I tried it a couple years ago. Came to the conclusion that it wasn’t profitable for me at that time, in that location.

I think it depends on your industry.

I actually just got a new job. Went through the usual, job boards, linkedin, friends and family. Nothing worked for 3 months. Longest Ive ever been out of work.

what actually got me a job was a cold email I sent to a local company, explaining that I was new in the area and looking for work.

I picked that company to “cold call” simply because I had bought something of theirs in the past and remembered the name when I was learning the local maps.

Like others have said, more RAM would help. 4GB is the absolute bare minimum for a usable desktop.

A scan for any malware might not be a bad idea, especially if you’re running Windows. I would also examine whether you actually need any browser extensions you have installed. I’d also check and disable anything running in the background that you don’t actually need.

Wiping the drive and reinstalling Windows may also help, so would dumping Windows for a lighter weight Linux distro. Linux tends to be more RAM friendly.

You might also want to check how much free space you have on your drive. SSDs tend to get slower the more full they get. Ideally you want to keep under 70% full.

If your laptop has a HDD, replace it with an SSD. That upgrade would give you the single greatest performance increase, however SSDs have been standard for some time.

I don’t know of any sftp programs specifically, but any file sync program should work.

It would be massive overkill for this one task, but I personally use my Nextcloud server to move files on and off my iPhone to my services as needed. I have the Jellyfin media directory, Calibre upload, and Paperless upload directories mounted in Nextcloud as external directories (as SFTP mounts, I think) and then access them from my phone from the Nextcloud app.

If I remember correctly, the instance owner vanished but left the instance running.

Secondary admins kept the place running until something happened to the instance itself. Something with the database that the admin didn’t have access to recover from.

I believe it was that secondary admin that spun up the new instance.

Sorry that’s vague but about to get ready for work.

Are you using some Apple or MS author account?

Google and Github SSO were the only options when I originally setup tailscale. There are a few more options now including what looks like every self-hosted OIDC provider I’ve ever heard of, and a few I hadn’t.

How did you config tail scale though?

There are a couple options depending on how you are using it. Most of the time I just use the tailscale command to configure each node.

Most systems were just sudo tailscale up --ssh to get it up and running, although I have one system setup as a subnet router to give me outside-the-house access to systems that I can’t put tailscale on. That was a little more involved but it was still pretty straightforward and well documented. Their documentation is actually very well written and is worth the read.

The way Tailscale works, you don’t need to worry to much about your local IP address. You can just use the Tailscale IP address and it will connect as if you were local using the fastest route. That’s the beauty of a mesh VPN. Each device knows the fastest route to each other.

Without more information I can’t really tell what issue you are actually having, but if your system has internet, you have a local IP and if the system is showing as up on your tailscale dashboard than it will have a tailscale IP. Not being able to connect using one or the other would be a configuration issue. Whatever service you are having trouble with is probably only listening to one of the interfaces but not the other.

I’m assuming you are running a linux or unix box, but try running the command ip addr. Assuming you have the package installed, it will tell you all of your IP addresses for the system you run the command on. The list may be quite long if you have a lot of docker containers running. The command tailscale ip will do the same but limited to your tailscale IP addresses.

Enforcement against Linux distributions, however, is likely to be problematic. Distros like Arch, Ubuntu, Debian, and Gentoo have no centralized account infrastructure, with users downloading ISOs from mirrors worldwide, and can modify source code freely. These small distros lack legal teams or resources to implement the required API, so a more realistic outcome for non-compliant distros is a disclaimer that the software is not intended for use in California.

I had forgotten how much I miss that style of website. Well written too.

Well, since I’m not doing that, that would prevent me from having to install the apps that every damned company seems to insist I install rather than having a website. Kinda makes me wish for this nonsense to come to the US.

Well, yes I looked at tailscale too, but that would prevent me from using my normal commercial VPN

You can split your devices traffic, Tailscale traffic through Tailscale, everything else through your masking VPN.

I’m trying to get the best of 2 worlds: using the VPN to hide my IP from services that i visit and my ISP, and a secure connection to my home server.

For that, what I would do is put the masking VPN (like PIA or whatever) on your router (not all routers can do this) and then have Tailscale on the devices or individual services. In theory, everything would still be able to talk to each other (even if your mobile device is not behind the router), but everything that is behind the router would enter and exit their traffic wherever you have the masking VPN set to. Downside of doing this is that EVERYTHING that is behind that router is also behind that VPN which can cause problems with some services, like banking and streaming.

It would also mean that the only way you could host a public service is to have an external VPS acting as a reverse proxy. Cloudflare might also have something that could work around this setup, but I’m not familiar with their offerings.

This setup also doesn’t mask your traffic (origin and destination) from your mobile provider (just your home ISP), but that is a harder nut to crack as they can see, real time, where you are physically, and depending on your device, may have deeper device access anyways. I’m thinking prepaid phones and phones bought from the carrier (at least here in the US) or if your carrier has “asked” you to install an app to manage your account. My assumption is that my mobile provider can see anything I do while I have my phone or tablet with me, and just work around that.

