Thinking about my home server

On my home server I have, till now, Hubzilla and WordPress. Hubzilla is a good all-round piece of software that does various things, though not perfectly: it is an activity-hub connected social network, a place to store photo albums and files; a content management system for blogs, and a place where you can make static websites.

There are idealistic, practical and economic considerations regarding home hosting. On a practical level, the experience has been much smoother than I anticipated. The system has stayed up most of the time, despite occasional power cuts. There haven’t been so many issues at all. I’m using an old laptop for the purpose, connected to my modem-router. There are still one or two things I have to figure out, but that’s only because I’ve been lazy.

On an idealistic level, I love the idea of being in control of my own server.

Economically, it’s probably cheaper, after the small fee I pay for a permanent IP, and the electricity used, than hosting the site on a server. There were no hardware costs since I’m using an old laptop, which would otherwise just lie in the cupboard.

There is still a question whether the effort has been worth it. Regarding blogging and social networking, it depends a lot on the usage case. Although it is occasionally nice for me to see all the product of 20 years of writing together in one place, actually I could achieve the same by writing off line, on my computer, and then uploading it somewhere – anywhere – perhaps various places – not necessarily a personal website. That’s true because there are no commercial or reputational considerations involved. That would not be true for everyone.

Regarding social media, also there, there are few advantages to be found in hosting your own network. It is easier to become known and discover others by using a commercial network or a popular federated instance. If what you are posting is mainly short posts and links to your own writing, and the service is free, then there is no real need to host it at home.

What would make sense, perhaps, would be to host your own email system. That would be great, if it were not so technically challenging to host email, and if were not so difficult to self-host email without being blacklisted by the big companies who today host email.

It does not make sense to use a home server for a file server, because the main advantage of backing up your files in the cloud is that they are not being stored at home. If the house is burgled or burns down, it’s better that the files are stored elsewhere. It still makes sense to rent a cloud server for that; it is simply better that it isn’t at home. I pay a little money to Disroot in order to store my files on their server.

It would be a good idea to use a home server for storing a photo and video collection. Photos and video take up a lot of space, which is sometimes costly, so a good case can be made for creating a photo gallery on your own server. But that too could be hosted somewhere in the cloud.

SoundCloud

I’m just starting to use it, but I think I like the interface of SoundCloud over that of Deezer, and am finding it easier to find music that I like. I am still listening free for now, but haven’t heard any ads so far. SoundCloud’s paid service isn’t available in Israel, so it will always be free for me.

I don’t feel like hearing any mainstream western songs, somehow, so most of what I’m listening to are “organic house”, “downtempo”* or electronic versions of ethnic music from around the world. And sometimes the original music, without any synthesized sounds. “Quieter than Silence” by Mehdi Aminian and Mohamad Zatari continues to satisfy – I like it more each time I listen to it.

Note: It’s with a bit of hesitation that I write “organic house”, “downtempo”, etc., because I actually have very little understanding of what the terms mean. They are just words that appear next to the titles. My interest in such kinds of music is quite recent. And anyway, I have little understanding of music in general. I only know what I like. And that’s subject to change.

Just now, I’m listening to Jose Solano.

What I’m reading

“Son Visage et le Tien”, a long essay by Jenni Alexis. Interesting, so far. The English Wikipedia article about him references an article in the Atlantic, “When does a writer become a writer“[1]. Alexis, like T.S. Eliot, Franz Kafka, John Steinbeck, Margaret Duras and so many others that the article doesn’t mention, has a daytime job. Winning the Goncourt prize came as a big surprise for him. It’s the kind of attainment that so many aspiring writers dream about.

Links

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/11/when-does-a-writer-become-a-writer/248945/

Despite all the predictions that the Pegasus affair would be all forgotten after a few weeks, no, the company’s woes seem only to be accumulating. Blacklisted by the US gov’t, half a billion dollars in debt, and now being sued by Apple.

NSO was about to sell hacking tools to France. Now the Israeli spyware company is in crisis. | MIT Technology Review https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/11/23/1040509/france-macron-nso-in-crisis-sanctions/

Apple Sues NSO Group For Hacking Its Users https://www.vice.com/en/article/7kbvyb/apple-sues-nso-group-for-hacking-its-users

“For the experts and activists who have been accusing NSO Group of enabling authoritarian abuse for years, it’s a victory that is long overdue.”

Organizing some news feeds under Vivaldi

I put some of my RSS Newsfeeds in order in Vivaldi. My idea is to use it for blogs, rather than busy news sources. For that reason I first added RMS’s political notes, and then removed it. Because if I want to use it as what Dave Winer calls “a river of news”, RMS dominates too much. But the links are good. It would be better if Vivaldi made it possible to use sub-folders for different areas (and hence sub-rivers – by being able to click on the top folder that includes each set of feeds).

