My email provider shut down, so I had to migrate off of it. Every account I had allowed changing emails, although I had to contact customer support about some.

I tried to run some software on my router. It kind of works, if it fits. Storage was the limiting factor. There’s an option to expand the FS to include a USB stick, but somehow it made something overheat, and the router froze every now and then.

I’m running my email server on a POCO F1 ex-Android phone (running PostmarketOS now).

I wish I could get NixOS running on it, then I’d move other things also there.

I’m using VNC over an SSH tunnel. TigerVNC’s vncviewer even has the -via parameter you can use to make creating the tunnel seamless.

Here’s a couple of pointers to get started:

1. The Arch Linux Wiki is full of excellent information. It’s not for beginners, though.
2. Run top in your terminal to see what’s taking CPU.
3. Run top -o RES (or what’s easier, run top and then press M while it’s running) to see what is taking up RAM.

… though unfortunately, it’s mighty probable that the only significant consumer of memory and CPU is your browser. Get uBlock Origin, it helps web pages be lighter and eat less resources. Don’t open too many tabs at once - learn to use bookmarks efficiently, instead (folders, bookmarks toolbar and whatnot).

Reminds me of the programs that make the kernel drop FS buffers in an attempt to free up RAM. Or hog as much memory as they can in an attempt to have unused things swapped to disk. Yeah, they free up RAM all right, but at the expense of actual speed.

Most of the time, this junk is actively harmful. Forget it, modern Linux uses optimized defaults.

You can get more performance out of your hardware by switching to from heavyweight to lightweight programs - for example, instead of Skype (which uses Electron), choose some other way to chat like irssi for IRC. Instead of Gnome, choose i3 or dwm or something like that. You need a bunch of tradeoffs and learning, though, to really get the most out of your hardware.

Windows has a pre-built index as well (or at least it has a search indexer service that enjoys as warm a CPU as possible). That doesn’t appear to improve the speed of search, though.

In Linux, the locate command is crazy fast. I am amazed at how slow search is in Windows, compared to this.

Having an unauthenticated relay imposes the responsibility to configure it correctly (the “only certain addresses” part) and protect it (the “accessible outside the local network” bit). Are you sure it’s not accessible? Did you remember to test with IPv6 too? Will it remain protected after the next time you mess around with your firewall for some totally unrelated reason?

If it works - good for you, but be mindful of all the baggage that comes with a new service.

You’re trading one security issue (profileration of app passwords) to another one (an unauthenticated relay). Is it worth it?

The last time I needed to boot a PC that didn’t have a screen, I built a NixOS installation image with SSH access. I added a user, sudo access, and prepopulated authenticated SSH keys, something similar to https://nixos.mayflower.consulting/blog/2018/09/11/custom-images/

It was about as easy as configuring my own NixOS system.

There you go: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Bubblewrap

Environments are per-process. Every program can have its own environment, so don’t inject secrets where they’re not needed.

I’m using bubblewrap to restrict access to FS.

Oh, I totally agree my solution is not “proper” - it’s a homebrewn solution, full of duct tape and shoestrings. That said, it does everything I need to do. Which features of “proper programs” would you be missing? Perhaps I could add them for my own use.

Did gou look into what takes up the most memory? You could downgrade from the modern browser with 500 tabs to netsurf with 500 bookmarks, perhaps, or similar. Many modern websites don’t work there, though.

Instead of Gnome, I’m using Sway, at the moment it’s taking up 236MB resident.

Do you need that mail client to run 24x7? It’s better for mental health to check mail when you decide (once in the morning), not when some rando wants to sell you cannabis oil (best cure for any ailment!) - or you might find something tiny that checks for email and shows a desktop notification, so you know to launch your mail client.

Alacritty likes to munch memory, Foot takes up much less, but Foot doesn’t render some colors correctly, for whatever reason.

Shop around, there are more options than just changing the Matrix client.

I wrote a Bash script that uses rsync to copy data elsewhere.

It gets launched by a systemd timer, but cron would also work. At first it creates a btrfs snapshot of source, for consistency’s sake.

Then it copies stuff. It’s incremental, ie. unchanged files get hardlinked, not copied (-link-dest against the latest symlink) into date-specific directories that present the full view of the filesystem.

Finally, it cleans up the source snapshot and rewrites the latest symlink to point to the freshly made copy, if successful.

I could share my script, if there’s interest, tho it might look a bit messy. Oh, and these rdiff-whatchamacallits probably do the same thing in a more professional manner. I wrote mine to learn rsync.

Does this mean it’s off-topic for Mildly Interesting?

I saw a website once that taught me how to cross one eye. Now I’m teaching kids how to freak out their parents and teachers with this.

Most of modern music sounds horrible. Elevators and shopping malls would be better off silent than blasting this noisome garbage.

There are exceptions - there totally are modern composers creating quality stuff. It’s just not played anywhere in public places, for some reason.

I’m running my own mail server at home. It wasn’t all that difficult to set up, using SNM.

The biggest hassle happens when my home IP changes (that’s when my router dies for longer than the DHCP lease time), andI have to re-allowlist my home IP in Office365 and whatever the other one was. I get an automated response to the 1st email I send, with instructions how to unblock my IP.