I mean, the hosting company would be the likely target then and they’d probably lock your account and switch off the server. Depending on your nationality and that of the hoster, at least.

In contrast to office rotting?

When I was a student, I did an internship in a chemistry lab. On one of the days, someone brought in some samples of skunk secretion for an analysis.

Everyone was like Not again i dont want that, let the intern do this!

I thought how bad could it be?. Turns out really bad. It days to stop that smell. And I mostly handled the sealed phials and only opened a single one for a gas chromatography without spilling something…

It gets better if you backup and then get the prompt again after the next feature update of windows - because you get asked again and if you click on it will do a second backup which means that now all files are twice in your OneDrive, then three times, then four times, then… a reminder to upgrade OneDrive further as your storage is full.

I had to clean up this less more than once now for people and even witnessed it live after doing the upgrade for them sigh

Windows doesn’t have sudo (not yet, at least) and privileges work a bit different as even as an administrator, you may not have full rights.

To overcome that obstacle, you’d need to run a shell as an administrator (hold CTRL+Shift, then use the start menu entry or right-click it and select run as administrator).

Next obstacle: We have a separate drive for each partition, but no root folder.

If we assume we’re running on a laptop or PC with a single drive and a single partition*, then it’s just

In cmd.exe:

del /F /S C:\

In Powershell:

Remove-Item -Recurse -Force -Path C:\

When you want to delete all (mounted) partitions/drives, you need to iterate over them. (Note that’s from the top of my head, didn’t check the script if it works).

In cmd.exe:

REM Not gonna do that, I'm no masochist

In Powershell:

Get-PSDrive -PSProvider FileSystem | Foreach-Object {
    Remove-Item -Recurse -Force -Path "$($_.Name):\"
}

Done. Mounting additional partitions before that is left as an exercise for the reader.

*note that even a standard installation of windows creates 3 partitions. One for the bootloader, one for the recovery system and then the system drive. Only the latter is mounted and will be deleted by this. The other two will still be intact.

Relevant xkcd

My newest vps runs with Caddy. Works like a charm. The downside was, that I didn’t think of the automatic certificate deployment when I set everything up and it wouldn’t come up a first when I only wanted to connect locally to it, as it tried to get a certificate but the challenge failed because I hadn’t the firewall open yet. But besides that it was very smooth so far.

Amazon Deep Glacier is a lot cheaper for storage (but expensive for retrieval).

I use Archive Storage in Oracle Cloud S3 for my dr backups which is their equivalent of AWS deep glacier archive. It’s quite cheap, no restore fees, inbound traffic is free and outbound traffic is only paid, when you’re using more than 10TB per month. (Also first 10 GB of S3 storage is free)

Remember <marquee>? And maybe add some dancing hamsters?

Remember that JS file that rendered a text besides your mouse pointer and when you moved your mouse, the text would follow it letter by letter?

It’s not the most detailed thing, but I just use a free account on cron-job.org to send a head request every two minutes to a few services that are reachable from the internet (either just their homepage or some ping endpoint in the API) and then used the status page functionality to have a simple second status page on a third party server.

You can do a bit more on their paid tier, but so far I didn’t need that.

On the other hand, you could try if a free tier/cheap small vps on one of the many cloud providers is sufficient for an uptime Kuma installation. Just don’t use the same cloud provider as all other of your services run in.

No, it’s not „always up“.

There are three main ways how Google, Bing,… can track you:

1. When you’re doing a search while being logged in, it’s probably you
2. If you’re not logged in, they can set a cookie to recognize you on your next visit (although they may not be able to link this to you, your email address,… but that’s not needed). They may mix your searches with those of the other users of your PC, when those are using the same PC, browser and account (e.g. if you have a family PC with a single windows/Linux account that everyone uses)
3. Even if you’re not logged in and don’t accept / delete your cookies, they still see your IP. Depending on your ISP you might have the same Ip for a long time or you might have it rotated regularly. Now they could only track the searches of your household (assuming everyone isn’t logging in and deleting cookies immediately)

With Searxng, they can only do the last variant. But assuming you use a “real” server in the internet (and not one at home), it will likely have the same IP for its lifetime. And if you’re using it alone, that’s the only thing they need to identify you and track your searches. The more other people use your instance, the less useful this kind of tracking gets. Too much noise to identify a single person.

Having your own instance can be bad for privacy, as all your searches come from your IP (hosted at home) or the same IP (hosted on a server). They might not be traced to you personally, but you might still get personalized results or your search may still be tracked, depending on how they track you.

That’s circumvented when using it with some or better many other people. But then, you need to trust the admin of that instance.

Self-hosted is easy if you know a bit about servers. You need a domain pointing to a server. If it’s the only thing hosted on that server and you have set up docker on it, you can just follow their instructions here to get it running in less than 5 minutes (assuming you run the default config and don’t customize all of the settings for a while): https://github.com/searxng/searxng-docker?tab=readme-ov-file#how-to-use-it

Patchday is once a month. No need to reboot every day. Also, what “ridiculous boot time”? What hardware do you have?

I was wondering the same, but I didn’t find any information on how it builds the search index. I guess it takes quite a while until it’s usable. Also, it might be very dependent on the speed if the internet connection and also the available storage.

Ransomware in Windows:
You need to allow macros to read this job application

Ransomware in Linux:
You need to run chmod +x application.ods.sh to read this job application

And if they don’t update it soon, you might want to reconsider your choice of instance.

The advisory went up about 4h ago. About 3h ago, my instance admin sent out an announcement that the patch had been applied. That was before I even heard about the issue.

Nice work :)

I use Voice audiobook player, that can do that, too. But when I switch devices, … it’s easier to pick up where I left, if it’s at least separated by chapters (or as some MP3 CDs do every 3-5 minutes a new track).

Also I do sometimes buy mp3 audiobooks for a blind friend who prefers to listen to them on a CD player (buttons can be felt and its easier to use than a touch screen). But a single, several hours long mp3 is bad in this scenario. And as i didnt find a tool to split them easily, Audible exclusives were out of the question…

Thanks, I’ll try it

Have you found a way to split those mp3s into several files by chapter etc.? All converters that I have tried so far just yield a single, several hours long mp3…