'No Stupid Questions' (NSQ) Internet & Technology Edition

[80's Dad]

Alright, I have a stupid question and no one can judge me here. I have a list of requests and am trying to figure out how I want to go about this. Problem is that I am so overwhelmed by all the info out there of something I only have a very basic understanding of and am only learning exactly how much I don't know. I am asking for guidance and suggestions for what exactly I should research deeper. After seeing what we have been through here and how much of my old livejournals have been lost due to photobucket bullshit have made me believe this is the path I should take.

I want to self host a private, personal blog/website and photo gallery on a Raspberry Pi 4 (which I already own). I want to be able to access this site even when I'm not on my network. My instinct is to get a domain and hide it behind some kind of password input, but what do those options look like and is there a better way? I want to routinely back up data to either a separate hard drive or to my PC (or both?). Should I get something like this case with an SSD in it? Is there something similar to CPanel? Would there be an advantage to using something like HomeLab, Sandstorm, or Yunohost? Are those even comparable things? idk.

I'm sure these sound like noob questions, but I promise I'm not tech illiterate. I don't have experience with servers or Linux and I don't want to open myself up to any obvious security issues. Is this something I could do on my own or would it be worth it to have a local computer guy put this together for me?

 

[Archeops]

Welp, my laptop (it turns out it an ASUS F15) arrived two days early so that kind of threw a monkey wrench into things.

Whatever you do, you shouldn't be running a Home version of Windows. Most of the "Windows nightmares" stuff you mention can be remediated (at least to some degree), but not on Home.

I've been playing around with Windows 11 and I'm not hating it as much as I thought I would (the bottom menu is eerily reminiscent of current Macs) so I may just upgrade it to the Pro version.

SO-DIMMs don't have the same kind of wide selection - heat spreaders and ARGB LEDs and shit - like desktop kits. I'd say you can't really go wrong with kits of Corsair Vengeance or G.Skill Ripjaws if you're willing to pay some extra for higher clock speeds. If not, you could go with Samsung, Crucial, or Hynix. Patriot Viper Steels maybe, if you absolutely need to have heat spreaders on your RAM kit.

Tracking down RAM kits have proven to be really annoying, especially when you're looking for dual channel kits and said computer just arrived today. But I'll keep Vengeance and Ripjaws in mind when I replace these RAM sticks proper, the same friend gave me a 8GB stick and a 16GB stick he held onto for emergency repairs.

 

[Manat]

I just want to understand, what am I doing wrong in these captchas? I usually use the onion server and sometimes captchas block videos on tor without a way to get the url, I would literally bash my head against it for minuets trying to complete it correctly but I'm never able to.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole 2]

Alright, I have a stupid question and no one can judge me here. I have a list of requests and am trying to figure out how I want to go about this. Problem is that I am so overwhelmed by all the info out there of something I only have a very basic understanding of and am only learning exactly how much I don't know. I am asking for guidance and suggestions for what exactly I should research deeper. After seeing what we have been through here and how much of my old livejournals have been lost due to photobucket bullshit have made me believe this is the path I should take.

I want to self host a private, personal blog/website and photo gallery on a Raspberry Pi 4 (which I already own). I want to be able to access this site even when I'm not on my network. My instinct is to get a domain and hide it behind some kind of password input, but what do those options look like and is there a better way? I want to routinely back up data to either a separate hard drive or to my PC (or both?). Should I get something like this case with an SSD in it? Is there something similar to CPanel? Would there be an advantage to using something like HomeLab, Sandstorm, or Yunohost? Are those even comparable things? idk.

I'm sure these sound like noob questions, but I promise I'm not tech illiterate. I don't have experience with servers or Linux and I don't want to open myself up to any obvious security issues. Is this something I could do on my own or would it be worth it to have a local computer guy put this together for me?

With private you mean "only for you" right? Nothing public facing.

 

[80's Dad]

With private you mean "only for you" right? Nothing public facing.

