I have a homelab, mainly as a hobby but also as an environment for experimentation. It’s quite useful for self-hosting different services—not only because of the potential cost savings (although you do need to account for hardware costs and electricity) — but also because it allows you to develop skills that will be useful as a professional developer. And the best part? You don’t have to invest a lot of money — I didn’t. I started my homelab with a Raspberry Pi 3B, and for about a year, that was all I needed. It was capable of running HomeAssistant and Mosquitto well enough. Eventually, as I brought more services into my homelab, I had to expand. And guess what? I got a Raspberry Pi 4. So now I have two hosts in my homelab, and the most important question I had to answer was which node should run each service and what kind of availability I wanted.

In today’s digital world, ensuring the authenticity and security of our communications is more important than ever. PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) and GnuPG (GNU Privacy Guard) are tools designed to provide secure encryption and decryption of data, playing a crucial role in protecting privacy and information. A key component of this security model is the “web of trust,” an informal network of users who verify and sign each other’s public keys. By hosting a PGP/GnuPG signing party, individuals can expand their web of trust, increasing the reliability of key verification and enhancing overall communication security. This guide offers practical steps, complete with GnuPG command examples, to help you host a successful signing party.

The landscape of Linux desktop environments has been undergoing a major transformation, with the advent of Wayland as a promising successor to the long-standing Xorg display server. This shift has brought about significant changes in popular desktop environments such as Plasma and GNOME. In this post, we explore the state of the art in terms of Wayland’s impact on these environments and how they compare to Xorg, as well as explaining my path towards moving from Xorg to Wayland, steps I took, mistakes I made, and learnings I’ve got.

This weekend I traveled to Brussels to attend FOSDEM 2023, although only for the first day (Saturday 4th, 2023). It hasn’t been my first one, but it has been the first massive event I have attended after the COVID-19 pandemic. After the morning keynote, I had a quick look around the buildings where the event was hosted to visit the different stands of the many sponsors of the conference. Among the most interesting ones (for me personally, all the stands where really interesting in one way or another) where:

Comment systems are an essential part of modern websites, providing a platform for users to engage with the content and share their thoughts and opinions. While there are many options available for adding commenting functionality to a website, one alternative worth considering is integrating a Mastodon thread, also known as a “toot.” Mastodon is an open-source, decentralized social media platform that allows users to share text, images, and other types of media in a manner similar to Twitter. In this blog post, we will explore how to integrate a Mastodon thread into your static website as a way to replace traditional comment systems, using simple HTML and JavaScript. By the end of this tutorial, you will have a fully functional Mastodon thread on your website that allows users to participate in discussions and share their thoughts and ideas.

A while back, digging into an old DO NOT DELETE backup folder in one of my old hard drives, I stumped upon a folder called parchis, and for a moment I held my breath until I found some *.bas files there! So what? Well, I just found the lost source code of my very first project, the one I coded while learning about variables, procedures and loops, the one that made me realize that this is the kind of stuff I wanted to do as my professional career and hobby.

Bitcoin (and many more) cryptocurrency prices have been sky rocketing for the lasts weeks/months, and thus their usage and mining. But have we stop thinking how this impacts the Climate Change? Before jumping into graphs, a quick recap on how cryptocurrencies work: when you buy or sell Bitcoins (for example), your transaction is being recorded into a distributed ledger. This distributed ledger is cryptographically secured against tampering, meaning that once anything is written into it, there is no way of changing nor removing it. But that ledger needs to reside and be supported by a platform. This platform is what the miners provide, and the computation power they contribute with is what enables the distributed ledger.

If you are a AWS SES user (AWS’ email system) you probably know that working with its JSON based templates is not a user-friendly task: Text and HTML content are defined as properties of a JSON object It’s a JSON file, meaning that you have to escape some characters, like " in the HTML It’s quite hard to find the content to change in the HTML being stored in a single line But still, is a quite convenient system, as hosting your own email server is quite an effort, and you want it to be reliable.

Definition: A monorepo is a standard Version Control System, or VCS (such as Git, Subversion or CVS) repository, which instead of containing just one application or unit of software (applications, libraries, micro services, modules…), contains all the components that a project (or company) needs to operate. At first glance, it sounds counterintuitive to host more than one unit of software in a single repository, but there are few advantages on having all components stored in the same place:

Amazing. That’s the one word summary for this unconference. It wasn’t my first time in an unconference, although the previous ones were slightly smaller and my experience then wasn’t that satisfactory as the one I’ve had in JCrete. And I have just discovered the key ingredient for a successful unconference: the people. Because is not only about the technical content of the sessions (which was quite high, don’t get me wrong), but about those interactions during and after the sessions, happening without any planification, as natural as a conversation can be. Probably the most interesting ones are, in fact, those unexpected gatherings happening at random places, like at the beach, or during breakfast, or while trekking to Balos beach, or while snokerkeling in a beautiful location of the island.