Create an automation that runs at a specific time, or any other trigger such as opening/closing an app, and make it run “Synchronize for a while.”
You can pick how long it runs.
sync your photos for easy DIY backup in one of a couple no-nonsense formats
Well, almost. It copies your photos to another directory and optionally deletes them from Photos.app after a specified time. So I either have to double the storage used by photos (~100GB right now) or not be able to use Photos.app for old photos. Would love to use it but feel a bit stuck.
Holy- This is excellent. Well, miles better than Mobious Sync on first blush, but the bar isn’t super high :p The streaming files on demand is really nice.
Swapped to it on my phone, but keeping Mobious Sync on my iPad for a bit (I don’t know if it will scale to the iPad’s screen). Seems to be working well.
Taking a break from my own Rails app - a small hardware reservation platform for a community - to poke around some of the Lobste.rs issues. Been annoyingly enjoying Ruby on Rails after writing off it and similar frameworks due to my bad experience with Django. Helping run a VRChat based club event today as well, mostly managing two video streams. Probably tweaking some Grafana dashboards but otherwise trying to take it easy.
I sometimes go on random dev tangents so who knows what else I’ll end up doing.
This is true, and was pointed out to me shortly after publishing :D Forgejo doesn’t provide a robots.txt by default, so I’d have to setup an nginx config snippet to do it for me - which is now on my todo list, maybe providing a default to Forgejo.
Unfortunately some of the AI bros have already figured out the telemarketer trick of creating a new file, or new parameter for robots.txt, that you must add to opt-out of their specific scraper, creating an arms race you can’t win. It’s a nice example of why the opt-out model doesn’t work unless every actor is a saint. Only opt-in is scalable.
So far I’ve been enjoying Matrix, the protocol. Although I have yet to find a client, especially on mobile, that I particularly like - Element X seems very close but it’s still missing the ability to read previous chats and the chat list doesn’t seem to be ordered chronologically which is… odd. On desktop I’m opting for the Cinny webapp since Element Web is just too cluttered. None of the apps I’ve tried have satisfactory session verification consistency, but that could also be in part from my use of the Conduit server rather than their Synapse or Dendrite implementations.
I wish it had more adoption but it’s still in a state where I actually don’t really want to push people to use it, especially when it’s “competing” is Discord and their UX (sidenote: I wish Discord didn’t cripple third party clients so we could get a real bridge to Matrix. imo the “killer feature” of Matrix is the bridging functionality).
Hopefully finishing up one of the blog posts I’m writing, but more likely trying to avoid the heat in this UK heatwave. Probably do some more playing around with Nix flakes too.
Also, it’s really easy to setup on NixOS: services.smokeping. It’s not too heavy and it can be a lifesaver when things break, so there’s little reason not to run it on servers.
Quick question, what’s the diff between smokeping and uptime kuma? What do you use them for? I have uptime kuma just for monitoring a few sites, I don’t need anything fancy, but I also brought it to work so we can also use the dashboard export thingy. What extras does smokeping have in comparison?
Smokeping is for Network latency. So I think of uptime kuma is more.of a heartbeat to check if the site is either up or down and notifies you if they are down. And smokeping does analysis of packets sent. But very much could be wrong. I stood up both and they are very similar except for UI
The main downside(s) I’ve found with Funnels is a lack of custom domain names (you’re stuck with your Tailscale Net name) and generally slower speeds when running through a relay. I ended up spinning my own using DNS splitting and a free tier VPS.
I misspoke, apologies. This list is more of a “homelab” list, especially with cloud flare tunnels and tail scale. I’m not using headscale. I’m using the non self hosted tailscale
The split DNS runs *.gmem.ca queries to the CoreDNS instance running. The CoreDNS server returns A records for git.gmem.ca that point to the internal Tailscale IP of the server, and Tailscale handles the handshake and direct routing!
It’s slightly magical, and while I could point it to the internal 192 IP directly this is nicer.
and Tailscale handles the handshake and direct routing!
