I’ve been using email aliases for a few years now, but all spam I get is addressed to my main email (which admittedly is readily available on my website). Seems like no one has sold my email address yet

Seems to still be available on F-Droid, but the last update was in 2017. I’ve installed it, but ended up not logging in since it’s targeting an SDK version so old that Android is giving me a bunch of warnings (and it doesn’t even scale to my entire screen, there’s a big black space at the bottom)

I’ve had this “problem” before, and I did not want to use the full Messenger app for privacy reasons as well. I had installed Messenger Lite, but it was discontinued a few weeks ago. I now have Facebook Lite, which also has Messenger, and you get notifications as well. It’s not perfect, but don’t give it too many permissions and you should be mostly fine. Using it in the browser is absolutely terrible, and you would not get push notifications.

That’s great to hear! There are still some apps on my phone that aren’t taking advantage of it then – or perhaps it has something to do with my custom ROM.

I’m unsure if this is still the case in the latest Android versions, but the terrible camera APIs in 3rd party apps/social media apps is still a big reason why my non-techy friends switched to an iPhone. Even if the quality of pictures using the stock camera app is good, if the photos that come out while using Instagram or Snapchat or whatever kids are using these days are low-quality, they’ll consider moving to an iPhone. Again, I’m unsure if the APIs already exist or if it’s just app developers that are not using them. Either way, there needs to be a push in this direction.

I’m in the process of migrating my servers to NixOS. It takes a lot of time and the learning curve is steep, but I have one config shared for all the servers and PCs. I have setup the servers to automatically pull the latest configuration everyday and even restart if there’s a kernel update.

This means I just need to update my laptop and push the changes to the repository, and all the servers will also update.

I haven’t had this setup long enough to know if things will break unexpectedly with updates tho. NixOS has a great feature where you can rollback to a previous configuration (generation) with a single command. You can always keep using containers to isolate updates, if you want (Nix allows you to declare those in the config as well).

As an example, you can take a look at my config.

EDIT: Systemd timers have an option to randomize the time a service runs, I use it all the time. The option for Nix’s config pulling is using systemd timers, so you can use that.

I’ve been using Restic for a while, and it’s backing up to a Hetzner storage box (1TB).

Restic supports encryption, compression, deduplication, and can forget old backups in a spread out timeline (configurable; e.g. save one yearly, three monthly and 7 daily).

On top of this I also use healthchecks.io to make sure all backups are working.