I have been playing around with uBlue’s Bluefin-dx recently, and it’s been a pretty cool change of pace. Rebasing between Gnome and Plasma was pretty amazing (though there was some clean up required.)

However, one thing that I had been missing was sending video links to mpv using the tridactyl extention. Tridactyl adds vim-style keybindings to Firefox making moving around using the keyboard possible. Opening sites, adding bookmarks, and all of the regular things one does when on the internet can be done just from the keyboard.

I moved my DNS setup for my domain names over the Cloudflare a while back. People much more knowledgable than I mentioned they liked it…in particular the proxying of your IP addresses. I like this additional layer of privacy since I’m self-hosting some services I’ve made available online. My personal IP address is not visible to the internet at large.

However, self-hosting these services means that I need to set up dynamic DNS. My IP address will occasionally change, and I need dynamic DNS to ensure my services remain available after an IP address change.

I’ve had a Raspberry Pi running Pi-hole for a couple years now, and I’ll always have one from now on. I’ve heard there may be some issues with encryted DNS, but no doubt the open source community will figure out a solution.

I’ve also been setting up more self-hosted services on my home network, and some of them I don’t actually want to open up to the internet. They all have internet access (for the most part), but I cannot access the services outside of my home network. This has been okay, but then I installed Nextcloud. I really wanted a way to access that data on the go, but I still wasn’t sure if I wanted to put my Nextcloud outside of the home firewall yet.

De-Googling your life has become popular these days, and the more I read about it the more it made sense to move at least some of my information away from one of the globe’s largest companies. The biggest step for me (and most people) is to stop using gmail as your main email address. I’ve had my gmail address for close to a decade. People know it, many accounts are connected to it, and it has a huge backlog of email.

Having never set up a VPS before, it took a while before I was able to get everything working correctly. Eventually, I got this to a state where I can write posts, and things seem secure (though we’ll see about that).

I’m writing this post mainly to keep a good set of notes in case I need to do this again at some point down the road.

I grabbed a plan from one of the cheapest VPS plans I could find from a provider that received decent reviews. I then read several tutorials about setting up a static site on a VPS, and I settled on the following which has been working for me so far.

I bought the Quad SATA Hat after watching a review of it from NovaSpirit Tech on Youtube. It took me a while to get the raid5 array set up, but it appears to be working after going through the process a couple times. Looking back, additional research before getting started would have been useful.

I used four 1 TB 2.5" WD Red NAS drives connected to the hat, and it makes a nice little package when all assembled. I decided to go with a raid5 array to provide some redundancy in case of drive failure.