Posts

Today I finally ditched Google for my personal domain’s email. Google has announced that on May 1, 2022, it’s ending the free tier I’ve been using for more than 10 years to host my domain’s email. I knew this was coming long ago, but I was lazy. The easiest way to solve this is moving the kids email accounts to free email accounts, and paying Google $3/user monthly for the remaining accounts for the first year and $6/user afterwards1. Read more...

Some time ago I subscribed to r/selfhosted, a subreddit about “alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don’t control.” It’s difficult not to resonate with the ideals of the self-hosted movement: being in control of your data, retaining privacy, no vendor lock-in… As a friend of mine would say, who can argue against freedom? In practice, however, nowdays people don’t want to run their own servers, even if they know how to do it. Read more...

Last year I read this article by Derek Sivers. What he proposes is to ignore arbitrary calendar dates if they don’t make sense. We are on the second week of 2022 and I have a bad feeling in my stomach because I’ve not gone through last year’s review, nor finished my planning for 2022. That’s not exactly so, because I’ve spent some hours here and there in November and December taking notes, reflecting on 2021, and thinking what I want to achieve in 2022. Read more...

I was recently in the process of upgrading a system running Django 2.2 to 3.2. Django 3.2 requires Python 3.6+. This system is running on a cloud instance of Ubuntu 16.04, which only supports Python up to 3.5. Upgrading the server to Ubuntu 18.04 or 20.04 is out of the question. (Just the thought of someone typing do-release-upgrade in a production server makes me shiver…) Also, the system is from a pre-docker era, so no luck there. Read more...

Inspired by Kevin Quirk’s post about Core Web Vitals and Wordpress, I spend some hours trying to improve the web vitals from my other site, which runs on Wordpress. (You can measure your site’s core vitals on web.dev.) Some months ago I migrated that site from a self-hosted Linode instance to a managed solution on WPEngine. I’m essentially buying back time. A managed solution frees me from server admin duties, like making sure the latest Linux updates are installed, and PHP and its libraries up-to-date. Read more...