Categories
geek hosting internet music mystuff software tools

run Faircamp on Windows with Docker

Faircamp is like a DIY Bandcamp for artists wanting to put their music online, independently. With Faircamp you can generate a static website, and host it anywhere. No need for a SQL database or PHP on the server. Just simple HTML files.

Unfortunately, Faircamp only has installation files for a few Linux operating systems, and Mac at the moment. If you are on Windows or a non-supported Linux distribution, things get pretty technical fast if you want to try to run it yourself.

To fix that, I thought I’d get the app running inside a Docker container, making it available for Windows, Mac and any other Linux distribution in a single move.

The easiest route is to install Docker Desktop, which runs on pretty much all operating systems, and follow the guide in my faircamp-docker project to get set up.

With a simple batch script on Windows, you’ll be creating your Faircamp site in no time. On Mac, you can do the same with the Docker CLI on the command line. You can spy in the Windows batch script for more details.

I hope this helps people easily get their music out there, without having to waste time messing with the tech. I like music, so I hope to see more Faircamp sites out there.

Feel free to drop your Faircamp site links in the comments. I’d love to check them out.

Categories
blog internet

best posts of 2023 oslt

Everybody is doing those recaps, right? But maybe I can put a bit of a twist on it. I checked my Matomo stats and found these interesting bits.

Last year, a lot of people were having issues with their Visual Studio fonts apparently, as this post tops the chart with 10% page views. The next posts only make it around 5%, so that’s a lot. That and some C# unit test issues.

PowerShell is a thing. I like it, I use it, and I occasionally blog a thing about it, and it shows to be popular. I get quite some hits on these PowerShell articles. These posts together made up 17% of my traffic for 2023. Neat.

Tech posts are clearly popular compared to other topics I blog about (like music). One category that still gets quite some hits, is the “How do I remove this damn thing from my computer” category. It’s sad so many people are looking to remove bloatware, but hey, at least it gives me something to write about.

Another interesting bit is this really old post from 2009 which stays popular year after year. It’s a small tool to generate a bookmarklet to open any URL in a popup window. It’s nice to see simple things like this keep being useful to people.

Categories
geek opensource software tips tools

my default apps for 2023

A wooden wall, full of work tools like hammers, saws, wrenches etc.

I saw these default app posts go around on the fedi, so I thought I’d chip in and list what I typically use for various tasks. A lot of people contributing are on Macs, so I’ll weigh in with my Windows and Android oriented list, with a lot of Open Source software. I also added some categories that apply to me (music related, for example), that I didn’t see in other lists. I guess I’m not using that much “default” apps after all.😁

I like going through these lists from other people to see if there’s anything cool in there I haven’t heard of, so I hope you also find a gem in here.

📨 Mail Service: Gmail mostly, and some other mailboxes, forwarded to the Gmail inbox
📮 Mail Client: Spark on desktop & mobile
📝 Notes: text files, synced with NextCloud to my devices
✅ To-Do: I keep them in my calendar or inbox, or a text file
📆 Calendar: Google Calendar
🙍 Contacts: Google Contacts, because Android
🗞️ RSS Client: None. I do use IFTTT to send digest emails for some RSS feeds
⌨️ Launcher: Nova Launcher
☁️ Cloud storage: some stuff on Google Drive, most on NextCloud
🌐 Web Browser: Firefox (developer edition)
💬 Chat: Telegram, Signal
🔖 Bookmarks: a text file
📚 Reading: FBReader and Pocket
📜 Text editor: Vim
📈 Spreadsheets: Google Spreadsheets mainly, or LibreOffice Calc
💰 Budgeting and Personal Finance: Google Sheets
🎵 Music service: Bandcamp
📻 Music player: Foobar2000 and Shuttle
🎮 Gaming: Steam
🎤 Podcasts: Pocket Casts
🔐 Password Management: KeepassXC & Keepass2Android
🤦 Social Media: Mastodon with the web or Tusky app
🌤️ Weather: that thing that came with my phone.
🔎 Search: DuckDuckGo
🧮 Code Editor: Visual Studio, VS Code, Vim
🖥️ Screenshots: Greenshot
🎥 Video player: VLC
🎞️ Video editing: Shotcut
🎼 DAW: Jeskolla Buzz and Bespoke Synth
🔈 Audio editing: Audacity
🖼️ Image viewer: Irfanview
📦 File compression: 7zip
🖥️ Terminal: Windows Terminal
📝 Blog: WordPress, self-hosted
🎨 Photo editing: Depending on the required task, digiKam, Paint.NET or Irfanview
🤖Automation: IFTTT, Autohotkey and Tasker on Android
📕 PDF reader: SumatraPDF
🎁 Windows package manager: Chocolatey
🌪️Torrents: QBittorrent
🔍OS search tool: Everything
💿 Backup: Backblaze (cloud) and Duplicati (local)

Categories
geek internet opensource software tips tools

nextcloud as a dropbox replacement

A picture of a cloud, with rays of sunlight beaming from behind it. A metaphor for a better way to store your files in the cloud.