Could you tell me more about that part? Like, does Tailscale transparently route all traffic through the local network when it somehow detects the devices are connected to the same WiFi? Does that work when you simply use MagicDNS instead of your own CoreDNS instance?
Like, does Tailscale transparently route all traffic through the local network when it somehow detects the devices are connected to the same WiFi? Does that work when you simply use MagicDNS instead of your own CoreDNS instance?
I am really let down every time I see people giving in to the NSA’s pet-project for circumventing web traffic encryption that is Cloudflare. I hope I’m not the only one extremely alarmed by Cloudflare’s origins and obvious implications if you have seen the Snowden leaks.
A very simple VPS on Hetzner with 40GB disk space and 20TB traffic (easily enough for the author’s case) costs like 4,51€/month. It also includes DDoS-protection. If you do not need custom server software, 10GB web hosting cost 2,09€/month.
Yeah the “move to CloudFlare because it’s free!!!!” caused me to eyeroll really hard, and then I recognized that the problem is just going to grow. Can we stop supporting CloudFlare? Please?!?
I guess the first thing is realizing that you probably -don’t- need that in the first place. But if you do - personally, I’m using Cloudfront for some of my things that /do/ require a bit more caching and distribution, and I fit neatly into the free tier for that. I think when CDNs do become a concern, a paid one is probably worth it.
I don’t know if Vercel is a Cloudflare CDN reseller or if they’re an AWS CDN reseller, but their free tier offers 100GB of bandwidth a month. I switched from a VPS to Vercel when UNIX sysadmin stopped being a fun hobby for me.
The first link in the lobsters search results makes clearest accusations, especially the last two sections of the page. These are clearly stated, and link to sources. They have the same rhyme as other accusations. See earlier history on wikipedia: Room 641A, PRISM, e.g.
ssl removed here sketch
This is a weird place to make that case. The OP is just hosting a public static website with a few technical articles. Unless you’re suggesting that the NSA is man-in-the-middling this encrypted traffic to some nefarious purpose, I don’t see the concern.
It’s pretty easy with an actual VPS (which is not much more expensive). Push to the VPS, have a post-receive hook there which forwards to your actual git host and does a deploy.
I’m out on vacation! Which probably means a bit of reading and maybe a touch of studying for the Kubernetes certifications I have lined up from work. Might end up designing a side project as well but I’ll be constrained to my iPad to not much actual work will be able to be done on it :)
Having been a user of VRChat going back some years, I’m really bummed that the development story is so tightly-bound to Unity. I get it, right, but it’s still a disappointment.
A fairly old version too at this point (2019.4.31f1). I’m not familiar with the process of upgrading Unity versions for games but at this point it’s likely they will never be able to upgrade and that’s really going to hurt.
Is it designed to fracture, or not designed to unite? Both can cause the same conclusions but the framing is entirely different. I feel like it may be the latter.
Defaulting to proprietary extensions only usable on the proprietary build of VSCode, and NOT the open source build? Definitely designed to fracture. The vast majority of users don’t know or care about the language integration extension licenses. They will just know that using OSS derivatives of VSCode means they can’t use any of the extensions they are used to.
I have a pretty favorable view of Microsoft these days, and I like to assume people generally act in good faith, but this is clearly embrace, extend, extinguish all over again. Or at least embrace, extend, become the de facto standard and gain the lions share of the market without technically extinguishing anything. As the author points out, high quality competitors like JetBrains exist and do well.
What are they trying to extinguish? Jetbrains? Microsoft can’t really see Jetbrains as a threat. They wouldn’t even register on the C-level dashboard.
Microsoft has at least 400x Jetbrains’ revenue (based on 2020 numbers for both companies, it’s certainly a much bigger gap now), and this isn’t a market that’s going to grow by orders of magnitude like when they killed Netscape. I can’t see them bothering trying to extinguish anyone in the development tools space.
Disclaimer: I work for MS, but I am not involved in VS Code (and don’t use it because the remote extension doesn’t work with FreeBSD or other unusual platforms and so I’d have to switch editors for a bunch of places where I can’t use VS Code and I don’t want to confuse my fingers).
