Maroon

So far, my self-hosting has been limited to Pi-Hole, and a static website. I now want to try out something new, an Immich server.

I have a static IP from my ISP, so I don’t need to rent out a VPS. However, given that this IS a home internet, I want to be extra sure that it is going to be secure.

In my existing website, I use Fail2Ban + BadBotBlocker + Anubis + Nginx rate limits to protect it from scrapers, bots and malicious users, and it works well. With photos (especially family photos) at stake, I just want to know more on how to protect my server.

Add: thanks for the helpful replies. I will be sharing the photos with family, many of whom live abroad.

According to my friend who comes from Pakistan, they have a slang for brown folks living abroad called "kuttae" which transliterates to "dog", but basically means "white man's lackey". She says most people hate them, but tolerate their antics because they generally have more money.

I know how badly immigrants from Africa and Asia have been treated in the US. What surprises me is that so many of the people working in the immigration office are descendants of immigrants. This got me thinking if one of the consequences of a US collapse (or even a major expulsion/exodus) would be these folks being forced to go back to the countries of their ancestors, and being treated horribly there out of spite / revenge.

My wife has a windows 10 laptop that works very well (hardware). However it seems that it won't support win11. Rather than trying to tinker and make it install Win11 without the TPM support, etc., I want to install Linux Mint.

There are three games she adores and wants them to work if I installed Linux:

1. Grandia 2 installed via Steam. Will proton support it?
2. Sims 3 installed via Steam. Willnproton support this as well?
3. Cesar 3 (which runs in a Win7 VM in windows setup by her tech savy friend). She has those files and the exe files etc. Can that be run on Linux? I'm reading about DOSBox, but not sure if that is the right tool.

I can rip out windows and go full Linux on her machine if there is support for running these three games. Any chance for me on this?

I won a new grant (yaay!) and dipping my toes in the role of PI in my university. For now, I will have a PhD, a post doc and a couple of masters students in my team.

In all my previous labs, everything was on paper and very poorly documented (...don't ask). I myself used to use LaTeX to keep a "neat" labnote. Obviously, it is not easy to collaborate and work with others.

Any researchers here who have experience hosting their own e-lab book in their labs?

I am in the EU. I want to help make the TOR network more robust by contributing a relay node. I have one of three hardware options: a raspberry pi zero W, raspberry pi 4B, or ThinkPad T470s.

In your practical experience, which of these computers would be the best for the network? As I understand, beyond a point, the CPU power doesn't matter unless massive traffic loads go through the node.

P.S: Not sure if this is relevant, but I currently have a pihole hosted in a separate RPI zero. I plan to host this at home. I do not have a separate connection line. My router doesn't support vlan.

Add: Thank you for the kind replies. Based on the feedback, it think I'm currently not setup to help the network. I will instead continue with my annual contribution.

I will look into hosting a node on a VPS and just pay a monthly subscription fee or something.

You will see that I have posted about this before asking for suggestions on which software I can use to convert PDF to docx/odt.

I am a teacher. During my time as a researcher I wrote a lot of documents and regularly draw upon them to teach my students. I often have to take the text, modify them, or build upon them. A lot of my material is bound up in PDFs. Sometimes, I have grant applications to write where a previous draft I wrote was stored as a PDF. Converting them to text has become the bane of my life.

I am forced to use online tools because none of the software I have seem to do the trick. Lot of people keep saying pandoc. Pandoc does not convert PDF to any other format. It can only be the output format.

Is there a magic open source solution that I have missed out?

I have a thinkpad lying around. I have used Linux over the last 5 years and I an NOT a power user. I use Mint and it gets the job done for me.

Lately though, the whole libre software bug bit me and I want at least one machine that is libre compatible through and through. I have heard some stuff like Parabola and GNUIX or something like that, but thought it best to ask around first before even thinking about something like this.

My work essentially involves writing documents (LaTeX and LibreOffice), doing statistical analysis, and making lectures. I access emails via Thunderbird. That's it.

Does anyone here daily drive a fully libre laptop?

I moved away from MS Windows a long while back and have ported everything EXCEPT presentations. I still use a friend's laptop just for PowerPoint.

I have used LibreOffice Impress and it is quite poor in design and the templates are very unprofessional.

I have used LaTeX beamer a lot and I am now tired of fighting it to make simple transitions look good, quickly customise a slide, etc.

Are there alternatives that I can use which are libre friendly as well as user-friendly?