Getting tired of the constant nagging to upgrade because your free 2 GB storage is almost half full? Do you want to use more devices than just 3 to synchronize your Dropbox files to? Do you dislike the fact that Dropbox is experimenting with AI and might or might not be scanning your files to train their AI model? Do you have some spare PHP web hosting space?

Well, you’re in luck. You might as well install Nextcloud on that PHP web host and get all the Dropbox features, without the restrictions.

Out of the box you get:

  • Access to your files using a browser, of course.
  • File synchronization to unlimited devices, with a desktop client for Mac & Windows.
  • An app to access your files on iOS and Android.
  • Share files and folders using links.
  • Restore recently deleted files.
  • All the storage you can provide is yours to use. 100 GB left on your web host? Why not dump some more files into that Nextcloud instance? You can even use any spare cloud space you have. Amazon, Google, Azure, you name it.
  • Server-side file encryption built in.

So basically everything Dropbox has to offer, but on your own server.
You have a few options on how you can host your Nextcloud instance:

  • Run it on your own server (shared hosting, spare VM somewhere, whatever).
  • Run it on a box in your network which you can access from the internet. Your NAS might do, a Raspberry Pi, an old laptop. Plenty of options.
  • Run it at a 3rd party hoster. That’s not going to be free, of course, so unless you really want to move away from Dropbox, you might also upgrade to their paid plan. Then again, you’re not escaping the AI stuff in that case.

You don’t have to worry too much about the minimum requirements if you’re going to be the only user. I’m running it on less than the recommended 512 MB memory, and it works fine.

What will it cost you?

  • Some spare time to set things up, and maintain the instance. You’ll have to install updates frequently (for your own safety), but that can be done through the web interface, or by manually copying files from a zip you get from the site. It’s pretty straightforward, and it’s gone smooth every time so far.
  • Whatever costs you have to run your own machine or hosting. Might be zero, might be more. Up to you.

Give it a try on a spare machine, or some spare hosting space. See if you like it, copy your files into it and start syncing. You can always go back to Dropbox if you don’t like it. Chances are you won’t though, because it works quite well out of the box, and it has a bunch of extras I’m not even mentioning here (Apps!). Ok, so I did just mention it.

Categories
geek software tips tools

the best typical android launcher

I’ve switched between a number of Android launchers in the past. I have used Zeam, SmartLauncher 2 and the stock OnePlus launcher for a long time. The OnePlus launcher was excellent. It was close to stock Android, but did have some features that made it really handy. Like a widget dock as the panel to the left of the home screen. I put my calendar there, and weather info, and used it daily.

Then they moved that somewhere else, and you had to swipe down or something like that, really annoying. At that point, I was in the market for another launcher again, so I tried a ton of them.

I was looking for a typical launcher, you know, the one where you have several screens you can swipe between, and you can put icons, widgets and folders on it. There are a lot of these, with a lot of different features, but there’s one that stood out for me in the end.

Nova Launcher.

You can use the Nova Launcher app for free. It’s good and usable as it is, but if you want to unlock its full potential, you also need the companion Nova Prime app. I got it pretty quickly after trying out the main app.

  • No ads on any version, no restricted features on Nova Prime.
  • One time purchase, no subscriptions.
  • You can customize everything about the UI. Ever-y-thing. It’s insane. You can spend hours going through the settings and configure icon animations and the angle you want for the rounding of your icons and other details like that. I noticed settings there of things I didn’t even notice were there before.
  • Icon themes. You can even use different icon themes for different parts of the UI.
  • You can set up gestures to open apps with swipes etc.
  • Unread notification badges on app icons if that’s your thing.
  • You can back up and restore your settings, so you can set up a new phone super quick, or try completely different configs and revert your changes if it turns out you screwed things up.
  • Scrolling wallpapers. I like those.
  • And so much more.

The cool part about using Nova is that when I get a new phone, no matter what brand, I just have to install Nova again to feel right at home on my new device.