My impression is that the strategy for VS Code and a bunch of other things from DevDiv is not about extinguishing anything, it’s about not being extinguished. Historically, Microsoft made great dev tools and these encouraged people to build things that locked folks into their platforms. Now, with Mac and Linux being common systems for developers to run, supporting Microsoft platforms (even Azure, which focuses quite heavily on Linux hosting) is often an afterthought. If someone develops a .NET service with VS Code, there’s a lot more of a chance that they’ll think of Azure Functions instead of AWS Lambda as a deployment platform (for example) than if they write it in a purely Linux or Mac-focused environment.
Again, this is just my impression, but Microsoft is not trying to extinguish F/OSS for a couple of reasons:
These are the ecosystems where we hire engineers from. If we alienate them, our talent pipeline dries up.
We make a ton of money selling cloud services to folks that want to run F/OSS. With confidential cloud computing, we can offer the kinds of very strong privacy guarantees to small players (even individuals) that you could previously get only with hosting your own infrastructure. F/OSS developers are a huge market of people who build services on the kind of infrastructure that we’re building.
I’ve had few conversations with CVPs who are still a bit confused about how the open source ecosystem works and how best to contribute, but they’ve all been positive about the idea. For a lot of things, our policy is to open source unless there is a compelling business reason not to (whereas, apparently, a few years before I joined to default was to keep proprietary and open sourcing needed business justification). That’s a huge attitude shift, but in a company of over a hundred thousand people it takes a while a propagate everywhere.
Thanks for commenting on this. My (uninformed) take was similar - I think MS missed an entire generation of programmers for whom paying $$$ for a Visual Studio license was not only laughable - it wasn’t needed. They were making money not using MS tools.
I’m just a casual VS Code user, so I don’t know if there’s a market for proprietary, paid extensions. This would also track with MS historically - make it easy to code for MS products, and make money doing so.
I would argue it is indeed designed to fracture because it’s open source(ish), encouraging others to adopt it for their own projects (like Gitpod, as detailed in the article). That said I’m not quite sure how I’d frame it as “not designed to unite” so perhaps I’m misinterpreting.
Have you considered exploring Marmot instead of LiteStream or LiteFS. You can actually build a CouchDB like multi-master service on top of SQLite (I’ve done demos of PocketBase and KeyStone JS).
Reduction of 43% in memory seems pretty awesome. I already run a server in Oracle Cloud, but could possibly run in a more limited environment because of this.
I can’t blame you. I’m awfully suspicious of their free tier - I have a few things running there (a Minecraft server and a tiny instance of Uptime Kuma) and I’m constantly checking that it hasn’t been terminated (mostly solved by having the monitoring in place) or Oracle has decided that it’s no longer free.
I understand that, but that blog is run by Oracle. Oracle curates the articles that get published. I have been in the industry for too long to believe that they picked Oracle Cloud instances by accident.
Disclaimer: I put this up here and am employed by Oracle.
Two colleagues reviewed and I co-authored the blog post (our names are mentioned at the very end of it) and sure, the entire blog is about promoting GraalVM and its enterprise edition is an Oracle product. When the students reached out regarding a few technical questions, we, of course, suggested to try the Oracle Cloud Free Tier, which also gives you free access to GraalVM Enterprise. Nothing prevents you from using the open-source community edition and deploy the binary to some other cloud provider.
Based on this post, I went off and actually set up some monitoring for my services, which right now is just Uptime Kuma running on a tiny dedicated VPS. Works quite well now that I’ve finally gotten around to doing it.
Now I just need to go and build some health endpoints for some of my APIs….
In Chrome, the backup plan is to use a flag to freeze the major version at 99 and report the real major version number in the minor version part of the User-Agent string
my favourite bit from that is they are also monitoring for possible breakages from it being a minor number. this whole thing is a bit hilarious to me.