Yes, I want this only for me. My current idea is to be able to go to 80sdad dot com, be met with a log in/password situation, then proceed to my blog. I thought about keeping it just on my network, but figured there is enough security in a random domain existing on the internet that no one would stumble upon it and try to cause issues.

 

[Kosher Dill]

but figured there is enough security in a random domain existing on the internet that no one would stumble upon it and try to cause issues.

I don't think that's true anymore. There are infinite botnets that do nothing but try every 0-day from Script Kiddie Central, and only 4 billion IPv4 addresses. I've absolutely had attacker traffic on "obscure" domains.

It's like a burglar just walking down the street and seeing whose front door is open, one by one. Except he's The Flash.

 

[bliblblblbbllb]

I just want to understand, what am I doing wrong in these captchas? I usually use the onion server and sometimes captchas block videos on tor without a way to get the url, I would literally bash my head against it for minuets trying to complete it correctly but I'm never able to.

You need to be more discriminating. Think, "if I only saw this tile, would I know it's a __?" In your first sidewalk example I would only have clicked the bottom two tiles. In your motorcycle one I only would have clicked a 2x2 square, not the extra bits.

You almost never need to click more than 3 or 4 squares.

 

[Manat]

You need to be more discriminating. Think, "if I only saw this tile, would I know it's a __?" In your first sidewalk example I would only have clicked the bottom two tiles. In your motorcycle one I only would have clicked a 2x2 square, not the extra bits.

You almost never need to click more than 3 or 4 squares.

thank you very much I will try it next time. I though (totally unfounded) that the AI will be very particular about details and added more tiles the more I failed.

 

[bliblblblbbllb]

I don't think that's true anymore. There are infinite botnets that do nothing but try every 0-day from Script Kiddie Central, and only 4 billion IPv4 addresses. I've absolutely had attacker traffic on "obscure" domains.

It's like a burglar just walking down the street and seeing whose front door is open, one by one. Except he's The Flash.

You're right and this happened to a friend of mine. His personal website- just for himself and friends- had a url that was basically nonsense at an uncommon country domain. Think like pfareggnt.st. And bots found it and spammed it.

---

Here is my stupid question: I'm designing a personal website, like html and css. I want it to be very much oldschool, no javascript, no infinite scroll Wordpress bullshit.

But all the html "how to build a website" tutorials are made to help people make modern, phone-friendly, websites, and step 2 is always "put in all this javascript and copypaste all this shit in."

Where can I find the tutorials that people used to learn to make their geocities sites? I want to learn that style of web design.

 

[⠠⠠⠅⠑⠋⠋⠁⠇⠎ ⠠⠠⠊⠎ ⠠⠠⠁ ⠠⠠⠋⠁⠛]

Alright, I have a stupid question and no one can judge me here. I have a list of requests and am trying to figure out how I want to go about this. Problem is that I am so overwhelmed by all the info out there of something I only have a very basic understanding of and am only learning exactly how much I don't know. I am asking for guidance and suggestions for what exactly I should research deeper. After seeing what we have been through here and how much of my old livejournals have been lost due to photobucket bullshit have made me believe this is the path I should take.

I want to self host a private, personal blog/website and photo gallery on a Raspberry Pi 4 (which I already own). I want to be able to access this site even when I'm not on my network. My instinct is to get a domain and hide it behind some kind of password input, but what do those options look like and is there a better way? I want to routinely back up data to either a separate hard drive or to my PC (or both?). Should I get something like this case with an SSD in it? Is there something similar to CPanel? Would there be an advantage to using something like HomeLab, Sandstorm, or Yunohost? Are those even comparable things? idk.

I'm sure these sound like noob questions, but I promise I'm not tech illiterate. I don't have experience with servers or Linux and I don't want to open myself up to any obvious security issues. Is this something I could do on my own or would it be worth it to have a local computer guy put this together for me?

It sounds like you want to have a diary/photo gallery.

