Zelaf

potato chips

I doooo and I still love it! I haven’t had the time to update to the latest version yet but it’s running very very nicely and has been a big help in my day to day!

So I’m also using Beszel and Ntfy to track my systems because it’s lightweight and very very easy. Coming from having tried Grafana and Prometheus and different TSDBs I felt like I was way better off.

I’ve been following Beszels development closely because it was previously missing features like container monitoring and systemd monitoring which I’m very thankful for them having added recently and I use containers as my primary way of hosting all my applications. The “Healthy” or “Unhealthy” status is directly reported by Docker itself and not something Beszel monitors directly so it has to be configured, either by the configuration in the Dockerfile of the container image or afterwards using the healthcheck options when running a container.

As some other comments mentioned, some containers do come with a healthcheck built in which makes docker auto-configure and enable that healthcheck endpoint. Some containers don’t have a healthcheck built into the container build file and some have documentation for adding a healthcheck to the docker run command or compose file. Some examples are Beszel and Ntfy themselves.

For containers that do not have a healthcheck built into the build file it is either documented how to add it to the compose or you have to figure out a way to do it yourself. For docker images that are built using a more standard image like Alpine, Debian or others you usually have something like curl installed. If the service you are running has a webpage going you can use that. Some programs have a healthcheck command built into it that you can also use.

As an example, the postgresql program has a built in healthcheck command you can use of that’ll check if the database is ready. The easiest way to add it would be to do

    healthcheck:
      test: ["CMD", "pg_isready", "-U", "root",  "-d", "db_name"]
      interval: 30s
      retries: 5
      start_period: 60s

That’ll run the command inside the container pg_isready -U root -d db_name every 30 seconds but not before 60 seconds to get the container up and running. Options can be changed depending on the speed of the system.

Another example, for a container that has the curl program available inside it you can add something like

    healthcheck:
      test: ["CMD", "curl", "-f", "http://localhost:3000/"]
      interval: 1m
      retries: 3

This will run curl -f http://localhost:3000/ every 1 minute. If either of the above examples would exit with an exit code higher than 0 Docker would report the container has unhealthy. Beszel will then read that data and report back that the container is not healthy. Some web apps have something along the line of a /health endpoint you can use the curl command with as well.

Unless the developer has spent some extra time on the healthchecks it is often just a basic way to see that the program inside the container is running. However, usually the container itself exits if the program it is running crashes or quits. So a healthcheck isn’t always necessary as the healthcheck will be that the container has abruptly stopped. This is why things like Uptime Kuma is something to consider running alongside Beszel because it can monitor when a web address or similar is down as well even if a container exits which as of now Beszel is still sadly lacking.

I would recommend you read up on the Docker Compose spec for healthchecks since with the other options you can also do things like timeouts and what not, combining that with whatever program you’re running with the healthcheck you can get very creative with it if you must.

My personal recommendation would be to sticking with Uptime Kuma regarding proper service availability healthchecks since it’ll be easier to configure and get an overview of things like slow load times of web pages and containers that have stopped while using Beszel to monitor performance and resource usage.

I see. I must’ve missed that while doing my skimming a bit too hastily. Good thing it has, I was worried it would be limited to securing it through a VPN.

I’m glad it exists and hope of develops further. It has gotten some well deserved growth and exposure in general.

I’ve been a Joplin user as well for some time and decided to switch to something different too. I looked at Trilium as a possible alternative but decided it wasn’t for me. Seems like their self hosted sync server doesn’t have much in terms of proper authentication at all? At least from what I’ve seen from the setup and when I skimmed through the docs. However there does seem to be encryption available which at least seems to be something. The interface also seems very cluttered and has a wild amount of features I’ll never even dream of using extensively. I needed something more simple and streamlined.

With that in mind and as I use Authentik for authentication and user management I decided to look elsewhere. I’m currently testing Jotty/Jotty.page, however they want to format it, and it has everything I need. But it lacks encryption and a proper mobile app. It does however have PWA support which is at least something. I do also enjoy that it is pretty much completely directory based. Even the users and user sessions and shared notes are just JSON files. This makes active backups a breeze and disaster recovery is going into a users directory and making a copy of their directories and .md files. It’s growing on me to say the least.

This GIF is perfectly synced up to the music I’m listening too, Reach Out I’ll Be There by The Four Tops

I’ve always found the installation process of Debian unintuitive for people not used to linux. But I could imagine that it’s probably abreally good contender once the packages are installed and the DE setup with any necessary extensions for file browsers and other programs, for example preview of files in Nautilus for GNOME. Unsure if that is automatically installed or not in Debian but could be a good idea to check.

I’d suggest trying a test install in a VM if you can to check how well Debian will hold after configuration. Package updates for my Debian servers happens every once or so week and with a DEs GUI package manager it could simplify the process of the user actually hitting the update button.

“Nevermet”?

I’d want this as my first tattoo.

Same. Wanted to give some AI a try for my HA and it was fun. But this was very early on when they didn’t have official implementation of intents and such for AI so I sometimes had to say “You didn’t turn on the lights. Please turn the lights on”.

