A few updates, a few milestones. My magic internet points are growing.
This will be a very short and simple blog post, but as I said in one of the previous ones, my aim for this year is to use this blog also for, well, blogging, and not only elaborate tutorials how to do computer shenanigans. I really like the word shenanigans.
Folding@Home
In the last few weeks I have been occasionally crunching Folding@Home. It’s a nice change of pace after years of doing only BOINC.
So far I’ve reached a nice milestone of 2 million points, and we’ll see how it goes from here.
F@H provided certificate certifying that I crunched 2.1 million points
As I’m used to the BOINC way of life, I found some things with F@H confusing. The web client is a nice touch, and something BOINC could use, but the way headless machines need to be attached to one’s account is not that intuitive.
The fact that it is the system that decides which projects to send and not the user choosing projects is a bit weird, but I guess it’s just a different philosophy, and it can allow for better matching of work units to the available hardware. But the biggest difference in my opinion is that F@H allows only crunching a single task for the CPU and another one for the GPU. In most BOINC projects I’ve seen, you can crunch one task per CPU core, and one or more tasks per GPU. In my Ryzen 3700x times, it was a joy to see 16 Universe@Home tasks being crunched at once.
Finally, in a very similar fashion to for example Einstein@Home, you get a lot, like a LOT more points per hour if you crunch on GPU vs CPU. Of course those are only magical pointless internet points, but still something interesting.
Leaving USA
I have finally migrated all of my self-hosted services from the US servers of RackNerd to the European ones of Hetzner. Looks like it mostly went without a hitch, with the exception of Umami losing some data. I guess it is because I did not pinpoint the version of its Docker container, and the one running on the old server was much older than the one I spun up on the new one. I migrated the PostgreSQL database 1:1 between servers and probably some schema changed between versions and I lost a bit of data, like the history of browser types. Not really an issue, I only collect that data because I like looking at graphs, it’s not used for anything serious.
This article was super useful for me: How to dump & restore a PostgreSQL database from a docker container
The last service to migrate was this exact blog. So now the words you are reading come from Southern Germany. They are best enjoyed with a side of Käsespätzle
Actually, this blog post is the first one that will be sent to the new server. If you see it, that means I correctly reconfigured the Forgejo action that pushes it from my NAS to the VPS.
But what about AWS?
Yes, I am using Cloudfront as the CDN for serving media on this blog. Moving to a European CDN is on my very long todo list.
New services
I started two new services, mostly for fun and learning.
The first one is UptimeKuma. I now have a status page. It’s running on my “dev” server and monitoring the services of the “prod” one. The whole installation, setup, and subdomain configuration process took less than hour. One gets proficient after doing such things tens of times :)
I also started using ntfy. I am selfhosting it on the dev server. It’s running as a systemd service. Recently I started moving away from Docker and started using more of systemd. In contrast to some people on the Internet, I find systemd very practical and easy to use. You know who you are :) For now the only usecase I have for it is that I get a notification every night whether the Borgmatic backup of my GoToSocial instance finished successfully. When I find more usecases for it in the future, the service will be already there.
GoToSocial
A second nice round number is that my GoToSocial instance is now federating with 10 000 other Fediverse instances. 10 000 is OVER NINE THOUSAND! I am so happy to see that the Fediverse is strong, and there are so many independent instances. And 10k is not that high of a number. If I remember correctly, Piotr Sikora, the admin of pol.social said in his talk that that instance is federating with more than a hundred thousand other instances. That is extremely impressive <3
fedi.stfn.pl, home to 6 users who wrote 1716 posts, federating with 10155 other instances
I also reached a thousand followers on my English-speaking/IT account. Actually it happened for the second time, because I lost around ~200 followers when migrating from Fosstodon. Speaking of Fosstodon, they now have a totally new crew, and I wish them smooth sailing from now on.
And that’s basically it, thanks for reading!