Claire's Journal

Ever since Hurricane Helene the Gouache Airship YouTube has been silent.

I don't have any real desire to resurrect the Crafts channel so instead we're starting over and heading into a new direction. You are definitely going to see a lot more of me visually along with me doing things.

Here is how it will break down:

Gouache Airship

https://www.youtube.com/@gouacheairship https://www.twitch.tv/gouacheairship/

The former Crafts channel will now be focused entirely on video games. Art will have a separate channel.

YouTube: Game Development, Tutorials, Let's Plays (VOD/Live) Twitch.tv: Any live streams will be simulcast here, probably mostly the Let's Plays.

Claire's Cozy Art Corner

https://www.youtube.com/@ClairesCozyArtCorner

This is more of a life journey channel where I will be sharing the things I'm actually doing with you.

YouTube: Traditional Art (Primarily Pastels), Music, Songwriting, Recording, Chillin

General

Everything will also be fully archived for posterity on the official PeerTube. You will find archives for all my channels here.

If you want to see more or want more content there will be more here than on YouTube ultimately due to Guidelines and other restrictions. Things will be a lot more relaxed here and there will be more live content that isn't elsewhere as well.

#linux #howto #selfhosting

Here you are with your very own statically generated website. You want to get that puppy up but you definitely don't want to resort to something that's a huge chore like S3 buckets. Well i have a solution for you. It's called BusyBox.

That's right and you probably already have it.

Just one caveat here before i show you how simple this can be. You will probably want some form of reverse proxy for SSL. If you already have one or plan to use something like cloudflared then read on.

Most people don't realize this but BusyBox has it's own HTTPD server:

$ busybox httpd -f -p 9393

for example will run an httpd server serving up $PWD on 9393

$ curl localhost:9393 hello

So the simplest thing that could possibly work is to create a service file in /etc/systemd/system name it something like myweb.service and it would look like this:

[Unit]
Description=BusyBox HTTP Server
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
User=root
WorkingDirectory=/var/www
ExecStart=/bin/busybox httpd -f -p 8000
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=5

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

now you can just do this as root:

$ sudo systemctl enable —now myweb

now your site at /var/www should be being served up on 8000. This is where you want to utilize your reverse proxy if you're serving up some SSL. These are so light with a proxy in front of them you can easily run several for different domains and services without feeling a pinch.

#linux #selfhosting

Here is a list of EVEN more tiny software that i dug up recently. I do not use all of it some of it where indicated.

Fair Camp

https://faircamp.org/

Faircamp is a static site generator which creates a complete website to present your music project. It's completely flat and static no moving parts. It is intended to look sort of like Band Camp and actually has quite a few features which allow you to change it's look. While keeping that Band Camp user experience.

You can toss it up anywhere. I'm using it here: https://fluxture.net

Rust Pad

https://github.com/ekzhang/rustpad

Rust Pad is a very light alternative to something like Etherpad. It's written unsurprisingly entirely in Rust. Making it very small. It runs very smoothly in docker and that is the preferred way to run it. One feature i like is the ability to automatically wipe the pads periodically so you can start clean. Currently in use.

Hyper8

https://hyper8.org/

Hyper8 is a static site generator for Video publishing. If you have an archive of video for a project you have going and you want to store a static version of that anywhere on a web host this might be for you. Much lighter than something like PeerTube if you want to archive media.

Rust Chan

https://github.com/csd113/RustChan

This is a self-hosted Image Board written entirely in Rust that you can run yourself. It's pretty light as far as image boards go. Love that it's a Rust project and modern rather than something as old as Kusaba-X.

#art #linux #foss #pastel #music #blog

I don't know what your opinions on AI are and how people want to or don't want to use AI in their artwork. I don't have any intention about writing about that. Instead I want to write about the way in which we respond to it.

I have my laptop on my lap. I was going to use Krita which is excellent Free and Open Source Software which everyone should endeavor to use. Then i realized that i also had a box of pastels. Armed with this some paper and few moments to myself i decided to get back to what i really care about. Traditional mediums. In particular i really enjoy pastel even though I'm very horrible at it currently. I like how it feels and how portable it is. It has a really deceptive texture to it that i enjoy that is oily without there being any oil in it. There is just that much pigment in there. This doesn't mean I will never again use Krita it has all kinds of uses for me. It is just how i'm deciding to slice my time between technology and traditional work.

But also, I love other things a well. I recently started collecting vinyl so i could play it back without the need of the internet. Having offline music is a great way to reduce your stress. Climbing all in on a single device has enslaved us to our devices. Everything is there, everything is easy. Nothing is tactile. You touch a phone and you get the same experience everywhere. I don't know if you've spent a lot of time around actual turntables but they are a very different experience and not all the music is continuous there are sides to records sometimes as many as 4! There is a process to using it that creates memory and changes how you think. The phone changes how you think too.

I finally bought the equipment and instruments i need to get back into my songwriting process. I am pivoting from electronic music to using my hands again and touching steel and wood. I have a bass guitar and a 6 string electric and now also a 6 string acoustic. This is all i really need along with the 88 key Keystation MIDI controller which i operate as a lightweight piano/organ using synthesizers in Ardour which is another FOSS project. Since i have decided to focus on recording Ardour makes the most sense for me. It's uncomplicated enough you can create your setup as you go or create some more sophisticated templates to keep around and even edit for later.