Do you need to be able to access it on the web or just on your devices? If the latter, you could write your diary in text files by day and put them in a directory, and copy your photo library to a subdirectory alongside the 'diary' folder. You could then use syncthing or a similar software to sync both between all your devices (including your pi). And get a free Oracle ARM VM with 200gb of storage and set that up as a 'receive only' client on syncthing and turn on versioning so it just backs up everything you have and ignores any deletions. That way you should always have some degree of backup of everything somewhere.

If you want to be able to access it from machines that aren't your own, others have pointed out potential issues with just making a site available on a public IP. There is a caveat to these concerns about 'spammers finding it':
* If you host a blog on 8.67.53.9, on any port but especially 80 or 443, spammers will find it
* If you associate the domain jennyigotyournumber.org with the IP 8.67.53.9, more spammers might find it (the ones using monitoring services that provide feeds of newly registered domain names).
* If you set up a random subdomain under jennyigotyournumber.org, oerlsxu.jennyigotyournumber.org, even if you point that record at 8.67.53.9, noone but you, your nameserver provider, and any DNS servers that you interact with when browsing to it will know it exists (of course, if you pick a common subdomain like www.jennyigotyournumber.org or blog.jennyigotyournumber.org the ones who get lists of newly created domains will just guess it). But if you know it exists, you can go to oerlsxu.jennyigotyournumber.org and that request will go to the web server running on 8.67.53.9.
* Why does that matter? Because since HTTP 1.1, all decent web servers can be set up to only reply to requests for oerlsxu.jennyigotyournumber.org, and ignore requests for any other domain, or for the IP address 8.67.53.9.

So, if you must host a web server, a properly obfuscated domain name can be part of your security solution, to make it very unlikely that anyone who might be able to exploit your web server or your blog software if it responds would actually get it to respond. Though obviously I would recommend having more explicit security measures too.

Also, if you must host a web server, make sure you setup SSL through Letsencrypt or similar. Otherwise any password protection you apply could be in vain.

 

[Least Concern]

Where can I find the tutorials that people used to learn to make their geocities sites? I want to learn that style of web design.

In general, the documentation on developer.mozilla.org is very good, so I'd suggest you try starting with their introduction to HTML site.

Yes, I want this only for me. My current idea is to be able to go to 80sdad dot com, be met with a log in/password situation, then proceed to my blog. I thought about keeping it just on my network, but figured there is enough security in a random domain existing on the internet that no one would stumble upon it and try to cause issues.

The simplest solution is to use HTTP authentication on the whole site. Whenever someone tries to access the home page or any other resource on the domain name, they'd be prompted for a username and password not by a web page but by the browser itself, and these credentials must be provided before the server will respond with a useful response. HTTP authentication is good in this case since it means you don't have to set up a CMS and database or some other software to handle the authentication and can instead just serve simple pages and files like you would on a normal static site. This can be a bit of a pain to get set up and the process will vary depending on what web server and OS you use, but searching for "set up HTTP basic authentication in (Nginx/Apache/whatever)" should give you useful results.

 

[Boris Blank's glass eye]

Here is my stupid question: I'm designing a personal website, like html and css. I want it to be very much oldschool, no javascript, no infinite scroll Wordpress bullshit.

But all the html "how to build a website" tutorials are made to help people make modern, phone-friendly, websites, and step 2 is always "put in all this javascript and copypaste all this shit in."

Where can I find the tutorials that people used to learn to make their geocities sites? I want to learn that style of web design.

It's been a couple years since I've last used it so I can't vouch for its current state but w3schools.com does have full (HTML) references (CSS) and excercises for both HTML and CSS.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole 2]

Yes, I want this only for me. My current idea is to be able to go to 80sdad dot com, be met with a log in/password situation, then proceed to my blog. I thought about keeping it just on my network, but figured there is enough security in a random domain existing on the internet that no one would stumble upon it and try to cause issues.

The fast, reasonably secure and easy solution would be to create a VM on a local (home) machine and VNC/RDP/TV into it.

