This Week in Self-Hosted (8 September 2023)

Newsletter Update – What's New

Happy Friday, everyone! It's been a hot minute, which means it's time for another brief update on the state of selfh.st and where we'll be heading in the coming months.

Since launching, I've been very intentional about publishing content that adds value to the self-hosted community. While I've enjoyed writing about specific applications outside of This Week in Self-Hosted, publishing regularly is difficult given the amount of time I find myself spending with each piece of software to provide an overview that isn't just a rehash of the project's GitHub README.

As I've wrestled with ways to produce new content that adds real value to the community, I spent most of the summer tweaking the content and sections in This Week in Self-Hosted to ensure it's more than just a feed of r/selfhosted's weekly top posts. Hopefully you've already noticed some of those changes.

To kick off the fall season, I've updated the site's design to be a bit more streamlined and added a few new sections to the newsletter starting this week. I'm also committing to an end-of-the-month announcement for an exciting selfh.st project I've been working on outside of this newsletter.

As always, happy selfh.st/ing!
Ethan

In the News

Falcon (AI) Punch

Move over, Meta – there's a new open large language model in town. Falcon 180B, released by the Hugging Face AI community this week, is a LLM trained on 180 billion parameters (compared to LLamA 2's 70 billion), with features similar to Google's PaLM-2 and ChatGPT 3.5. Unfortunately, the project's documentation states users will need approximately 400GB of memory to adequately self-host Falcon 180B. Details on previous Falcon models can be found here.

When Your Two Best Friends Finally Meet

This week, the popular VPN/mesh software company Tailscale and VPN provider Mullvad announced a partnership to begin allowing users to configure Mullvad servers as exit nodes while connected to Tailscale's mesh network. In other words – users can now connect to their remote devices via Tailscale's mesh capabilities while forcing all other traffic through Mullvad's VPN servers. Per the announcement, the functionality is currently only configurable via Tailscale and cannot be achieved through the Mullvad VPN app. Configuration documentation can be found here.

Software Updates

• Actual Budget v23.9.0 | Budgets: Mobile transaction entry now supported, privacy mode
• Ghost v5.61.0 | Content Management: Automatic content conversion when opening in beta editor, minor fixes
• Home Assistant v2023.9.0 | Home Automation: New climate, humidifier, and water heater dialogs, new tile features, lawn mower entity, group sensors, weather forecast service, new integrations
• Immich v1.77.0 | Photos: Face tooltips, improved assets upload, machine learning memory optimizations, minor improvements and bug fixes
• Kavita v0.7.8 | eBooks: New robust filtering system for media, improved OPDS implementation, more localization options
• KitchenOwl v0.4.11 | Recipes, Grocery Lists: Real-time shopping lists, minor bug fixes
• LinuxServer.io | Containers: Unifi Controller deprecated in favor of new Unifi Network Application container
• Searx | Search: No longer being maintained, GitHub repository archived

New Software

• carbon: Online text editor powered by Git
• Cloudflared-web: Cloudflared CLI and web UI combined into a single image
• docklogkeeper: Simple persistent log viewer for Docker containers
• eza: Modern replacement for the command line program 'ls'
• Frigate Plate Recognizer: Identify license plates to be added as sublabels in Frigate
• Librum: Modern eBook library manager and reader
• PeaNUT: Dashboard for network UPS tools
• Plant-It: Open-source gardening companion app
• Rig.dev: Kubernetes application management
• Series Troxide: Simple, modern television series tracker
• Websurfx: Modern meta search engine

Community Content

AI Homelab: A guide into hardware to software considerations

AI Homelab: A guide into hardware to software considerations

https://erdaltoprak.comErdal Toprak

GitHub - voidquark/privatebin: Ansible Role - PrivateBin

Ansible Role - PrivateBin. Contribute to voidquark/privatebin development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHubvoidquark

Content Spotlight: Traggo

Meet Traggo, a self-hosted time tracking tool that allows users to track time using tags and time spans. Designed to be as customizable as possible, Traggo gives users the ability to create custom tags to be assigned to blocks of time based on their own ways of working (project work, etc.) while also providing various statistics and diagrams for each via a built-in dashboard.

Features include time tracking, customizable dashboards and diagrams, list and calendar views of tracked time, a streamlined web UI with multiple themes, and user management. It can be installed via Docker or bare metal.

Links: GitHub, Documentation

Featured Homelab

This week's featured homelab is presented to us by Reddit user u/Radioman96p71, who spent a whopping $25k on the 520TB storage array pictured below currently being used for ESXi datastores. Radioman96p71 provides additional details on the setup in comments scattered throughout the posted thread for those curious.

Command Line Corner: sudo !!

Prefaces the previously executed command with sudo to avoid having to retype the entire command a second time:

$ apt update

E: Could not open lock file ...

$ sudo !!

sudo apt update
[sudo] password for user: 

Weekend Discussion

Weekend Discussion: What’s your homelab backup strategy?

A judgment-free zone to share your own personal backup strategy with the world

selfh.stEthan Sholly

Privacy Corner

Connected cars are a “privacy nightmare,” Mozilla Foundation says

Data privacy protections are almost nonexistent when it comes to automobiles.

Ars TechnicaJonathan M. Gitlin

Other Interesting Tech Stories

Microsoft is removing WordPad from Windows after nearly 30 years

Windows 12 will likely be the end of the road for WordPad.

The Verge

A new modern look for the Android brand

This evolution of our visual identity better represents Android’s core ethos of being open, iterative and inclusive — and it’s fun, too.

GoogleJason Fournier

Share Your Content in a Future Newsletter

We're always looking for new and existing self-hosted content to share in our newsletter. Reach out using the button below if you'd like to have your own content featured or have a suggestion for content types you'd like to see featured in future newsletters.