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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 14th, 2023

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  • I primarily use Standard Notes. It’s a fantastic tool and I can use it anywhere, online or offline. It’s not great for collaboration, though, and it doesn’t have a canvas option. But I use it for scratch pads, for todo lists, for project tracking, for ideas, plans, plotting for my tabletop (Monster of the Week) game, software design and architecture, for drafting comments, etc…

    Standard Notes also has a ton of options for automated backups. I get a daily email with a backup of my notes; I can host my notes on my home server and the corporate one; I can also set up automated backups on any desktop.

    I don’t use it for saving links. I’m still using Raindrop.io for that, even though I’m self-hosting both Linkding and Linkwarden.

    For sharing and collaboration, I either publish to Listed with Standard Notes or use Hedgedoc, which is great for collaboration and does a great job presenting nodes, too.

    For canvas notes, I use GoodNotes on a tablet or the Onyx Boox’s default Notes app. I’d love a better FOSS, self-hosted option, especially for the Boox, but my experiences thus far have been negative (especially on the Boox).

    I’ve been trying out SilverBullet lately, since I want to try out cross-note querying and all that, but I’m too stuck in my habits and keep going back to Standard Notes. I think I’ll have better luck if I choose one app and go with it.

    I also have a collection of Mnemosyne notebooks that I use with fountain pens (mostly the Lamy 2000, but also quite commonly a Platinum 3776 or a Twsbi). Side note: the Lamy 2000 was my first fountain pen and after getting it I went deep into fountain pens. I explored a ton of different options, found a lot of nice pens across a number of brands… and yet how I still haven’t found something that I consistently like more. The Pilot VP is great but deceptive; a fancy clicky pen that only holds 30 minutes of ink (in a converter, at least) is decidedly inconvenient.

    I’ve also been checking out Obsidian on my work computer. So far I haven’t seen anything that makes me prefer it over my existing set of tools.


  • Hedgedoc is fantastic. If you’re okay with your notes app being web-only (without an app or even a PWA) and you don’t need canvas notes or multi-note queries, you should check it out.

    First, every note is Markdown, but it supports a ton of things natively. It has native Vim, Emacs, and Sublime (the default) editors and it’s built to be great for collaboration (if you want).

    It also has

    • syntax highlighting for a ton of languages
    • Mermaid.js support
    • LaTeX support
    • easy drag and drop image uploads
    • a solid mobile interface (for a webapp in your browser, at least)
    • built in revision history
    • support for other diagram tools, like graphviz, flowchart.js
    • a bunch of other little Markdown enhancements that make using it feel oddly intuitive

    And best of all, they have a Hedgehog for the icon! (I may be biased.)



  • Giphy has a documented API that you could use. There have been bulk downloaders, but I didn’t see any that had recent activity. However you still might be able to use one to model your own script after, like https://github.com/jcpsimmons/giphy-stacks

    There were downloaders for Gfycat - gallery-dl supported it at one point - but it’s down now. However you might be able to find collections that other people downloaded and are now hosting. You could also use the Internet Archive - they have tools and APIs documented

    There’s a Tenor mass downloader that uses the Tenor API and an API key that you provide.

    Imgur has GIFs is supported by gallery-dl, so that’s an option.

    Also, read over https://github.com/simon987/awesome-datahoarding - there may be something useful for you there.

    In terms of hosting, it would depend on my user base and if I want users to be able to upload GIFs, too. If it was just my close friends, then Immich would probably be fine, but if we had people I didn’t know directly using it, I’d want a more refined solution.

    There’s Gifable, which is pretty focused, but looks like it has a pretty small following. I haven’t used it myself to see how suitable it is. If you self-host it (or something else that uses S3), note that you can use MinIO or LocalStack for the S3 container rather than using AWS directly. I’m using MinIO as part of my stack now, though for a completely different app.

    MediaCMS is another option. Less focused on GIFs but more actively developed, and intended to be used for this sort of purpose.



  • Understandably frustrating, especially if you’re new to investing. But it’s expected that the market will have both ups and downs.

    The best advice I can give is to choose a good investment allocation and then stick to it. Contribute as much as you can each pay period or month and avoid looking at your balance as much as possible. You should figure out a rebalancing strategy, and you’ll probably need to look at your account to do that. Also, see The Best Order of Operations For Saving For Retirement.

    Right now you have unrealized losses, but you haven’t actually lost any money (i.e., you have no “realized losses”) until you withdraw it. As it’s a retirement account and you just started it, I assume you aren’t planning to retire in the next decade, much less the next three years.

    Is this your only retirement account? If so, why have you not been continuing to add money to it? If you wait to do that until the market recovers, you’ll lose out on all the gains between now and then.

    I know you haven’t said you’re considering selling, but I recommend you check out the “Maintain Discipline” section of the Bogleheads investment philosophy, just in case that’s on your mind. I also recommend that you read up on dollar cost averaging (if you’re investing in a retirement plan every pay period, you’re already doing this).