 

[Least Concern]

It's been a couple years since I've last used it so I can't vouch for its current state but w3schools.com does have full (HTML) references (CSS) and excercises for both HTML and CSS.

W3schools.com has a bad reputation among web devs of being of poor quality and laden with ads. I've heard they've taken steps to address the former problem more recently, but still, I'd recommend checking mozilla.org first any time you want to learn anything.

The fast, reasonably secure and easy solution would be to create a VM on a local (home) machine and VNC/RDP/TV into it.

I know that you're joking but please don't confuse the n00bs.

 

[Aidan]

Alright, I have a stupid question and no one can judge me here. I have a list of requests and am trying to figure out how I want to go about this. Problem is that I am so overwhelmed by all the info out there of something I only have a very basic understanding of and am only learning exactly how much I don't know. I am asking for guidance and suggestions for what exactly I should research deeper. After seeing what we have been through here and how much of my old livejournals have been lost due to photobucket bullshit have made me believe this is the path I should take.

I want to self host a private, personal blog/website and photo gallery on a Raspberry Pi 4 (which I already own). I want to be able to access this site even when I'm not on my network. My instinct is to get a domain and hide it behind some kind of password input, but what do those options look like and is there a better way? I want to routinely back up data to either a separate hard drive or to my PC (or both?). Should I get something like this case with an SSD in it? Is there something similar to CPanel? Would there be an advantage to using something like HomeLab, Sandstorm, or Yunohost? Are those even comparable things? idk.

I'm sure these sound like noob questions, but I promise I'm not tech illiterate. I don't have experience with servers or Linux and I don't want to open myself up to any obvious security issues. Is this something I could do on my own or would it be worth it to have a local computer guy put this together for me?

The simplest thing to do would be to pay for web hosting. You could also set up a VPN into your home network, that's what VPNs were made for.

 

[Gender: Xenomorph]

My PC is acting weird lately.

I can run high tech and more demanding games, but if I open more than two opera tabs or work with browser videos in the background I get sound stuttering, even crashes.

I'm not sure what the problem might be. HDD seem to work fine. GPU seems to work fine. CPU seems to work fine.

Any ideas? What tests should I run?

 

[Alphasnail]

Is it a bad idea to try learning to code? I'm tired of working in restaurants, I'd like to go back to school, but I doubt I could cover my cost of living at this point. I went to college to learn theater, and while I'm really good at some of the things I've done, I can't get by in that culture anymore. I went to school thinking that it would be a place to challenge ideas and learn new things, and it was all a scam. I'm just tired of scrambling around a kitchen all day. I'm tired of working with addicts and sex offenders. I just want a real dignified job. I just spent the last year busting my ass on overtime to make less than my father made as an assistant manager in a grocery store in the 90s and I'm sick of it. Is there a reasonable way to do this?

 

[Kosher Dill]

Is it a bad idea to try learning to code?

I'm just tired of scrambling around a kitchen all day. I'm tired of working with addicts and sex offenders.

It is a bad idea, but at least you'll be working with addicts and sex offenders in an office with a laptop instead of scrambling around a kitchen.

 

[Post Reply]

It is a bad idea, but at least you'll be working with addicts and sex offenders in an office with a laptop instead of scrambling around a kitchen.

Yeah, too many trannies in programming. Go the sysadmin route and work towards becoming a devops engineer.

 

[Alphasnail]

Yeah, too many trannies in programming. Go the sysadmin route and work towards becoming a devops engineer.

I mean realistically how do I go from where I am now, with no experience, to employable? 35000 a year would be a massive life altering improvement, and with my work being in a new field at that point I'd be more than capable of broadening my skillset. It's daunting from the outset, because I don't want to spend free time on this just to find out I learned the wrong things or that the market is so oversaturated that no one will hire me anyway. I've seen that there are a few bootcamps in the area, but I hear I should learn some stuff first. Also the cost of a bootcamp is prohibitively expensive, but with sleazy options for financing, or state sponsored socialist good boy financing. What skills can I learn that will get me the fuck out of restaurants?