What am i getting at? In each case I'm increasingly more inclined to go back to the way things were closer to my childhood. Not out of nostalgia but out of convenience and as a way to fight back against a world that keeps insisting on encroaching on every part of our existence. These are just some ways to keep in touch with what makes us human. I'm all for human art. I suspect since we already have a corporate art shift and corporations seem intent on largely utilizing AI in some way to generate more corporate art it's fine if the rest of us focus on human art. That is art made by humans for humans doing human like things.

#linux #nixos #selfhosting

I am compiling a list of really good tiny software which you can use to run all kinds of things. This is not intended to be comprehensive. I probably missed your favorite thing. I would love to hear about your favorite thing you should tell me.

Here are some things I am using or have considered using

Snac2

https://codeberg.org/grunfink/snac2

This is a very tiny single binary ActivityPub Server. You have several options and most linux package repositories seem to have it available. You can also use docker or just simply download a release binary. I recommend utilizing with custom systemd startup service.

Write Freely

https://writefreely.org/

Should you wish to do as I am currently this very moment and in fact Write Freely. Then uhm Write Freely is for you! This is a very tiny blogging software that runs in a similar fashion to snac2.

this is what the Write Freely systemd service looks like you could copy it for whatever else you want to run:

[Unit]
Description=WriteFreely Instance
After=syslog.target network.target
# If MySQL is running on the same machine, uncomment the following 
# line to use it, instead. 
#After=syslog.target network.target mysql.service

[Service]
Type=simple
StandardOutput=syslog
StandardError=syslog
WorkingDirectory=/var/www/example.com
ExecStart=/var/www/example.com/writefreely
Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Copy Party

https://github.com/9001/copyparty

“Portable file server with accelerated resumable uploads, dedup, WebDAV, SFTP, FTP, TFTP, zeroconf, media indexer, thumbnails++ all in one file.”

Wow that's a lot but it really is as good as advertised i can't actually tell you more than this. Do you like small things that do lots of stuff? Ya that's definitely Copy Party. Transfer all the things all the time everywhere i guess. The interface is quite good if you want to share a small number of things among a small number of people. It's pretty reasonable. A little retro but i like it.

Hugo

https://gohugo.io/

This is still the best choice for a statically generated blog alternative. If you want to edge cache something with no moving parts you're hard pressed to find something simpler to use than Hugo.

Owncast

https://owncast.online/

You want to live stream something. That's why you're here. I would say also that if you couple this with the obvious pair which is using OBS Studio you get quite a bit here. You can even list your little channel in their directory and people can find you. Very minimal setup to get going. Many VPS providers have templates already.

Tiny Ice

https://github.com/DatanoiseTV/tinyice

I have not yet tried this. It seems to have a built-in AutoDJ feature which is of special interest to me and perhaps you i don't really know. We don't know each other. Perhaps we are similar in our tastes?

Ergo

https://github.com/ergochat/ergo

Ergo is a very small IRCD. You remember IRC right it's like social media it even has #hashtags (they call them channels). You should try it. It's how old people used to communicate on the internet before Twitter. Ergo is low effort and pretty much zero maintenance. Put it everywhere.

Forgejo

https://forgejo.org/

Forgejo is a fork of Gitea. They share a code base originally but separated concerns over i believe ideological reasons. It's quite good and i prefer Forgejo now for no other reason than it's pretty cool and i like it. You have many options here and this is just my favorite one.

and maybe why you shouldn't care

The slow decline of the social media world is upon us finally. We all knew that eventually corporate greed would drive us here.

Recently upon logging into a dormant X account in a feeble attempt to find someone from my past I discovered the horrifying truth of the most recent developments in social media.

Not only is X only full of a few delusional people still hanging on to what little credibility this platform still affords them. They are doing so under heavy fire. AI is destroying the platform. A clear lack of guidelines when it comes to post content and style are making the platform completely unreadable.

I'm an active participant in the Bluesky ecosystem but recently like many others have been experiencing massive amounts of downtime spanning as long as an entire week with large portions of it unavailable during that time. In addition numbers here are down, way down.... like 27% year over year. Perhaps Bluesky isn't quite dead yet but it's certainly not looking good.

Then there is YouTube.

I'm a long time user of YouTube. YouTube used to be about you the user of the platform. Then it was about influencers. Now it seems to be about the automated wholesale rip off of any content posted to the platform by AI bots which steal transform and even translate content made by others.

It's pretty awful especially in special interest community's like various art communities are now effectively dead with their best content is from 5 years ago. You add to this the ever increasingly unintelligible “algorithm” pushing all the AI slop clones to the top it's becoming impossible to find even that.

There is a trend however.

It may not be totally popular yet but there is a trend forming especially among younger people of migrating away from these platforms and into the arena of self-hosting and other third-party alternatives. You are using one such alternative right now in order for me to write this and for you to then read it.

Why is this happening now?

The over commoditization of services especially those surrounding the interaction between human beings is saturating the market. AI is compounding the saturation while simultaneously degenerating the entire user experience. Humans are often no longer in either the decision making or programming process when it comes to how software is designed or coded. Coupled with a lack of desire to innovate over iterate and the endless pipeline of needless AI use cases which are eroding every part of tech.

Enough is enough. It's time to put your foot down and enjoy free software. You've earned it buddy. Make your life happy again, release yourself from the shackles of someone else's political agenda.