    You pointed out that the entire market has been impacted. I haven’t personally been paying attention in enough detail to confirm that (and my accounts that I just checked have gone up about 10% over the past three years, not down), but if so, that means you could change your asset allocation without selling low and buying high. I’m not saying you should change it, but if you take the time to learn about different investment strategies and decide a different one works for you, it’s nice to not have to sell your current investments while they’re underperforming relative to your new investments. (On the other hand, you can always change the allocation for your future investments without worrying about that.)




  • Do you memorize all of your passwords? If so, I take that to mean that you don’t use a password manager. Password managers - really, any app with 2FA - have this problem, too. But if you use a password manager and store your 2FA methods in it, then you only need to be able to regain access to your password manager.

    If you use a cross-platform password manager with Passkey support, like Bitwarden, you can use it on any of your devices. In the event that you lose all of your devices, if you don’t have an Emergency Contact set up, you will need your password and one of the following to gain access to your account:

    • Access to your 2FA method
    • Access to your Recovery Code
    • If you’re in an enterprise using Duo 2FA, access to a Duo bypass code (contact your Duo admin to request this)

    If you use security keys for 2FA, then you should have at least two - one that you keep with you and a backup that you keep in a safe place, like at home in a lockbox.

    If you use a TOTP app to log in, or if you use security keys and want another backup, then making sure you’ll have access to the Recovery Code should be your priority. You can write it down and keep it in a few different places - at home, in your car, in your locker at work, etc… You can share it with someone you trust in person or over an encrypted channel (like Signal). You can store it on a flash drive, encrypted by a second password (which can be much easier than your primary password) or even unencrypted, if you generally keep the drive somewhere safe, disconnected from your computer. As long as you remember your password and can access your recovery code, you’ll also be able to regain access to your account, including all of your passkeys.

    Emergency Access requires someone else to have access to their Bitwarden account, but assuming you don’t both lose access, it’s a pretty solid solution. When they request access, Bitwarden will send you an email allowing you to accept or reject their request. If you accept or don’t respond within the allotted “Wait Time” (which you configure: 1 day minimum, 90 days maximum) then they’ll be granted access. You also get a choice (when setting this up) to let them takeover the account (resetting your master password) or to just get read-only access.

    Maybe you don’t like Bitwarden and want to use some other app, like 1Password, Dashlane, Roboforms, etc… Whatever your choice, familiarize yourself with how to restore access to your account in an emergency. Then you only need to worry about that and not about how to get access to your passkeys that are on your Windows laptop or only synced to your Apple devices.


  • But that is exactly what he recommends, using a password manager - with one time email authentication for the first login as an extra step, right?

    Nope.

    Using a cross-platform password manager with synced passkeys is different and much more secure than using a password manager with email TOTPs or sign-in links with emails that aren’t end-to-end encrypted.

    And password manager adoption is much higher than PGP keyserver adoption, and if you can’t discover someone’s public key you can’t use it to encrypt a message to them, so sending end-to-end encrypted emails with TOTPs/sign-on links isn’t a practical option.

    According to Statista, 34% of Americans used password managers in 2023 (a huge increase from 21% in 2022), so it’s not even like the best case scenario is rare.


  • The author mentions it: the QR code approach for cross device sign in. I don’t think it’s cumbersome, i think it’s actually a great and foolproof way to sign in. I have yet to find a website which implements it though.

    The site doesn’t need to implement this; the browser handles that part.

    I confirmed this works and logged into Github using Google Chrome on my work computer using a passkey stored in Bitwarden earlier today. I had to enable Bluetooth for Chrome, since I’d had it disabled, but then everything else was seamless.







  • Expecting everything for free with no ads is just greedy.

    In this case you’re not paying to not have ads. You’ll still get ads; they just won’t be personalized.

    Personalized ads are more valuable to advertisers, so it still makes sense for them to charge a bit for it, but it’s not something I’ve seen before.

    I’m guessing they charge a decent amount more than the difference, though - and probably even more than they make from personalized ads per person. On that note, I really wish ad free subscriptions were closer to the revenue providers get from serving ads - if they were, I’d be more willing to pay for them than just running an adblocker all the time. YouTube Premium, for example, costs 14 USD monthly, but annual ad revenue per non premium user was 1.21 USD.



  • I made a typo in my original question: I was afraid of taking the services offline, not online.

    Gotcha, that makes more sense.

    If you try to run the reverse proxy on the same server and port that an existing service is using (e.g., port 80), then you’ll run into issues. You could also run into conflicts with the ports the services themselves use. Likewise if you use the same outbound port from your router. But IME those issues will mostly stop the new services from starting - you’d have to stop the services or restart your machine for the new service to have a chance to grab the ports while they were unused. Otherwise I can’t think of any issues.