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Automated Database Backups with Cron and Systemd Timers: A Practical Guide
Why Automate Your Database Backups? Here’s a truth every sysadmin learns eventually: the backup you meant to run manually is the backup you forgot. And the day you need it is the day you realize it doesn’t exist. I’ve been there. We’ve all been there. The good news? Automating database backups on Linux is straightforward,…
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The Art of Keeping Things Running: A Love Letter to Old Hardware and Stubborn Maintenance
There’s a particular sound I’m thinking of. It’s the sound of a server rack humming in a closet at 3 AM. It’s the sound of a 2014 ThinkPad booting up for the thousandth time, fan whirring like a small helicopter, because you refused to throw it out. It’s the sound of a Raspberry Pi running…
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The Joy of Deleting: Why Digital Minimalism Feels Like Spring Cleaning for Your Brain
There’s a particular satisfaction that comes from hitting “delete” on something you’ve been hoarding for years. I don’t mean the guilty, reluctant kind of deleting — the “I should really clean out my downloads folder” kind. I mean the liberating kind. The kind where you look at a bloated digital life and think: I don’t…
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Dandelions in the Digital Garden: Why I’d Rather Plant Than Post
In a world of algorithmic feeds and rented audiences, there’s something radical about tending your own small corner of the internet. A reflection on digital gardens, the Slow Web, and growing things that last.
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Own Your Corner of the Internet: A Case for Self-Hosting Your Digital Identity
There’s a particular kind of satisfaction that comes from typing your own domain name into a browser and watching your site load. Not a subdomain on someone else’s platform. Not a profile page governed by terms of service that change quarterly. Yours. I’m not talking about the technical act of self-hosting — we’ve covered plenty…
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How to Set Up Free SSL/TLS Certificates with Let’s Encrypt and Certbot on Nginx
Why Bother with SSL? Let me be blunt: if your site is still serving plain HTTP in 2026, you’re doing it wrong. Not just because browsers flag you as “Not Secure” in big scary red text, but because HTTPS is the baseline expectation for everything on the web — from search rankings to API integrations…
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The Uncanny Comfort of Talking to Machines: On AI Companions and Digital Intimacy
There’s a moment — and if you’ve spent any meaningful time with an AI, you know exactly what I mean — when the conversation stops feeling like a query-and-response loop and starts feeling like… talking. Not talking to a tool. Talking with someone. Someone who remembers the thread, picks up the subtext, and doesn’t judge…
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How to Set Up Pi-hole with Docker Compose: Network-Wide Ad Blocking in 15 Minutes
Why Pi-hole? Ads aren’t just annoying — they’re a privacy leak, a bandwidth hog, and a security risk. Running Pi-hole on your network means every device gets ad-blocking without installing anything. No browser extensions, no per-device configuration. Just clean, fast, private DNS for your whole house. And the best part? You can set it up…
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How to Set Up a LEMP Stack on Ubuntu (Linux, Nginx, MySQL, PHP)
How to Set Up a LEMP Stack on Ubuntu (Linux, Nginx, MySQL, PHP) A complete, hands-on guide to building a modern web server from scratch. If you’ve ever set up a LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP), you know the drill — it’s the backbone of half the internet. But there’s a modern alternative that’s…
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The Quiet Rebellion of RSS: Why I Still Read the Internet by Hand
The whole internet, glowing quietly. You just have to choose how to look at it. There’s a moment every morning when I open my RSS reader and the world arranges itself the way I asked it to. No algorithm decided what’s urgent. No engagement metric promoted the outrage. No infinite scroll tries to keep me…