It’s a little disappointing to see many of the bloggers whom I bookmarked falling silent for months on end. Many people invest a lot of time in producing a nice looking blog, and then forget to use it.

Paywalled systems

I had a look at Glenn Greenwald’s website (http://glenngreenwald.net). It’s an outdated mess, with stuff requiring Flash player. His website doesn’t mention that he is now on Substack, (greenwald.substack.com) of which I was already aware. I can’t afford to subscribe to him on Substack, any more than I can afford to pay for other news sources. For now, I support the Guardian with a monthly donation, but can’t afford to do that for every web journal I visit. Steve Winer, who is wealthier than I am, has written about this problem. If enough websites gang up on me and offer a subscription model that works more like the music streaming services, offering a monthly subscription that allows me to read, say, 50 or 100 articles a month, across different journals, maybe I would pay for it. I think that the only real solution to paywalls is a model similar to the music streaming services, with a flat monthly subscription similar to that of Medium. But Medium reminds me a little of the gig economy; there are a few top earners, but even they are not getting paid so much. For bloggers and independent writers, what would work best would be to get together and create a “writers guild” or cooperative, working as a non-profit, so that the writers themselves don’t get cheated.

I don’t mind the presence of ads, only the nasty ones and trackers.

Open Library

I was delighted, then disappointed, to find https://openlibrary.org, where one can “borrow” books for a limited time. The problem is that the presentation makes them not very readable. Might be okay for students, but not really for readers. Someone put in a considerable amount of work in making the books available, but didn’t go the full route. At minimum there should be a phone application enabling comfortable reading of the books. The project belongs to archive.org, the internet archive, and uses the same login for both.

Links

India hovers over the Pause button for Big Tech’s march onto one hundred million farms • The Register https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/22/india_agristack/

29 August 2020

Listened to another YouTube video of Yuval Noah Harari, This one was a lecture at Google in 2015 and is about “new religions of the 21st century.” I have read only the first of his books, and listened to various interviews. He lives not far from here, practices vipassana meditation, is strictly vegan, firmly on the left, anti-nationalist, and deeply influenced by Buddhism. The video is chiefly about the increasing power of the algorithm in undermining our currently dominant religion, which, as he says, is humanistic liberalism.

I was thinking his talk about the “new religions of the 21st” century would be about the discovery of our interdependence with nature and of the impossibility that the human race will survive the coming centuries while maintaining its existing speciesism.. At a point in the talk he asks a rhetorical question about the main scientific discovery of the 20th century? (the response: there are so many of them that it is hard to say), and then what was the main discovery in the same period from the faith religions (“the religions that believe in God”). The response he gives is that it is hard to decide, because we can’t think of any. But I don’t think that’s strictly true. There is a discovery or re-discovery, of one of them core teachings of all religions, of altruism and the need to overcome our inherent egoism for the good of the whole. It isn’t exclusively the domain of religion, and the dominant religions have themselves contradicted this message to disastrous effect. Yet the belief, or understanding, that there is a deep connection, or even a fundamental unity, between our own existence and consciousness and that of the universe, is both at the heart of religion, and is the key message of our times. “Key” because it is key to our survival as a species. Like the power of the algorithm, this understanding challenges humanistic liberalism and individualism, as Harari defines it. But unlike our new faith in algorithms to address the issues of our times, the earlier message that we can, and need to, transcend our egoism is at the heart of the human condition. It predates humanistic liberalism by tens of thousands of years and can be felt when viewing the art of the first humans on cave walls. And it will supersede our present stage of evolution, if we are to survive at all. It’s a truth with which we have grappled from the beginning, but which rises to paramount importance in an era when we have the power to destroy both our species and the delicate symmetries that make all of life on earth possible. Eventually logic may lead us to the same conclusion. Indeed, we may already have enough scientific knowledge to emphatically confirm it. But if we don’t grasp, at a deep level, and quickly, that in order to survive we must stop destroying the biosphere for selfish reasons, it won’t be very helpful if this understanding remains confined to the rational level. Understanding has always been a matter more for the heart than for the intellect.

28 August 2020

Listened to one of Yuval Noah Harari’s interviews again. This one was about the likelihood that careers and professions would likely be changing every few years, and that we would constantly need to reinvent ourselves. As a result, he suggested that the most important things to learn now are mental and emotional stability and flexibility.

In the 1970s Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock, probably inhabited a similar space. The themes about which they talk are similar, though Toffler was politically more on the right.

I’m not scared about the future, because after the age of around 50, as Haruki Murakami says somewhere in one of his books, we are all living on borrowed time. Most people were traditionally dead by that age. Even today, in many large countries, the average lifespan is less than 70. And, on the other hand, we are never really born and don’t actually die. The pandemic is the most significant and least predicted event that has shaken us recently. I was a bit sorry to have to come home from India earlier than expected, but even if I don’t manage to take much advantage of my new five year visa, it won’t matter to me that much, as I’m also happy to stay home. Lately, it’s been fun working on my home server and setting up Hubzilla. A pleasant distraction.