It’s an interesting topic me and my friends have discussed for a long time. On one hand, putting ease of use and user experience behind a paywall is terrible but on the other developers deserve compensation. Not everyone can donate and others doesn’t even figure that it’s an option.

Pangolin I think does it very kindly by having a button on the lower left of the interface that you can click on and then also dismiss to hide that button for a week which I find a good common ground. But at the same time I also think it’s hard to justify hate towards projects that lock things behind a paywall.

Of course if you lock security features like OIDC/LDAP like some do or self-hosting to “Local Infrastructure” it’s pure BS. I think there’s a lot of nuance to what should and shouldn’t be done in the matter but as long as it’s still open source it’s good in my book. Like self hosting Bitwarden gives you access to the paid features or you can pay them the small fee to not self host it and get some extra QoL features.

People do in the end have to juggle software maintenance, community maintenance, organizing issues, planning features and implementations, keeping wiki and docs up to date, etc. On top of, I’m assuming in most cases, having to do a regular job too. I know for a fact I wouldn’t be able to do that at all so if they can get some motivation through either code contribution or monetarily it would potentially ease up things.

“I was also on the team that helped create covid!”

Having run minor projects using PocketBase before and also seen what PocketBase itself can do and SQLite configured correctly in general, It’s great. I’ve gotten to be a big fan of it by the years and gladly opt for it over the bigger ones.

If this project got SQLite support it would be a great replacement for my own setup which requires about 3 or 4 accounts. Currently using a proprietary solution and been looking into moving to Authentik but it’s a bit too heavy resource wise for my current servers.

I really really like this. Especially the sentiment of the text.

For the past few months I’ve been cripplingly focused on my homelab environment trying to perfect it and fix issues only to find new issues and when I’m not I keep trying to find things to fix with it. It takes out a lot of what I should be doing in my day to day.

Australians rn

Look at Mr. Svalbard Global Seed Storage over here.

Dan… I fucking love you. Thank you for this writeup. Not only is it helpful but it gives me encouragement to continue finding ways and figure things out.

I couple years back when I did my photography education we had an assignment to create a photo book as our final “exam” thing. I decided to document and show the daily life of a blind man and his tools and what he’s had to go through as his blindness got worse over the years. He showed me how he uses his computer and phone and such so I really really saw the importance of accessibility.

Somewhat luckily I’ve been able to keep the forms somewhat sane due to using component libraries which implement accessibility well. I always make my things in SvelteKit which does have good support for accessibility and I always keep my colours contrasty with as close to as AAA as possible because it’s easier on my own eyes too hahaha.

There’s a national deaf-blind association nearby and I’ve been thinking of going there to chat about accessibility and website usage with them one day.

I’m working on digitizing the book I made into a website and of course want to make that website extroniously accessible so even a blind person can hear through descriptive wording of what’s happening in the images. I also plan to make a scrolly-type thing using as little JS as possible which is nicely achievable now with the CSS scroll modifiers that’s been added over the years.

It’s going to be exciting to see how everything will work out. I can’t thank you enough, while my only computer is a Steam Deck where running VMs is a bit so and so I’m gonna see if I can use some public computer or see if someone in the association can help me test things out and fix things from there.

One thing I’ve had troubles with when trying to implement accessibility is in web dev. There’s so many attribute tags and I think a few different software based standards as well? I’m not entirely sure. The documentation on it felt a bit hard to follow and implement. Then I’m not sure how to go about testing it fully either without having those proprietary softwares either. I’m on an all Linux machine and the only accessibility software I know of is Orca and it’s so and so last time I tried it.

While I slowly figure that out however I make sure to follow tag recommendations and keep things in sections, only one h1 tag per page, descriptive and short alt tags, and so forth. At least that helps a tiny bit.

I absolutely love GNOME but had to switch recently due to hardware and software quirks. My primary computer is a Steam Deck and with valve primarily testing their things with KDE and the ability to launch into the Deck mode there was a lot of bugs and quirks happening with GNOME that I got tired of troubleshooting and patch in config files for all the time.

Switching back to KDE, sure I get a better overview of things but I love Adwaita and the GNOME Intuitivity of the UI. Things I needed was there and presented in a very nice non-distracting way. The clean look and the added margins around elements giving a comfortable view of what’s necessary is extremely nice to me, all while the rest of the stuff isn’t distracting me with buttons and gizmos everywhere. I hope I can one day switch back but the added niceties of HDR and better KDE Connect support that isn’t half broken is also quite nice. Loose a little, win a little.

I don’t really have social circles that show of Linux elitism. While on public spaces and have the time and energy I try to help out as best I can in a respectful manner and make sure not to get frustrated or annoyed at peoples need to learn things. While I haven’t encountered the elitism myself I can obviously see why it would be extremely off putting to encounter it as a new user and it saddens me a bit to hear about it.

I have a few local friends who wishes to give Linux a go now and decided to hook them up with containerbased systems, in this case since they play video games I chose to give Bazite a go for them specifically for the reason that ruining it with modifying installed packages is going to be harder. I don’t mind helping them out myself however and have found the bazzite community pretty forgiving as well luckily.