1
FediMeteo: A €4 FreeBSD VPS Became a Global Weather Service
How a simple idea turned into an international weather service on the Fediverse.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 170 posts.
2
I migrated to an almost all-EU stack and saved 500€ per year
“Bye bye bye.” It took some time, and a serious amount of research, but I have finally crossed the finish line. I have officially migrated my digital life to pure, EU-hosted solutions.
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Self-hosting is being enshittified
Self-hosting got harder in 2025. Here's what changed.
4
How uv got so fast
uv’s speed comes from engineering decisions, not just Rust. Static metadata, dropping legacy formats, and standards that didn’t exist five years ago.
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Package managers keep using Git as a database, it never works out
Git repositories seem like an elegant solution for package registry data. Pull requests for governance, version history for free, distributed by design. But as registries grow, the cracks appear.
6
Incremental Backups of Gmail Takeouts
Discusses the problem of Gmail takeouts as a single giant file and provides detailed background on the gmail-mbox-codec app that allows efficient incremental backups of said file.
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Clock synchronization is a nightmare
Time seems simple. But we engineers lose sleep over something as basic as keeping clocks in sync. Here’s why…
8
Go ahead, self-host Postgres
Self-hosting Postgres is simpler and cheaper than managed services suggest, with comparable reliability and better performance tunability.
9
A train-sized tunnel is now carrying electricity under South London
Electricity has started flowing through a deep-level tube train sized tunnel running through South London.
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I got hacked: My Hetzner server started mining Monero
I got hacked, my server started mining Monero this morning.
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Log level 'error' should mean that something needs to be fixed
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
12
Vm.overcommit_memory=2 is the right setting for servers
The Linux kernel has a feature where you can tune the behavior of memory allocations: the vm.overcommit_memory sysctl. When overcommit is enabled (sadly, this is the default), the kernel will typically return a mapping when brk(2) or mmap(2) is called to increase a program’s heap size, regardless of whether or not…
13
Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers
Before we get nerd sniped by the shiny engineering details, ask the only question that matters. Why compute in orbit? Why should a watt or a flop 250 miles up be more valuable than one on the surface? What advantage justifies moving something as mundane as matrix multiplication into LEO?
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GitHub Actions has a package manager, and it might be the worst
GitHub Actions has a package manager that ignores decades of supply chain security best practices: no lockfile, no integrity verification, no transitive pinning
15
From Azure Functions to FreeBSD
Putting FreeBSD’s “power to serve” motto to the test. On Thanksgiving morning, I woke up to one of my web services being unavailable. All HTTP requests failed with a “503 Service unavailable” error. I logged into the console, saw a simplistic “Runtime version: Error” message, and was not able to diagnose the problem…
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Microservices should form a polytree
Microservices work best as a polytree with clear dependencies and no cycles. Learn how this structure reduces complexity and makes systems easier to scale and maintain.
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Wolfram Compute Services
Wolfram releases the Wolfram Compute Services system--a fully programmable, streamlined way to scale up Wolfram Language computations. For large volumes of data, extensive iterations, large-scale parallelism and more.
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Comparing AWS Lambda ARM64 vs. x86_64 Performance Across Runtimes in Late 2025
See how AWS Lambda arm64 stacks up against x86_64 in real-world benchmarks across CPU, memory, and I/O workloads using Node.js, Python, and Rust.
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Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years
Experiences with the Matrix protocol, Matrix Synapse server, bridges, and Element mobile apps.
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How to run phones while being struck by suicide drones
In Ukraine suicide drones strike critical infrastructure regularly. Some outages are caused directly by the attacks - destroyed power plants, substations, transformers, power lines, some are scheduled in advance - power grid wasn’t designed to work while some of its power plants and transformers are destroyed and are…
21
Self-hosting my photos with Immich
For every cloud service I use, I want to have a local copy of my data for backup purposes and independence. Unfortunately, the gphotos-sync tool stopped working in March 2025 when Google restricted the OAuth scopes, so I needed an alternative for my existing Google Photos setup. In this post, I describe how I have set…
22
Datacenters in space aren't going to work
There is a rush for AI companies to team up with space launch/satellite companies to build datacenters in space. TL;DR: It's not going to work.
23
DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
An 8-bay DIY NAS with 10GbE networking, TrueNAS 25.10.0.1, an Intel N300 CPU, 32GB of DDR5 RAM, and a smallish form factor that occupies less than 20 liters of your office space.
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Cloudflare outage should not have happened
[BROKEN LINK: blog/google-cloud-s-outage-should-not-have-happened-and-they-seem-to-be-missing-the-point-on-how-to-avoid-it-in-the-future.pre-processed.org], another global IT outage happened (dèjá vu strikes again in our industry). This time at cloudflare(Prince 2025). Again, taking down large swaths of the internet…
25
Most Stable Raspberry Pi? Better NTP with Thermal Management
eBay affiliate disclosure: Links labeled “eBay affiliate link” lead to eBay. As an eBay Partner, I may earn a commission if you make a purchase. I’ve written before about building microsecond-accurate NTP servers with Raspberry Pi and GPS PPS, and more recently about revisiting the setup in 2025. Both posts focused on…
26
We should all be using dependency cooldowns
See cooldowns.dev for up-to-date information on cooldown adoption across various languages and package ecosystems.
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Run Docker containers natively in Proxmox 9.1 (OCI images)
Published: 20-11-2025 22:34 | Author: Remy van Elst | Text only version of this article
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Static Web Hosting on the Intel N150
Compare static web hosting performance on an Intel N150 using the same nginx.conf across FreeBSD jails, SmartOS zones, NetBSD, OpenBSD and Linux, focusing on HTTP vs HTTPS and TLS CPU usage.
29
Moving from OpenBSD to FreeBSD for firewalls
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
30
Do not put your site behind Cloudflare if you don't need to
At the time of writing 12:43 UTC on Tue 18 Nov, Cloudflare has taken many sites down. I'm trying to browse the web, but about half of the sites show an error: cloudflare.webp Most of these sites are n...