Chrome is also running experiments to ensure that reporting a three-digit value in the minor version part of the string does not result in breakage, since the minor version in the Chrome User-Agent string has reported 0 for a very long time
MCEdit also hasn’t been touched for years at this point, and doesn’t work with the newer versions of Minecraft :( There is Amulet (https://www.amuletmc.com/) that is attempting to be a more modern iteration of MCEdit but my experience with it has been mixed.
I switched to it instantly, thanks for the share!
Features I’m excited about that are not mentioned in the article:
The only downside I can see ATM is a new quirky UI to learn, but at least it’s native and built around Syncthing’s concepts that I already know.
How did you set up the automated background syncing with shortcuts?
Create an automation that runs at a specific time, or any other trigger such as opening/closing an app, and make it run “Synchronize for a while.”
You can pick how long it runs.
I gave it a spin with obsidian mobile to sync my files on my computer.
It seems to only sync changes from desktop to mobile, not the other way around :(.
Edit: Seems I also need to not just sync but also rescan for it to work.
Well, almost. It copies your photos to another directory and optionally deletes them from Photos.app after a specified time. So I either have to double the storage used by photos (~100GB right now) or not be able to use Photos.app for old photos. Would love to use it but feel a bit stuck.
Holy- This is excellent. Well, miles better than Mobious Sync on first blush, but the bar isn’t super high :p The streaming files on demand is really nice.
Swapped to it on my phone, but keeping Mobious Sync on my iPad for a bit (I don’t know if it will scale to the iPad’s screen). Seems to be working well.
I’ve been using it on my iPad and it’s been doing pretty well so far.
Taking a break from my own Rails app - a small hardware reservation platform for a community - to poke around some of the Lobste.rs issues. Been annoyingly enjoying Ruby on Rails after writing off it and similar frameworks due to my bad experience with Django. Helping run a VRChat based club event today as well, mostly managing two video streams. Probably tweaking some Grafana dashboards but otherwise trying to take it easy.
I sometimes go on random dev tangents so who knows what else I’ll end up doing.
Code is available here! Its not much now but over time it’ll grow http://git.gmem.ca/arch/daily-servo
I note you don’t have a robots.txt file; that is the usual way of instructing bots not to scrape.
Amazonbot’s support page, linked from the user agent string, says they respect it.This is true, and was pointed out to me shortly after publishing :D Forgejo doesn’t provide a robots.txt by default, so I’d have to setup an nginx config snippet to do it for me - which is now on my todo list, maybe providing a default to Forgejo.
Worth noting is that you can put a robots.txt in the custom path and it will be picked up, assuming that part of the Gitea code hasn’t been changed.
I.e.
$CustomPath/public/robots.txtForgejo issue to add a sane default: https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues/923 (shouldn’t be too hard to implement, if anyone is interested :)
I too host my own Forgejo instance but run a web server (Caddy in my case) in front of it.
Besides adding a robots.txt, you could block certain user agents.
For anyone not using Cloudflare’s WAF. I have an example Ansible playbook to create the robots.txt file and Caddyfile based on a list of known user agents.
EDIT: Updated for clarity.
Unfortunately some of the AI bros have already figured out the telemarketer trick of creating a new file, or new parameter for robots.txt, that you must add to opt-out of their specific scraper, creating an arms race you can’t win. It’s a nice example of why the opt-out model doesn’t work unless every actor is a saint. Only opt-in is scalable.
So far I’ve been enjoying Matrix, the protocol. Although I have yet to find a client, especially on mobile, that I particularly like - Element X seems very close but it’s still missing the ability to read previous chats and the chat list doesn’t seem to be ordered chronologically which is… odd. On desktop I’m opting for the Cinny webapp since Element Web is just too cluttered. None of the apps I’ve tried have satisfactory session verification consistency, but that could also be in part from my use of the Conduit server rather than their Synapse or Dendrite implementations.
I wish it had more adoption but it’s still in a state where I actually don’t really want to push people to use it, especially when it’s “competing” is Discord and their UX (sidenote: I wish Discord didn’t cripple third party clients so we could get a real bridge to Matrix. imo the “killer feature” of Matrix is the bridging functionality).