More of a worry is whether my children and grand children will be ready for the huge changes ahead of them. Why do people still risk bringing children into the world, while simultaneously undermining their future? We’re a strange species. My advice to everyone is to be as self-sufficient as possible and far away from the mainstream; not to believe the pernicious myths and existential fears that nations try to instill in us, or the lies and false promises of ideologies, religions and big corporations. It is better to live the model we would like to see for the world than to spend our time campaigning for things that may never happen. And of course, we need to be open to tweaking that model, according to the constantly changing conditions.

26 August, 2020

Z. came in the morning to do some work around the house. We have known him for 38 years, when he and we were in our 20s. He comes from the nearby Palestinian village of Beit Sira, about 10 minutes from here – or used to be, before they put up the separation barrier. It used to be much easier to visit him. Now, rather than taking him home, we have to drop him at the village gate, along apartheid road 443, under the army watchtower. Many workers used to come in from Beit Sira; including Z’s brothers and sons; but now I think it’s only Z. There are a few building laborers from nearby Beit Liqya. Right now, due to the virus, there’s kind of a reverse closure. Palestinian workers who come in have to stay, rather than go home every day. On the other hand, there are holes in the fence. According to Z, the places are well known by the Israeli army, who do not intervene, and sometimes whole busloads of people come through. The rules regarding the occupation have never been set in stone – a lot depends on who is the soldier on duty, or the mood of the times.

The virus is affecting some parts of the West Bank more seriously than others. It started in the south, but worked its way north. Z. says that two people died of it recently in Beit Liqya; a 45 year old woman with pre-existing health conditions, and a 72 year old man who was also not so well. He knew both of them.

Anyway, Z. replaced 3 new sewage pipe covers with cheap but good ones from El Bireh. He fixed the cobble-stone exterior wall facings that he originally built for us, about twenty five years, ago. He fixed an electrical problem under our new patio pergola, and closed off some unused vents for the A/C. (We used to have a central A/C but nowadays room units are preferred for energy saving.) he can do more or less anything, and I’ve always been a poor and lazy handyman.

SPIP

I ‘m deciding between two projects that I need to give attention to: our Civi-CRM site and a couple of things I need to do for our website on SPIP.  Civi-CRM is set up on our WordPress site, but I neglected it for a year or so, so something broke.  It then required re installation and a PHP update. That too didn’t go smoothly on hostgator, and need their support crew’s intervention.  Now I have to try to fix a bunch of things  in order not to lose the data that is already in. I didn’t manage to get any of the staff to actually use Civi-CRM, but now they are asking for it.

The other work I need to do is in SPIP.  That’s a French CMS.  When I began with it, somewhere in the early 2000s, it seemed to be the best CMS for multilingual content, including Right-to-Left languages.  So I adopted SPIP. Now it would be very difficult to move thousands of articles to an easier CMS..  So I continue to use SPIP.  It does have some advantages. I find it easier than WordPress for adding posts/ pages., and SPIP imposes a hierarchical structure that is great for our usage.  The main drawback is the difficulty in when it comes to design changes.  In WordPress you can just drop in a new theme (I know it isn’t always quite so simple). In SPIP, you need to re-create all the templates by hand, and also know SPIP’s unique adaptations of PHP. And of course, SPIP cannot compete with WordPress on the number of available plugins.

Hubzilla again; this time from a home server

That’s it; after a huge effort, I’ve got Hubzilla working from home.  Not everything works properly yet, and I will have to try to iron out the bugs.  I spent the largest amount of time trying to set up msmtp; because otherwise it was impossible to send an email verification and create a channel. But nothing budged.  Eventually I saw that in the configuration files it is possible to disable email verification.

As a result of the account registration mix up, I ended up creating a first account that was not my admin account.  

UPDATE:  I now see from the help files that this can be updated manually by going into the database; it’s the only way to correct that problem. Not having an admin user is probably the cause of several other problems that I may be able to fix once I am the administrator.

UPDATE:  Sorted

Extraordinary Times

We are living in an extraordinary time in which the viability of our institutions, the myths of society, and the true worth of leaders, is severely tested. Some leaders, like Donald Trump, are so completely confounded by the challenges that whatever they do or do not do places them in a situation of appearing ridiculous. Others, like Angela Merkle, do not need to be very vocal, since they sit atop functional systems that just work, or at least work better.

Countries like Sweden are being shown that some of the assumptions about themselves as societies are poor companions when they are confronted by a new kind of threat. They do not know how to adapt to it.

The virus managed to out-wait Israel. It is waging a war of attrition against a society that prides itself on being able to pull together in order to fight massive, but short term existential crises. Some of the behaviours that aid it in other circumstances fail it in this kind of crisis.

The pandemic is helping societies learn about themselves and their resilience in times of adversity.