This Week in Self-Hosted (4 August 2023)

Industry Activity

About the EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) and Why You Should Care

The European Union has been making headlines the past few weeks over its consideration of a proposed regulation called the Cyber Resilience Act that has developers concerned over its impacts to open-source software. In a nutshell, the CRA aims to increase cyber security through the enforcement of stringent standards for digital products. While the idea sounds great, it could become an issue for open-source developers and maintainers who don't have the resources to keep up with the strict requirements. This week, WordPress and a few other FOSS CMS projects issued an open letter to the EU Commission addressing their concerns.

Sweet as (Raspberry) Pi (Availability)

It's been a rough past few years for consumers looking to purchase a Raspberry Pi as they combatted supply shortages and businesses eating inventories up. The company's CEO previously noted 2023 as a recovery year for the single-board computer – and it looks like that may actually be true. Major Pi retailers have recently started removing purchase limits and stock tracking sites have noticed a significant decrease in re-stock alerts (suggesting the products never went out-of-stock to begin with). Personally, I can't wait for the influx of magic mirror posts that are about to start dominating my Reddit feed again...

Weapons of Self-Hosted Destruction

Last week's newsletter discussed some of the details surrounding open-source AI, generative chatbots, and the difficulty of self-hosting them. This week, Vox published an interesting article discussing the implications of Meta's decision to continue open-sourcing it's AI models for anyone to host and use as they please. Cue the concerns over the nefarious things people can do with access to unrestricted AI based on things we've already seen the public do. Should we restrict public access to freely self-host AI, or does the spirit of open-source software guarantee complete freedom to use as desired – despite bad actors with evil intentions? In the meantime, I'll continue pestering ChatGPT for the perfect pressure cooker hard-boiled egg recipe as my primary means of interacting with AI...

Software Updates

Hope you haven't made any big weekend plans – there are a ton of notable software updates and releases to explore this week. I [somewhat] jokingly considered adding a section to the newsletter dedicated to Immich given the consecutive number of weeks it has made an appearance on the list...

• Actual Budget v23.8.0 | Budget: New privacy mode to mask sensitive information, transaction sorting, goal templates, initial feature flag and infrastructure for dark and custom theme support
• Caddy v2.7.2 | Proxy: A number of improvements to increase scaling, performance, and support for niche features
• Discourse v3.1 | Forums: Support for chat threads, ability to customize navigation menu, Discourse AI, image grids, new lightbox based on Glimmer, updated hashtag styles, new admin/moderator tools
• Ghost v5.57.0 | Content Management: Page title/image toggles
• Grocy v4.0.0 | Groceries: Quantity unit conversions with unlimited hierarchy, various new features for products in stock (including reporting), and a number of other minor features for lists, recipes, meal plans, and chores
• Home Assistant v2023.8 | Home Automation: All services now translatable, event entities, improved onboarding, wildcard sentence triggers
• Immich v1.71.0 | Photos: Initial support for 360 degree panorama viewer on web, merge face suggestions based on name, better offline support on mobile
• Kavita v0.7.6 | Book Server: Personal (custom) table of contents support, ratings now allow half stars, Google Book rating support
• KitchenOwl v0.4.7 | Groceries and Recipes:Link to items directly from recipe description, setting to resize items cards, confirm shopping list item removal, yields for meal plans, item management improvements
• Komga v1.3.0 | Comic Server: Better support for one-shots, command line interface
• Mailcow | E-mail: What's up? -ARM64 Integration
• OPNsense v23.7 | Firewall: Migration of legacy components to MVC framework, API support for a broad spectrum of features, new OpenVPN Instances module, upgrade to FreeBSD 13.2
• Ryot v2.0.0 | All-Purpose Tracker: Configure notification platforms for media events, lay groundwork for fitness tracking
• Synapse v1.89.0 | Matrix Homeserver: Allow '+' in Matrix IDs, room version 11 support, Unix socket support for HTTP listeners, improved documentation
• Umami v2.4.0 | Analytics: Database performance increases with upgrade to Prisma v5.0.0, related event data on event data screen, ability to delete reports, new DEFAULT_LOCALE environment variable

New Software

• Breezy Weather: Open-source, Material design Android weather app
• EmailFlare: Send e-mails from your domain through Cloudflare for free
• Piglet: Simple web application for household budget management
• rrip: Bulk Reddit image downloader
• Snapify: Record and share recordings asynchronously
• Webmesh: Simple, distributed, zero-configuration WireGuard mesh provider

Featured Community Content

The Reluctant Sysadmin’s Guide to Securing a Linux Server

This guide covers the basics of hardening a new Linux virtual machine when you’d rather be doing something else.

pboyd.ioPaul Boyd

• Hosting Email on Residential connection with External VPS | Reddit
• Ubuntu Local Privilege Escalation (CVE-2023-2640 & CVE-2023-32629) | Reddit

Self-Hosted Spotlight: ffmprovisr

We're deviating a bit in this week's spotlight from an application to a community-generated repository of useful commands for the open-source software FFmpeg. Today, many open-source and self-hosting enthusiasts rely on FFmpeg to manage and manipulate media content (encode, extract audio, etc.), but its command line-only interface can be daunting for beginners...

Meet ffmprovisr. ffmprovisr is a project that collects useful scripts for executing various common tasks in FFmpeg along with detailed descriptions of how each works. The project currently maintains a GitHub pages site (driven by its GitHub repository) that lists each command along with its description. Additionally, users can install ffmprovisr on their own machines and pass its own custom commands to the command line to easily access each 'recipe' without having to copy and paste from elsewhere.

Links: GitHub, Website

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