I run three personal servers — one Oracle ARM box (the Internet-facing one), a NAS at home, and a tiny N100 mini-PC at a friend’s place that I use as off-site backup. They need to reach each other privately. Tailscale …
You’ve spent a decade reaching for strace when a Linux process is misbehaving. You move to a Mac. You type strace. Nothing. man strace. Nothing. You google “strace mac” and get six different answers, half of them recommending …
Your app writes to /var/log/app.log. The disk fills up. You write a quick logrotate config, copy-paste from the first Stack Overflow result, set up a daily rotate. Two months later the disk is fine but you discover the app …
You manage five servers. Each has a different SSH key in ~/.ssh/authorized_keys from the day you set it up — one’s an old id_rsa from 2018, two have your laptop’s current ed25519 key, one has an ancient ECDSA key from …
Apple Mail and Gmail used to be a fight: Gmail’s labels confused Apple Mail’s folder model, IMAP sync would crawl through 80,000 messages, and a half-moon “loading” indicator would spin for hours while you couldn’t search. As recently as 2023 …
You SSH into your server and run the same five commands every Sunday morning: df -h, free -h, systemctl --failed, apt list --upgradable, lastb. Five minutes of looking around to confirm nothing’s quietly broken. Multiply …
Pocket announced its shutdown in 2025. Instapaper still exists but is third-handed and feels frozen. Reader-by-Readwise is good but it’s a $10/month subscription. The self-hosted answer is Wallabag — PHP+MySQL, runs on a $5 VPS, has clean iOS / Android …
You set up an ed25519 SSH key with a strong passphrase, like the security guides told you to. Every time you boot your Mac and connect to a server, you type the passphrase. Every time you open a new terminal …
You sit down at a coffee shop, click the Wi-Fi prompt, and accept the captive portal. Your laptop is now on a network where the person at the next table can run tcpdump on the SSID and see your unencrypted …
The first time I filled / on a single-drive ZFS box was a Sunday at 2 AM. zfs list said the pool had 800 GB free; df said / was at 100%; the system was unhappy in that quiet, refuses-to-write-but-doesn’t-crash …