Hopefully finishing up one of the blog posts I’m writing, but more likely trying to avoid the heat in this UK heatwave. Probably do some more playing around with Nix flakes too.
I thought I was the only person left in the world running smokeping. Cheers!
I also run smokeping. So that’s 3, and by extension infinity.
Also which makes 4 and therefore double infinity.
Make that 5.
Also, it’s really easy to setup on NixOS:
services.smokeping. It’s not too heavy and it can be a lifesaver when things break, so there’s little reason not to run it on servers.Obviously we need to start an irc/mailing list where we can come together and show cool things we do with it!
Quick question, what’s the diff between smokeping and uptime kuma? What do you use them for? I have uptime kuma just for monitoring a few sites, I don’t need anything fancy, but I also brought it to work so we can also use the dashboard export thingy. What extras does smokeping have in comparison?
Smokeping is for Network latency. So I think of uptime kuma is more.of a heartbeat to check if the site is either up or down and notifies you if they are down. And smokeping does analysis of packets sent. But very much could be wrong. I stood up both and they are very similar except for UI
Great list!
How do Cloudflare Tunnels compare to Tailscale Funnels? (Hope I got the feature names right)
The main downside(s) I’ve found with Funnels is a lack of custom domain names (you’re stuck with your Tailscale Net name) and generally slower speeds when running through a relay. I ended up spinning my own using DNS splitting and a free tier VPS.
Wait, how are you self-hosting tailscale? Do you run headscale? https://github.com/juanfont/headscale
I misspoke, apologies. This list is more of a “homelab” list, especially with cloud flare tunnels and tail scale. I’m not using headscale. I’m using the non self hosted tailscale
That sounds cool. Can you explain how you manage to do that with split DNS?
The split DNS runs *.gmem.ca queries to the CoreDNS instance running. The CoreDNS server returns A records for git.gmem.ca that point to the internal Tailscale IP of the server, and Tailscale handles the handshake and direct routing!
It’s slightly magical, and while I could point it to the internal 192 IP directly this is nicer.
Could you tell me more about that part? Like, does Tailscale transparently route all traffic through the local network when it somehow detects the devices are connected to the same WiFi? Does that work when you simply use MagicDNS instead of your own CoreDNS instance?
Not OP, but yes and yes.
I am really let down every time I see people giving in to the NSA’s pet-project for circumventing web traffic encryption that is Cloudflare. I hope I’m not the only one extremely alarmed by Cloudflare’s origins and obvious implications if you have seen the Snowden leaks.
A very simple VPS on Hetzner with 40GB disk space and 20TB traffic (easily enough for the author’s case) costs like 4,51€/month. It also includes DDoS-protection. If you do not need custom server software, 10GB web hosting cost 2,09€/month.
Yeah the “move to CloudFlare because it’s free!!!!” caused me to eyeroll really hard, and then I recognized that the problem is just going to grow. Can we stop supporting CloudFlare? Please?!?
Could you recommend an alternative CDN that offers comparable low latency worldwide, for a cheap price?
I guess the first thing is realizing that you probably -don’t- need that in the first place. But if you do - personally, I’m using Cloudfront for some of my things that /do/ require a bit more caching and distribution, and I fit neatly into the free tier for that. I think when CDNs do become a concern, a paid one is probably worth it.
I don’t know if Vercel is a Cloudflare CDN reseller or if they’re an AWS CDN reseller, but their free tier offers 100GB of bandwidth a month. I switched from a VPS to Vercel when UNIX sysadmin stopped being a fun hobby for me.
Would you have a good resource where I can educate myself about the relationship between cloudflare and the NSA?
HN history search results or lobste.rs search results.
The first link in the lobsters search results makes clearest accusations, especially the last two sections of the page. These are clearly stated, and link to sources. They have the same rhyme as other accusations. See earlier history on wikipedia: Room 641A, PRISM, e.g. ssl removed here sketch
This is a weird place to make that case. The OP is just hosting a public static website with a few technical articles. Unless you’re suggesting that the NSA is man-in-the-middling this encrypted traffic to some nefarious purpose, I don’t see the concern.