You might want to ask in !privacy@lemmy.ml and !privacy@lemmy.world, as this is more up their alley.

So does this mean that the open secret that aliens (from space) exist and have probably been to earth is no longer solely the domain of what was once charitably called the tinfoil hat society? Or does everyone still laugh at them? Asking for a friend…

I can touch type most keys, though probably not with proper form. I have to look at some of the less common keys to find them with my fingers.

My schools did have formal typing classes but I wasn’t exactly a star student. I think my typing speed at it’s fastest was around 60 wpm, though I more commonly float around 40 wpm

Hosting for the public, it’s honestly going to depend on how many users you are going to have. Pretty much anything that is light on bandwidth should be doable. Websites, blogs, wikis. XMPP chat servers might work. Matrix might work as well. Adding to your seeding idea, you might seed torrents for any Linux distros you happen to like or build torrent seeds for projects with larger download sizes. I seem to recall a project that would enable you to seed peertube channels as well, though I can’t find the project right now.

If it’s just you and maybe a few family and friends,say over a mesh VPN, what ever you want, though video streaming may be a bit much for that bandwidth. Any other type of personal media should be very doable. Books, music, that sort of thing.

Lack of trust, for the most part. I’ve been screwed over a few too many times for me to rely entirely on someone else. Whether it’s Audible claiming I never bought an audiobook I knew damned good and well I did buy or seeing someone else getting their life made difficult by Google, Apple or Microsoft, or “friends” and family making life difficult, I’ve learned the hard way over the years I can’t rely fully on anything not under my control.

What would you advise i do?

If you can afford to and if what you are looking for is even available (for non-DRM’d download) through legal channels, I advise purchasing the content legally. (Yes, I know what community I’m commenting in… :D ) Doing so supports the artists that make the content.

Otherwise, I would check and see if what you are looking for is on Youtube or in Anna’s Archive. You can download things from Youtube using either yt-dlp (give it a Youtube link) or spotdl (give it a Spotify link and it will download the song, album or playlist from Youtube and tag the songs using Spotify or Musicbrainz metadata). The current addresses to Anna’s Archive can be found on their Wikipedia page.

I also like Usenet, currently, for a lot of the more esoteric, hard to find elsewhere things (like TV shows that don’t have DVD releases and aren’t on Youtube). Just a heads up if you go this route, the Usenet provider “Eternal September”, while free, does not provide access to the groups where binaries (things like video, music, epubs, and pdfs) are posted. They only provide access to the discussion side of Usenet, which has been largely dead for the last 10-15 years. Generally, Usenet access is fairly cheap, as are the nzb trackers needed to download binaries from Usenet.

Torrents don’t require a VPN, however, torrenting does broadcast your IP address for all the world to see if they decide to look. A VPN is used to obfuscate your IP address to minimize the odds of trouble with your ISP, the rightholders (who might sue) or depending on where your are, law enforcement. Just don’t ever use the “free” VPNs that are out there. They tend to be honeypots or malware vectors.

People not seeding things has made bittorrent pretty much useless for anything not currently popular. The only thing I use bittorrent for nowadays is speeding up the download of larger downloads, like Linux install disks. Works well for that. But if there’s not at least 15 seeders for the file your looking for, you may never actually be able to finish downloading the thing.

what did you do when starting out?

I’m getting to be an old fart. I was using Napster (early predecessor to bittorrent, now long dead), IRC and random ftp and gopher sites on a dialup modem in the late 90’s and into the mid 2000’s. Dial-up BBS’s were fading out into obscurity, and I hadn’t really heard of Usenet (even though that was during it’s hayday) and Bittorrent hadn’t been invented yet.

There’s not really an algorithm. Closest is sorting by Scaled or Top. The “algorithm” really just boils down to following communities you like and blocking communities and users you don’t like.

If you go into settings you can unset the “Show Read Posts” setting which will do what it says on the tin.

I would take a look at TeamSpeak or Matrix.

Of the two Matrix is probably the closest to Discord.

Possibly. I don’t remember that being an option when I was setting things up last time.

From what I’m reading it’s sounding like it’s just acting as a slightly simplified DNS server/reverse proxy for individual services on the tailnet. Sounds Interesting. I’m not sure it’s something I’d want to use on the backend (what happens if Tailscale goes down? Does that DNS go down too?), but for family members I’ve set up on the tailnet, it sounds like an interesting option.

Much as I like Tailscale, it seems like using this may introduce a few too many failure points that rely on a single provider. Especially one that isn’t charging me anything for what they provide.

In my case, most things that I didn’t explicitly make public are running on Tailscale using their own Tailscale containers.

Doing it this way each one gets their own address and I don’t have to worry about port numbers. I can just type http://cars/ (Yes, I know. Not secure. Not worried about it) and get to my LubeLogger instance. But it also means I have 20ish copies of just the Tailscale container running.

On top of that, many services, like Nextcloud, are broken up into multiple containers. I think Nextcloud-aio alone has something like 5 or 6 containers it spins up, in addition to the master container. Tends to inflate the container numbers.