{🎏}ᶜ @vleugelcomplement@qoto.org

foss zen: staring at the output of running guix build until it fails, patch, repeat

weird poll time (): on lengthy (a couple of hours at least) walks you usually listen to

I think I’ve discovered one neat cloud-free approach to organize the work for a small (research) group and need to share it with someone :)

Setup:

1. PC with internet access (host) somewhere in a closet (in our case somewhere in half-forgotten room at the uni, so internet and electricity are almost free)
2. dokuwiki installed on it. #dokuwiki is a lightweight wiki software running without a database (i.e. pages are plain text files). We use bootstrap3 template and a ton of plugins to make it more or less user-friendly and nice to look at.
3. very cheap vps (1-2 $$) serving as a gate for NAT traversal.
4. domain name from freenom for 0$

On host: open reverse tunnel with wireguard (see this guide) and serve dokuwiki on tunnel’s end corresponding to the host; on gate: some sort of reverse proxy (we use nginx) redirecting the queries to the host’s tunnel end IP address.

So, what we got for a couple of bucks:

• group knowledgebase with fine-grained access rules and simple task management (and almost anything can be tweaked by the admin, i.e. me)
• accessible from anywhere with the internet access without any VPN setup.
• to upload media files (pictures and movies) to the wiki we use sftp or syncthing running on the host (and bindfs to mount the media folders inside wiki media folder). The disk space is almost unlimited (we have 6tb hard drive plugged in the said pc and more are on the way :)

The obvious caveat is the setup time cost: dokuwiki plugins quality is not always great and they usually require some tweaking to match our needs.

OOM killer
pros: kills rampant ram-hungry jupyter kernels before my laptop becomes unresponsive
cons: kills my jupyter kernels :(

hanging my paddles to watch where the wind blows 🎐

Greetings! I’m an #astrophysics PhD student who mostly works with N-body simulation of galaxies (i.e. code in Python all days and some nights).

Sometimes pretend to be a fan of #foss and #reproducibleresearch and package some obstinate astro codes for #guix to run on our server (in a private repo though, I’ll submit the patches to the upstream, I promise :)

Never been on the birdsite (can’t really stand against the wave of random notifications) but always wanted to have a sort of microblogging acc to post random fancy pictures from my work, and #qoto looks like a very nice place to land.

#introduction