HTMX is an interesting project to me, and I’ve used it a bit in my large collection of 70% completed side projects, but haven’t really discussed it here. The plan for this post is to talk briefly about what it is exactly, then convert a simple ‘conventional’ (HTML/CSS/Javascript) app to htmx and think about some the differences.
htmx
You could (I recommend you do) read the book about the concepts behind htmx . Carson Gross (the man behind htmx) calls it a book, but its quite the treatise, it could fairly be called a manifesto.
I don’t have experience with SQLite and want to shift one of my apps over from Mongoose since apparently SQLite is much more capable than I imagined. My usual tactic when trying something new is to try and get a minimal project working on it, so what follows is the simplest possible node/express REST API to demo SQLite.
The simplest possible Express app is going to look something like this. Of course we would have gone to the terminal with npm i express first so this could run.
I’ve been really pleased with Gogs - it’s lightweight, was simple to spin up, and has worked perfectly. But then this morning on Mastodon, there’s a post from @Codeberg.org describing a security vulnerability in their Git hosting project Forgejo. This issue also apparently affects Gitea and Gogs - what’s up with that?
I actually already did spend a bit of time comparing Gogs and Gitea before deciding on Gogs, since I’d heard of people running Gitea over the past year or so, but only seen that Gogs seemed to be popular with self-hosters in a Lemmy post I’d read. My first impression was that Gitea was more focused on CI/CD and seemed to have a more complicated install process.
I am loving running a local Gogs instance - it’s nice pushing my git repos to a totally private hub that I know is backed up with all my other self-hosted infrastructure.
Of course, there’s good reasons to have code in GitHub as well - my build-in-public philosophy, the vague possibility that some of it might be useful to someone, my contribution to our future AI overlords, and when I need to make some code linkable - for example from one of these posts. And of course there’s this bit of social-engineering which I assume was inspired by the bathroom decor in Veronica Mars .
In the long ago times, I’d done several years of commercial programming before I ever had to worry about dealing with multiple things happening at the same time. Perhaps because of the rarity of this problem, doing it in traditional languages was not always elegant.
In the modern world of everything happening on the network, and systems being build out of micro-services and APIs, the beginning programmer probably has to deal with this stuff in Programming 102. Luckily, modern languages have these considerations built in, and one language with a particular reputation for that is Go.
I’ve developed a bit of a workflow for setting up a new service of some type on the homelab. Installing it is the obvious thing, but I also have a few quality of life things I do to make it a full production-quality part of my installation. I thought it might be helpful to run through those things using a recent example of adding audiobookshelf .
audiobookshelf
audiobookshelf is a web based system for viewing, playing, downloading and/or generally managing your audio books. I’ve been an Audible user/subscriber, but recently got grumpy at them about something - I think I had paused my subscription, and my downloaded books were still available on my phone. I was halfway through one, upgraded the app, and then wasn’t able to play the book without re-subscribing. That might not be exactly right, but it was some type of frustrating carry on like that.
Whenever I encounter one of those “What are you self-hosting?” threads, I know I’m about to waste an hour looking at, and often trying out, software I probably don’t really need, and that was the case with this post on the lemmy.world Selfhosted community.
The basic idea of ViewTube is that it’s a self-hosted front end for YouTube, which just happens to strip out all the advertising and tracking. You can create your own local accounts which allows you to subscribe to channels and which keeps your progress so you don’t start over if you go back to a video - although I couldn’t see a history list. Forgetting your history might be a feature in an app designed to prevent tracking.
In the spirit of over-complicating things, when I wanted to collect all the links to the services on my homelab into one place, I decided I needed to write them in markdown, and have them converted on the fly into HTML by a server. Then when I couldn’t find exactly what I was after (Harp was closest) of course, I decided to write it.
Markdown
Markdown has definitely been having it’s moment over the last couple of years. It’s a simple open format mark-up language that is quite readable in it’s source form. Although it’s now very fashionable as an input for static site generators, most people will have run in to it when adding simple formatting to forum comments or on instant messaging platforms.
I couldn’t help but measure some VPS disk speeds while I was busting out the fio.
Binary Lane only claims “pure SSD drives” but seems pretty great. The difference between Digital Ocean SSD and NVME is disappointing. Obviously you’re sharing a drive with other users, so perhaps this depends on what else is going on.
A quick look at the arrangements around the config settings for nginx. This is based on what I can see in Debian and Ubuntu, but likely it will be most apt flavoured distros. Others may well be different, I know CentOS is.
Context
If the way the configs for nginx are arranged seems a little complicated, it’s helpful to keep in mind there’s a couple of challenges that are being addressed with that complexity.