I mean, we know for a fact that the NSA is scooping up literally all the traffic they can for nefarious purposes, soooooooo.
The NSA’s data collection programs, and any nefarious uses, are wildly off topic in a discussion of static, public website hosting on Cloudflare.
If you can make the connection to have it be on-topic, by all means, please go for it.
How do I set that up to automatically rebuild when I push to git?
It’s pretty easy with an actual VPS (which is not much more expensive). Push to the VPS, have a post-receive hook there which forwards to your actual git host and does a deploy.
The higher web hosting tiers even have ssh-access, making it trivial to set up push-hooks. FTP works all the time.
Lobsters does not have downvoting. This is a feature. https://lobste.rs/about#ranking
I see. I can get behind that.
I’m out on vacation! Which probably means a bit of reading and maybe a touch of studying for the Kubernetes certifications I have lined up from work. Might end up designing a side project as well but I’ll be constrained to my iPad to not much actual work will be able to be done on it :)
A part 2 has been posted! https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2023/02/14/More-Mono
Having been a user of VRChat going back some years, I’m really bummed that the development story is so tightly-bound to Unity. I get it, right, but it’s still a disappointment.
A fairly old version too at this point (2019.4.31f1). I’m not familiar with the process of upgrading Unity versions for games but at this point it’s likely they will never be able to upgrade and that’s really going to hurt.
Is it designed to fracture, or not designed to unite? Both can cause the same conclusions but the framing is entirely different. I feel like it may be the latter.
Defaulting to proprietary extensions only usable on the proprietary build of VSCode, and NOT the open source build? Definitely designed to fracture. The vast majority of users don’t know or care about the language integration extension licenses. They will just know that using OSS derivatives of VSCode means they can’t use any of the extensions they are used to.
I have a pretty favorable view of Microsoft these days, and I like to assume people generally act in good faith, but this is clearly embrace, extend, extinguish all over again. Or at least embrace, extend, become the de facto standard and gain the lions share of the market without technically extinguishing anything. As the author points out, high quality competitors like JetBrains exist and do well.
What are they trying to extinguish? Jetbrains? Microsoft can’t really see Jetbrains as a threat. They wouldn’t even register on the C-level dashboard.
Microsoft has at least 400x Jetbrains’ revenue (based on 2020 numbers for both companies, it’s certainly a much bigger gap now), and this isn’t a market that’s going to grow by orders of magnitude like when they killed Netscape. I can’t see them bothering trying to extinguish anyone in the development tools space.
Disclaimer: I work for MS, but I am not involved in VS Code (and don’t use it because the remote extension doesn’t work with FreeBSD or other unusual platforms and so I’d have to switch editors for a bunch of places where I can’t use VS Code and I don’t want to confuse my fingers).
My impression is that the strategy for VS Code and a bunch of other things from DevDiv is not about extinguishing anything, it’s about not being extinguished. Historically, Microsoft made great dev tools and these encouraged people to build things that locked folks into their platforms. Now, with Mac and Linux being common systems for developers to run, supporting Microsoft platforms (even Azure, which focuses quite heavily on Linux hosting) is often an afterthought. If someone develops a .NET service with VS Code, there’s a lot more of a chance that they’ll think of Azure Functions instead of AWS Lambda as a deployment platform (for example) than if they write it in a purely Linux or Mac-focused environment.
Again, this is just my impression, but Microsoft is not trying to extinguish F/OSS for a couple of reasons:
I’ve had few conversations with CVPs who are still a bit confused about how the open source ecosystem works and how best to contribute, but they’ve all been positive about the idea. For a lot of things, our policy is to open source unless there is a compelling business reason not to (whereas, apparently, a few years before I joined to default was to keep proprietary and open sourcing needed business justification). That’s a huge attitude shift, but in a company of over a hundred thousand people it takes a while a propagate everywhere.
