Simple means different things to different people.

I self-host Ghost and find it pleasant to use and low maintenance. It is a single Docker container plus MySQL. I recommend a reverse proxy in front of it like Nginx. There are importers from many other blog formats.

I stuck with Ubuntu over a decade, but eventually Arch had several packages I was interested in that Ubuntu did not, plus the Arch wiki. I wanted to use Sway with several rofi/dmenu type utils, and Arch had a lot more of those packaged.

Years ago there was a voice to text transcription service sold as automated that worked by people listening to your voicemails and typing them out.

For 60+ I might recommend ChromeOS Flex, Mint, or Ubuntu.

This is interesting, I would be quite impressed if this PR got merged without additional changes.

We’ll see. Whether it gets merged in any form, it’s still a big win for me because I finally was able to get some changes implemented that I had been wanting for a couple years.

are you able to read and and have a decent understanding of the output code?

Yes. I know other coding languages and CSS. Sometimes Claude generated code that was correct but I thought it was awkward or poor, so I had it revise. For example, I wanted to handle a boolean case and it added three booleans and a function for that. I said no, you can use a single boolean for all that. Another time it duplicated a bunch of code for the single and multi-monitor cases and I had it consolidate it.

In one case, It got stuck debugging and I was able to help isolate where the error was through testing. Once I suggested where to look harder, it was able to find a subtle issue that I couldn’t spot myself. The labels were appearing far too small at one point, but I couldn’t see that Claude had changed any code that should affect the label size. It turned out two data structures hadn’t been merged correctly, so that default values weren’t getting overridden correctly. It was the sort of issue I could see a human dev introducing on the first pass.

do you know why it is uncommented?

Yes, that’s the fix for supporting floating windows. The author reported that previously there was a problem with the z-index of the labels on these windows, so that’s apparently why it was implemented but commented out. But it seems due to other changes, that problem no longer exists. I was able to test that labels on floating windows now work correctly.

Through the process, I also became more familiar with Rust tooling and Rust itself.

The lead dev is not available this summer to review, but you can review here: https://github.com/edzdez/sway-easyfocus/pull/22

It’s not great that four changes are rolled into a single PR, but that’s my issue not Claude’s because they were related and I wanted to test them all at once.

This weekend I successfully used Claude to add three features in a Rust utility I had wanted for a couple years. I had opened issue requests, but no else volunteered. I had tried learning Rust, Wayland and GTK to do it myself, but the docs at the time weren’t great and the learning curve was steep. But Claude figured it all out pretty quick.

For bookmarking: https://raindrop.io/

But it’s not self-hosted and I’m not sure it supports offline reading.

ChromeOS Flex can install and run desktop Linux software and has a terminal. What else makes it Linux-like?

ChromeOS Flex is designed as a desktop OS. Android is not.

ChromeOS Flex. Very low maintenance.

For a shared set of hosts at work, you can check a shared SSH include file into got so changes to the cluster can be updated in one place.

There is way to do this that works with even older computers and is easy to manage.

That’s with Edubuntu and thin-client computing using the Linux Terminal Server project, LTSP.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EdubuntuDocumentation/EdubuntuCookbook/Chapter_5_-_Thin-Client_Computing

In that model, you install Linux once on a server. Each computer in the lab is set to boot over the network from the server.

This way there is one computer to maintain, the users can’t access root and all the storage is centralized.

Even old computers with low CPU and RAM and no hard drive can make good thin clients.

A number of schools have been using this approach for 15+ years.

https://www.edubuntu.org/

Immich has a whole set of end-to-end automated tests to ensure they don’t accidentally make public any URLs they went to be private:

https://github.com/immich-app/immich/tree/main/e2e/src/api/specs

As a popular open source project, that would be e glaring security hole.

Using this proxy puts the trust in a far less popular project with fewer eyeballs on it, and introduces new risks that the author’s Github account is hacked or there’s vulnerability in he supply chain of this docker container.

It’s also not true that you “never need to touch it again” . It’s based on Node whose security update expire every two years. New image should be built at least every two years to keep to update with the latest Node security updates, which have often been in their HTTP/HTTPS protocol implementations, so they affect a range of Node apps directly exposed to the internet.

A simpler way to protect a private service with a reverse proxy is to only forward HTTP GET requests and only for specific paths.

It’s extremely difficult to attack a service with only GET requests.

The security of which URLS are accessible without authentication would be up to immich.

You don’t define bitrot. If you leave software alone with no updates for long enough, yes, there will be problems.

There will eventually be a security issue with no fix, or a new OS or hardware it doesn’t work on.

Backups can also fail over time if restores are not tested periodically.

This recently happened to me. A server wouldn’t boot anymore, so we restored from backup, but it still wouldn’t boot. The issue was that we’d introduced change that caused a boot failure. To fix that by restoring from a backup, we’d need a backup from before that change. It turns out we had one, but didn’t realize what the issue was.

The other moral is to reboot frequently if only to confirm the system can still boot.