.blog/changelog/2025-12-16-coming-soon-simpler-pricing-and-a-better-experience-for-github-actions/
It has been zero (0) days since trying to use my Google Titan security key with Google Chrome to access Google Meet has locked me out of a therapy call because the "device is not supported".
As a security nerd I really, really want to be on board with extensive 2FA and passkeys, but as an actual human being who is constantly getting locked out of their accounts because of totally inscrutable 2FA errors, I honestly want to go back to Just Long Passwords, Please.
Going to all the effort to MITM an Android app and then discovering it's just a webview and I can just get everything I need from Chrome devtools
IncusOS lifted three weeks ago the main limitation I found in my initial exploration: the first ZFS pool can only use one drive, which made using the cheapest Hetzner servers a pain.
It is still limited compared to Proxmox; Proxmox claims to handle any drive failure easily, IncusOS recovers easily from failure of the "B" drive, but if the "A" drive fails, you need to install IncusOS to the new "A" drive.
Incus is amazing and I'm seriously considering IncusOS for my next iteration.
I started up Zoom this morning and it gave me the message
"It looks like we are unable to connect. Please check your network connection and try again."
But my network connection was fine. The problem was at Zoom's end, or more precisely, Cloudflare's. (And it seems OK now.)
I'm beginning to be annoyed by this reflexive "please check _your_ network connection" coda in these messages. What it is, is victim blaming. And possibly gaslighting too. _Their_ network connection went wrong, and their immediate response is to tell all of us users that _we_ must have done something wrong. It makes us all do lots of pointless work checking things that don't need checking, and it probably makes half of us feel inadequate when we can't find any problem.
If you're _going_ to advise users to check their own network connection, take reasonable steps first to ensure the problem really does look like being at the local end. Try pinging a few other independently run well-known sites; try some DNS lookups; if you can't do _anything_, suggest the user checks their connection, but if the rest of that stuff works and only your own server can't be reached, maybe redirect to your application's status webpage instead?
Sweet next year letsencrypt will support a persisting DNS record so these tools don’t need access to DNS for renewal
„The features matter a lot less than the people who are using the platform. […]
It can sometimes be a bit misleading when you get a lot of ideas and feature requests in a community, and the conversations become, ‘We definitely need feature X to grow because that’s what’s stopping people from using the platform.‘ While that’s true in some cases, the sad reality is that any flaw can be overlooked as long as the people you want to reach are there.“
This feels true for #Conversations_im as well.
Even more insidious: LLM editing & "vibe coding" is itself gatekeeping! 100%!
It's telling people they're too weak-minded to learn how to program and accomplish meaningful work using their own brains, so they need Big Tech to (expensively) do it for them! In addition, it means Fancy Clever 10X Programmers (lol) can *avoid* making programming a whole hell of a lot easier because that notion "doesn't matter" anymore!
It's all so completely backwards and absurd! @sue https://glasgow.social/@sue/115633253930152970
Hello, computer.
Leonard Nimoy's Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (aka The One With the Whales!) was released 39 years ago today.
One of the most popular Trek films, the Whale Movie is indeed one of my fav. Fresh, funny, with a fine environmental message, it completes an overall successful trilogy.
I use Python mostly because it doesn't get in my way nor bothers me rather than because I like it.
I use Rust mostly because I like it, although it tends to get in my way and bother me.
Django's built-in admin is powerful, but it's essentially a separate framework within Django. After attempting to modernize django-admin2, I realized we needed a fresh approach: an admin interface that works like the rest of Django, built on generic CBVs, plugins, and view factories. Meet Django Admin Deux: a proof-of-concept admin where CRUD operations are just actions, knowledge transfers both ways, and everything feels like Django.
https://emma.has-a.blog/articles/django-admin-deux-bringing-admin-back-to-django.html
Here's a thing I wrote last month: jwzsheet.
It is a small and self-contained PHP and JavaScript library for generating HTML tables of spreadsheet-like reports, including arithmetically-computed cell values.
"I am not going to write a spreadsheet", I kept saying to myself, "that's stupid."
"Ok, maybe just a little bit of a spreadsheet. This far no farther."
"Ok, maybe just a little bit more."
As the song says, "I tell myself I will not go, even as a drive there."
Very excited to announce the general availability of #IncusOS today, an immutable OS image specifically designed to run #Incus!
https://discuss.linuxcontainers.org/t/announcing-incusos/25139
At work, I set up some development things with Docker because I suspected a few components would not support Podman.
I removed one of those components recently, so today I decided to test using Podman.
I had to activate the Podman socket (not a fan), but mostly everything worked; just needed small patches and documentation.
And this solved a few problems automatically!
I think we overuse containers, so try to make things work without containers. But if you need them, try Podman first.
LB: it's amazing how much worse the experience of watching movies, TV, and anime is now than bootleg *.mkvs circa 2008. Pause buttons are laggy on most streaming service players, if they work at all, audio cuts in and out when pausing and unpausing, OSDs take up giant portions of the player window, good luck not accidentally hitting "skip intro" or "skip credits," and then this shit with subtitles.
Typst 0.14 is out now! Get ready for production with accessibility, PDFs as images, character-level justification, and more. Learn about more of the highlights in Typst 0.14 in the thread below ⤵️
Does anybody else ever think about how "wow, that person is REALLY smart, they are my go-to for tough questions" used to mean knowing lots of stuff in your actual head, whereas now it mostly means you're better at search engines than most people you know?
I think about that rather a lot.
I think containers tend to be used in very debatable ways for self hosting. But playing with Podman quadlets, they seem pretty proper- they integrate cleanly with the system, they have built-in support for automatic image updates...
I still prefer not using containers, but some stuff like Vaultwarden the container is the first-class citizen distribution system.
Infra-as-code example at: