This Week in Self-Hosted (29 September 2023)

Newsletter Update: Subscriber Milestones and a Giveaway 🎉

Happy Friday, fellow self-hosters! I'll get straight to the point – This Week in Self-Hosted recently hit a major subscriber milestone. To celebrate this, we're giving away a Home Assistant Green – the recently launched Home Assistant hardware hub.

Entry into the giveaway is easy – simply be an e-mail subscriber to This Week in Self-Hosted. We'll also award a bonus entry to anyone who shares this week's newsletter on Mastodon and tags us (@[email protected]).

Deadlines for entry into the giveaway will end Thursday, 10/5, at 9pm EST. We'll announce the winner in the following week's newsletter (10/13) once the winning details have been confirmed.

Thanks, and happy selfh.st/ing!

In the News

Apparently You Can Have Your Pi (5) and Eat It, Too

The long-awaited Raspberry Pi 5 was announced this week, the latest successor in the popular yet constantly out-of-stock single board computing line. The upgraded Pi 5 boasts an updated processor with 2-3x the speed of the Pi 4, a new graphics chip for better graphics performance, and the first-ever Raspberry Pi Foundation-produced component: the southbridge, a component on the motherboard that facilitates communication with peripherals. The Pi 5 comes in the usual variety of memory options, costs ~$5 more than the Pi 4, and should be available starting October 2023.

Software Updates

• Bigcapital v0.10.0 | Accounting: Tax rate service, sales tax liability summary report, tax rate tracking with sales invoices
• Ghost v5.65.0 | Content Management: Dynamic post rendering, repopulate featured collection records
• Homer v23.09.1 | Dashboard: New Immich, PiAlert, and Readarr custom services, updated SpeedtestTracker service documentation
• PhotoPrism v230923 | Photos: Redesigned 'Places' view, support for Samsung and Google Motion photos, and a ton of other minor updates and fixes
• Podman v4.7.0 | Container Tools: Modules on Linux, Docker Compose bug fixes, and better Quadlet support
• SimpleX Chat v5.3.0 | Communication: Encrypt local files in app storage, improved groups (delivery receipts, speed, stability), simplified incognito mode, new privacy settings, reduced memory usage, new languages
• Umami v2.7.0 | Analytics: Latest Prisma update now accommodates running on ARM servers, HOSTNAME variable now defaults to 0.0.0.0, version number visible in profile menu
• WriteFreely v0.14 | Publishing: Fediverse verification, new 'Contact' page, post-excerpts in stats list when missing title, friendlier 404 messages, filter posts by language

New Software

• btw: Open-source personal blogging platform
• macOS Containers: Native macOS containers (currently in alpha)
• Swirl: Open-source search with AI-ranked results

Content Spotlight: Postmarks

Meet Postmarks, a self-hosted social bookmarking app with a twist – Fediverse integration. Postmarks provides tag-indexed bookmark archiving with ActivityPub integration that allows other platforms (Mastodon, FireFish, etc.) to follow "posts", receive updates when items are added, and comment on individual bookmarks.

The installation process outlined in the repository's README heavily relies on utilizing Glitch to get Postmarks up-and-running, but also includes instructions for downloading the source code and running yourself via npm.

Links: GitHub

Community Content

SwitchBot Curtain 3 Teardown and Review

The SwitchBot Curtain 3 is a new Bluetooth curtain controller with better solar panel charging, improved thrust force and extremely quiet operation.

SmartHomeSceneSHS

Featured Homelab

This week's featured homelab – brought to us by Reddit user u/EmiSkyye – is a custom-built rack cobbled together with a combination of off-the-shelf and 3D-printed parts. The end result is an extremely sleek mini-rack that houses three Dell Optiplex Micros, a patch panel, and switch.

According to Reddit post, the hardware is currently being utilized as a Proxmox cluster. The author provides links for all of the parts used in one of the comments and promises to make any custom STLs publicly available soon.

Command Line Corner: Using ^ to correct mistakes

Use ^typo^correction to fix mistakes in previous commands without having to retype the entire command from scratch:

user@selfhst:/$ cd /home/usr/appdata
   -bash: cd: /home/usr/appdata: No such file or directory
user@selfhst:/$ ^usr^user
user@selfhst:/home/user/appdata$ _

Privacy Corner

Musk’s X spreads more disinformation than rival social networks, EU says

Twitter/X left voluntary alliance but is “not off the hook,” EU official says.

Ars TechnicaJon Brodkin

Other News in Tech

Newly Empowered FCC Chair Moves to Rekindle Net-Neutrality Fight Between Tech and Telecom Giants

The FCC’s Jessica Rosenworcel wants to restore regulation of broadband service as Democrats gain a 3-2 majority for the first time in the Biden presidency.

The Wall Street JournalRyan Tracy

Welcome to Birthday Week 2023

Building the future is, in part, what Birthday Week is about. Over the past 13 years we’ve announced things like Universal SSL (doubling the size of the encrypted web overnight), or Cloudflare Workers (helping change the way people build and scale applications). This year will be no different

The Cloudflare BlogJohn Graham-Cumming

Share Your Content in a Future Newsletter

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