Cheapskate's Guide

> What is the issue they are trying to solve? Apparently, he self-hosts on a Raspberry Pi 3B+. I guess you need to block half the internet if your server has about the same performance as a decade-old smartphone. It's charming in a way, like someone who daily-drives a classic car. https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/self-hosters-nightmare.html

"the IP may be renewed every day or every hour)" What a coincidence! Right now from my phone on my carrier's network while traveling in the UK I am unable to reach https://cheapskatesguide.org My phone's IP address is likely on this guy's blacklist of 56M addresses. So I am forever going to remember whatever service this website provides may be arbitrarily unavailable unless I'm on a know good IP address. Overly aggressive blacklists like this are lame, make you lose customers, and go against the Internet's fundamental principle which is about the ability to exchange information with anyone in the world.

If you are into the "anti-bloat" movement, you might enjoy the "The Cheapskate's Guide to Computers and the Internet" @ https://cheapskatesguide.org/

> It means that more than one percent of the IPv4 real estate on the Internet (and probably much more) is occupied by people and organizations who are either clueless or just do not care how much the rest of us are paying to keep our websites on line. Oh, tell me, how much? The whopping $5/month? Oh, maybe this is a high load WordPress/like CMS running on LAMP stack... so $8/month? > I wrote the following small PHP script to search though my Nginx configuration file and tally up the number of IP addresses that I am blocking. Holy shit. Blocking bots through nginx configuration, more so, blocking 56M addresses through nginx configuration... Okay, for those of you who never did the thing or have no idea: Just use the firewall (most of the time it is built-in in your OS), use some way to tell the firewall about the 'offenders' (eg fail2ban though there are options) and don't ever block something indefinitely, it's totally meaningless, just use timeouts. If some Bob got his computer infected in 2015 and that computer tried to access /wp-admin.php then there is absolutely no reason to assume what in 2024 the IP address Bob's computer had in 2015 is still 'malicious'. Automatic activity like the scans, bruteforcing and whatever is all about opportunity. They are searching for an easy opportunities to exploit and scanning a server what actively blocks you even for 30m at time is just pointless, there is way, way more opportunities in other places than wasting ~4 weeks…

You don't have to be old to experience this problem. This was my take on techno-clutter from a few months back: https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/techno-clutter-farnell.html A more funny story: Back in school, when we were about 17 years old, another kid told me that his Great Uncle had died, and caused him much stress. He'd never met this distant relative, so I enquired, why was he worried? Great Uncle Ben-Ali had named my school-friend, who he'd heard about only through a grandparent but "taken a shine to", as the sole heir and benefactor of his estate - 5 acres of harsh scrub land about 200 miles into the mountains of Morocco containing a shack and two donkeys. He'd received a letter, which was very specific that he was now responsible for the welfare of the donkeys. Today, this would probably be the start of a great scam, but this was in the 1980s before people "had internet". Many people would have just ignored the whole situation, but my friend, true to his conscience, enlisted Arabic translators and sent letters back and forth to North Morocco for months. Eventually the fate of the donkeys was secured. It was agreed that Ben-Ali's neighbour, whose land they had already wandered on to, would have the donkeys, and the shack would go back to the village/local-government.

I have a laptop from 2009 or 2010 running at 800 mhz with a 32 bit CPU. It has to run an older version of Ubuntu (18.04) because nothing supports it nowadays. Even 32 bit packages are hard to get. I see no reason to use antiX or other esoteric distros since ubuntu runs fine on it and supports the hardware. I doubt antiX supports more hardware. Someone else recommended it here, but I don't see the advantages over a robust package repository like ubuntu 18 or a minimal ram only distro like puppylinux. https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/antix.html Funny enough I got puppylinux running from a dos (windows) partition and running out of RAM on just 2gb on a Toshiba Portage m200. I've even got Windows XP Tablet edition running on SSD, but it can't really connect to much online due to the TLS limitations. And newer versions of the linux kernel don't support the wireless chipset. It is also difficult putting an old non-PAE kernel into a newer distro. TLS really killed the utility of a lot of older computers with regards to using the "modern internet".

https://cheapskatesguide.org -- Cheapskate's Guide to Computers and Internet. Low-end and frugal computing in the 21st century. Long, opinionated posts on a pink(!) background. http://ranprieur.com/ -- Ran Prieur. Frugality, societal collapse, "dropping out", and beyond. Has been constantly blogging for ages; it's really interesting to see how his views have changed in time. http://joeyh.name/ -- Joey Hess, former long-time Debian developer, author of git-annex. Frugal living and computing in the wilderness (he used to do everything on a 9-inch Dell Mini 9). https://datagubbe.se/ -- Carl Svensson. Great long-form essays on frugal computing and, uh, what has gone wrong after 1994 or so. http://len.falken.ink/ -- I just really like the "layout", even if it feels a little pretentious to some. IIRC, his essay "Writing for the Internet across a Human Lifetime" also had some feedback on HN. http://viznut.fi/en/ -- Viznut. Demoscene, "low-end technical extremism", permacomputing. Updates are rare, but the older pieces are well worth a read.

