Thoughts November 2024

A collection of some of the things I learned and some of the thoughts I had this month.

Self-Hosting Journey

I have a small PC connected to a TV-screen that I use to watch TV, because I thought this would work way better than a "SMART"-TV (and it does! I really don't know why you would buy an absolute shite product like that). I thought I could just use this computer to act as a server and use it to self-host a bunch of stuff at the cost of always having it on. I installed Ubuntu Server on it, so far I've got:

• Pihole for blocking ads on any device connected to my network
• Wireguard as a VPN tunnel so I can access my network from anywhere.
• A shared folder with Samba for file sharing. Using this for back-ups and photos as cloud storage!
• A little Docker container that scrapes interesting job postings from indeed etc. and puts them in my Samba share (code not on Github yet).

I hope to do a bunch of cool stuff with this in the future. Like hosting this website, having more useful containers running that automatically do stuff for me, and a place where I can host my machine learning projects.

Other stuff

• What the hell is up with LLMs and generating the word "key"? Key Insights, Key Takeaways, Key Points, Key Issues. This word makes my LLM-alarm go off now.
• People often say the 2-axis system (right-left, progressive-conservative) is a much too simple system for analyzing the positions of political parties. For the Netherlands, seeing that parties tend to fall on a straight line, it looks like it's too complicated :-)

Reading...

• The Outsider, Albert Camus
• Der Prozess, Franz Kafka
• The Culture of Narcissism, Cristoph Lasch