A big chunk of my mindless doomscrolling used to go to Reddit, but also, Reddit posts from the various communities were frequently the useful results when googling error messages. I lurked in many a sub-reddit, but only posted in a couple - usually r/self-hosted or r/Homelab.
The problematic treatment of the communities in the leadup to their IPO has been well publicised, and the short blackout by some subreddits seemed to have zero effect on the company’s approach to it’s users (which is in fact what they have to sell). Those subreddits, and many others are still working, but (and perhaps I’m imagining this) seem somehow thinner. Additionally, I feel like it’s a fragile arrangement - the company has shown how they will deal with their communities, so depending on them in the long term does not seem wise, or even, somehow, ethical - like I’m crossing a picket line.
I’ve been slammed with other work, so my web dev learning has fallen well behind. Luckily, the YouTube procrastination algorithm noticed this and suggested I watch a video from CodeWithCon titled Learn Backend in 10 MINUTES .
Since I was watching a video of a guy learning to land a C152 at St Baths (a skill I do not need) at the time, it was hard to argue with myself that I didn’t have ten minutes to learn all of backend programming.
My MacBook died, I guess about three years ago. It was randomly difficult for a week or so, but then just behaving as if it had no hard drive at all. It’s been in a drawer ever since waiting for me to replace the hard drive and see if I could sell it, which I never quite got to.
I mentioned a while ago that I’d borrowed an old Atom powered HP Mini 110 to play with a Linux desktop machine, partly for fun & learning, and partly for a first-class SPICE experience (also fun). Meanwhile I’ve got an old but still sexy Intel MacBook Pro sitting in a drawer - that doesn’t make sense!
I’m interested in collecting some internal temperature data from my servers to look at the effect of adding an NMVe drive. Last week we had a couple of warm days immediately followed by a couple of cool ones. I imagine a 20° ambient temperature change could effect the server temperatures, so I thought it would be good to add that to my temperature logs.
I don’t have a weather station or other automated system for collecting the temperature, but there are several commercial sources for this data which, while probably not as good as a sensor in the server room, will be fine for our purposes.
I’ve been furthering my Linux education by playing with some desktop distros in VMs, but it’s not a great experience accessing them through the Proxmox web GUI. The alternative to this is to use a good SPICE client on the remote desktop, but there is not a simple good solution for this for MacOS.
I’ve been playing with the idea of picking up an old i3/i5 Thinkpad - these are around the AUD130 mark on eBay, to run a Linux distro with the main idea being to use it to SPICE into my VMs.
The reason I’ve been figuring out rsync is to setup my backup strategy. Eventually this will partly be managed with scheduled tasks (ie cron jobs) running rsync. I wanted the SSH in and try this out, since I didn’t know some basic things like the mount points of the shares.
Mount points
My first issue was to find the paths to all my data. This turned out not to be a drama. Each of the volumes you create when the NAS is set up are just in the root directory. This includes any USB drives plugged in.
The Synology operating system DSM (I’m on DSM 7.1.1) is Linux, but its highly customised for the purpose of making running a complicated Linux NAS doable for less technical users.
Due to that, some things that are routine in a regular distro, require a few more steps to jump through to get them to work. SSH-ing in to a Synology with keys is one of those things.
Should you?
Before you do start fiddling around, it’s probably worth mentioning that almost all the things you might want to do on the Synology can be accomplished through their web interface, or by installing a ‘package’ from the Package Center. For example, if you need to run a cron job, that’s done through the Control Panel ‘Task Scheduler’. If you need TailScale installed to easily access it over Wireguard, there’s a TailScale package. In general it’s probably easier and safer to do things their way.
I’m not super interested in FreeDOS, but did enjoy this video from Jim Hall since I lived through all this, and was working in IT (well, ‘data processing’ actually) during the introduction of the IBM PC.
My first DOS was 2.11, but spent a lot more time on 3.12, and later 4.01. Windows wasn’t really ready for anyone until 3.1 which is when I dived in there. I seem to remember purchasing a PC with a whole megabyte of RAM in anticipation!
I’ve been really happy with my two bay Synology NAS - a DS216j. The Synology’s seem to have great reputation for just pushing on. Mine is loaded up with two 8TB Seagate Barracudas in RAID 1 leaving me with a one drive failure redundancy.
I guess a more hard-core host-er than me would be building their own array and using Unraid or ZFS or something. I’m pretty comfortable with the Synology off the shelf system; it’s a good match for my (low) level of expertise, and more robust than my previous storage system of a USB external drive.
Unix, and therefore Linux, was built from the ground up as a multi-user system. Thanks to this, great security is baked in, for example every file has permission attributes for it’s owner, the group the owner is a member of, and then everyone. For example, it might be a good idea if I can read, write and execute my own files, but the other members of my group can just read them, and any other user on the system has none of those rights.
