the bad sleep

  • Escape from G**gle Photos part 2: User 2

    After almost a full year of happily storing and serving my photos on a little box under my desk at home, something unplanned happened: my partner needed some extra storage for their photos, too. So I had to add my second user. Multi-user support was not a feature that I cared for previously, but I…

  • The 512KB Club part 2: Going below 100KB

    WordPress released the first beta for 6.1, including the all-new default theme, Twenty Twenty Three, and on a whim I decided to try it out and see if I can squeeze a few extra bytes after my first attempts at optimization. I’m happy to report that this site is now around 93 KB uncompressed and…

  • (Finding about and) Joining the 512KB Club

    While reading a blog post linked at the orange site, I noticed and followed a funny little banner, and that’s how I got to https://512kb.club/ – a list of “performance-focused” websites under the 512KB threshold (before compression). After reviewing their FAQ, I ran to GTMetrix to scan my website – even if I don’t subscribe…

  • Escape from G**gle Photos – selfhosting

    If you’re here, you already know why we’re doing this – they capped the “unlimited for free” offer, they can suspend your account for any reason at any time, and probably worst of all, your photos are their product. Luckily, great open source/free software applications exist today that can almost bring that sleek and very…

  • Limit your sites to VPN and local clients only

    The problem: You have a bunch of sites running behind an nginx proxy, and you want to limit access to some of the more critical ones to your VPN clients only as a second security layer. You also have an ISP that will sometimes change your public IP address, so you are using the services…

  • Easy, Cheap Digital Life Redundancy

    This is a belated response to the “I’ve locked myself out of my digital life” post that was circulating earlier this month. Its author describes a hypothetical situation in which a single unexpected disaster (such as a lightning strike) could cause disruptive damage to your digital – and in turn, to your “analogue” – footprint.…