I don't think the IP blocking refers to Google, Bing etc. The site has a robots.txt that allows for these. Of course if robots.txt isn't honored, an IP block is in order. For-profit corporations aren't inherently malicious or benevolent. They are legal structures that maximize return on capital without moral judgement or care about what it does to others. A bit like Cthulhu. https://cheapskatesguide.org/robots.txt

Off the top of my head: https://brutalist.report/topic/news? https://urbancommuter.net https://47nil.com https://chuck.is https://wttr.in/ https://cheapskatesguide.org/

Yesterweb? Sure, consider reading these: > https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/yesterweb.html > https://suboptimalism.neocities.org/writings/yesterweb > https://voicedrew.xyz/articles/yesterweb-requiem.html

Well, I'm polling my feed reader's default. Which is every 15 minutes. Many RSS feeds for large sites post more than ten stories a day but only show the last ten stories on their feed, so checking regularly is critical. However, this author specifies I may get IP banned if I check his feed more than once a day: https://cheapskatesguide.org/policy-on-robots.html

I'm not quite sure what you are asking, but this maybe one of these? https://simplifier.neocities.org/ https://cheapskatesguide.org/ https://indieseek.xyz/ https://www.gameboomers.com/ https://sadgrl.online/

wouldn't a raspberry pi do it from within the drawer? Not only https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com does similar, but https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/raspberry-pi-3-4-web-server.html has some numbers. Seems feasible, unless you are the NYT.

I encountered this link on https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/normals-free-speech.html that blog post is very critical of HN and the owner actually claims that his username was shadow banned here, I didn't believed it, but now I'm not so sure what to think of it. edit: from domain to username

Agreed; here’s a project harkening back to simpler times: BabbleWeb: https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/babbleweb.html

If you share the feeling, join the small Internet movement: https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/small-internet.html/

> is that just a meaningless buzzword now? Very much, yes. If anything that word is now a warning sign. Thanks mr. minimal nerdy dev for having me download a minimal 9 MB auto playing header video over my mobile plan on your landing page[1]. This[2] is a better example of "minimalism" (I have to wash my mouth now). Notice something? Not a single mention of the word "minimal" in the entire article. Aaand, developer tools says it's 84 KB of data. Compare that to the the 13800 KB of the nerdy.dev landing page. Funny, [2] seems to be 164 times "more minimal" than [1]. [1] https://nerdy.dev/ [2] https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/low-bandwidth-hosting-tips.html

This post just landed, & it's a glorious takedown of this clutching of pearls desperate "we need lockdown!!!" close mindedness, https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/techno-cage.html There has to be space for more. General purpose computing getting snuffed out under the new security regime is accepting the abyss, & we must strive for more.

In the beginning, there were separate internets. By Postel's law, it is hard to stop them converging into one, though [1] Your last question, though is more about "Are there alternate networked information systems than WWW"? Gopher is still active [2]. Gemini is a proposed modern incarnation of Gopher [3]. There is also Alfi [4]. There seem to be run by hobyists, though. If there are any other comparable platforms, I'd like to know too. [1] https://apenwarr.ca/log/20200708 [2] https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/gopherspace.html [3] https://toffelblog.xyz/blog/gemini-overview/ [4] https://github.com/jezze/alfi

Clickable: [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines [1] https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/no-anti-virus-sw.html

As a side-note I found another like-minded person that wrote about the same issues I've raised regarding long-term sustainability of a modern laptop: * "Expansion Bays: Another Thing We have Abandoned for Thin Laptops" -- https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/dell-cpi.html * the HN link for the above article -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22821222;

OP first needs to decide what the actual problem is they want to solve. > Either they are filled with bugs, refuse to install on my computer's hard drive, require too much RAM, run too slowly, lack important drivers or codecs, are no longer actively supported, do not support 32-bit CPU's, are too difficult for novices to use, or have other highly-annoying problems like, for example, poor use of swap space. Most of these problems could be tackled without having to invent a whole new distribution – bugs can be fixed, swap usage can be tuned, drivers can be packaged and added, etc. Any of these, apparently, would make one or several currently borderline useful distribution into a fully usable one. Or maybe not, going by OP's other blog posts (e.g. https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/surf-internet.html) they're proud of not understanding how Linux distributions work. ("the same number of bugs as the average Linux distribution"?!, Complaining that lightweight distributions don't have as many preinstalled programs as big ones, dpkg -i'ing random packages designed for other distributions, …)