Thanks for commenting on this. My (uninformed) take was similar - I think MS missed an entire generation of programmers for whom paying $$$ for a Visual Studio license was not only laughable - it wasn’t needed. They were making money not using MS tools.
I’m just a casual VS Code user, so I don’t know if there’s a market for proprietary, paid extensions. This would also track with MS historically - make it easy to code for MS products, and make money doing so.
Microsoft is trying to extinguish free software in general, and this is just a part of it.
I don’t really believe that’s the case.
I do. Just look at their actions.
I would argue it is indeed designed to fracture because it’s open source(ish), encouraging others to adopt it for their own projects (like Gitpod, as detailed in the article). That said I’m not quite sure how I’d frame it as “not designed to unite” so perhaps I’m misinterpreting.
Ha, that’s definitely a possible perception too :D. I like it.
Have you considered exploring Marmot instead of LiteStream or LiteFS. You can actually build a CouchDB like multi-master service on top of SQLite (I’ve done demos of PocketBase and KeyStone JS).
Interesting - I hadn’t heard of this! I’ll definetly add it to my ever growing list.
Wait, is this the “red site”?
I’d assume so, yes.
I would venture to guess it refers to reddit :)
Probably: https://lobste.rs/s/8ejvlh/react_i_love_you_you_re_bringing_me_down
Either this site, reddit, or perhaps YouTube?
Can’t we be the red site someday?
Reduction of 43% in memory seems pretty awesome. I already run a server in Oracle Cloud, but could possibly run in a more limited environment because of this.
Why did you pick Oracle cloud? I am curious because I never talked to anyone who has used it, esp for hobby stuff
The answer is almost always “the extremely generous free tier.”
It’s recommended by the article.
I’d be extremely suspicious of anyone who recommended an oracle product to me.
I can’t blame you. I’m awfully suspicious of their free tier - I have a few things running there (a Minecraft server and a tiny instance of Uptime Kuma) and I’m constantly checking that it hasn’t been terminated (mostly solved by having the monitoring in place) or Oracle has decided that it’s no longer free.
graalvm is Oracle, so of course they recommend other Oracle products
The article wasn’t written by an Oracle employee, it was written by a (seemingly unaffiliated with Oracle) master student
I understand that, but that blog is run by Oracle. Oracle curates the articles that get published. I have been in the industry for too long to believe that they picked Oracle Cloud instances by accident.
Disclaimer: I put this up here and am employed by Oracle.
Two colleagues reviewed and I co-authored the blog post (our names are mentioned at the very end of it) and sure, the entire blog is about promoting GraalVM and its enterprise edition is an Oracle product. When the students reached out regarding a few technical questions, we, of course, suggested to try the Oracle Cloud Free Tier, which also gives you free access to GraalVM Enterprise. Nothing prevents you from using the open-source community edition and deploy the binary to some other cloud provider.
I was curious to try out their free tier for my brother and I. I mostly wanted to experiment with something external, but on my Tailscale network.
I’d honestly probably never use their products otherwise, if given the choice.
Based on this post, I went off and actually set up some monitoring for my services, which right now is just Uptime Kuma running on a tiny dedicated VPS. Works quite well now that I’ve finally gotten around to doing it.
Now I just need to go and build some health endpoints for some of my APIs….
jesus christ
my favourite bit from that is they are also monitoring for possible breakages from it being a minor number. this whole thing is a bit hilarious to me.
I am perplexed by the very compact structure of the processor. What kind of external tools, if any, are used to design things like that?
We use WorldEdit: https://dev.bukkit.org/projects/worldedit. On ORE, we also have a bunch of custom plug-ins to make certain things easier, such as this RedstoneTools plug-in: https://github.com/paulikauro/RedstoneTools
MCEdit is a popular tool for this sort of thing, though I don’t know if it was used as such in this case.
MCEdit also hasn’t been touched for years at this point, and doesn’t work with the newer versions of Minecraft :( There is Amulet (https://www.amuletmc.com/) that is attempting to be a more modern iteration of MCEdit but my experience with it has been mixed.