Danie

Healthchecks.io emails me when my automation jobs don't run We all “should” have scheduled backups running, and sometimes other automated tasks as well. In some cases you may see an error popup, but often it is just an e-mail to say the task has run. The problem is often we don't bother to check that daily e-mail properly, or we don't miss one of the e-mails out of the five that arrive daily for different tasks. This is where open source Healthchecks.io comes in. It is an online service for monitoring regularly running tasks such as cron jobs. It uses the Dead man's switch technique: the monitored system must “check in” with Healthchecks.io at regular, configurable time intervals. When Healthchecks.io detects a missed check-in, it sends out alerts. Whilst you can self-host it with unlimited functionality, it can be a concern if your own hosting goes offline. They do have a generous 20 checks plan which you can use for free though to monitor from outside your services. It is as simple as creating a check, getting the unique link for that check, and appending a command string at the end of any cron commands, or in a bash script you may be running. I'm still in the process of tweaking mine, but I'm hoping to move away from the 5 daily mails I get after cron jobs have run, and rather now only receive a mail when there is a problem to be looked at. Healthchecks.io can now classify HTTP pings from clients as start, success, or failure signals by looking for specific keywords or phrases in the HTTP request body. They've been going for 10 years now, with over 40,200 free accounts, and just under 51 million pings per day. Luckily they have paid accounts bringing in over US$18,300 monthly to sustain the business (hosting costs real money). See

XDA

Healthchecks.io emails me when my automation jobs don't run

This monitoring tool alerts you instantly when your critical automation jobs fail silently.

or their site at

Healthchecks.io

Healthchecks.io – Cron Job Monitoring

Simple and efficient cron job monitoring. Get instant alerts when your cron jobs, background workers, scheduled tasks don

#technology #opensource #monitoring

6 things RAID does not protect you from “Among new NAS buyers, and perhaps even older users too, RAID is one of the most misunderstood aspects of network storage. In a multi-drive setup, you have RAID in place, so you are covered in case one of the drives dies. That's the promise RAID sells, and it delivers on that very specific promise as well. The problem starts when you expect it to do more than it's supposed to. It is not a safety net for everything. The sooner we realise that, the better it will be. If you wait until the last moment or until an incident occurs, it will be too late to correct course. While RAID may be good for one thing, it just cannot protect you from many of the things that actually cause data loss in the real world. Here are some examples.” An article well worth reading before diving into buying a RAID setup, especially as a RAID setup often costs lot more money than two three drives doing rsync backups. A RAID is good for real-time redundancy. If a drive fails, the other/s carry on going without issues. You can replace that failed drive, and just rebuild the RAID. But RAID drives also all work hard as they are all constantly being written to. There is something to be said for having a second drive, and just doing a daily rsync backup to that drive. That second drive only needs to spin up once a day to receive updated or new files, and delete removed files. This not only extends that drive's life, but you can restore any mistakenly deleted files too. When your primary drive fails (anything up top around 5 or 6 years) you can actually use the backup drive as the primary drive. It just takes a bit more configuration effort to point to it (but that could be about 5 minutes of effort). I've had to do this once, so I know it is fully possible. See

XDA

6 things RAID does not protect you from

Redundancy feels like safety, until the wrong thing goes wrong

#technology #backups #RAID #selfhosting

FavBox is an open source browser extension that enhances and simplifies bookmark management without cloud storage or third-party services It extends your browser's native bookmarking features. Key features: 🔄 Syncs with your browser profile 🔒 No third‑party data sharing. No ads. No tracking. 🎨 Minimalist, clean UI 🏷️ Tag support for easy organisation 🔍 Advanced search, sorting, and filtering by tags, domains, folders, and keywords 🌁 Multiple display modes 🌗 Light and dark themes 🗑️ Detects broken and duplicate bookmarks ⌨️ Hotkeys for quick search access 🗒️ Local notes support ❤️ Free and open source Something I found very useful with this extension is it quickly showed me all the duplicate bookmarks I have as well as one's with broken links, so I could clean those up. The extension is available for Chromium based browsers right now, but there is work in progress for a Firefox version too. See

GitHub

GitHub - dd3v/favbox: 🖤 FavBox is a local-first experimental browser extension that enhances and simplifies bookmark management without cloud storage or third-party services.

🖤 FavBox is a local-first experimental browser extension that enhances and simplifies bookmark management without cloud storage or third-party s...

#technology #browsers #bookmarks #opensource

SSD thumb drives could be better than cheap USB flash drives “Instead of getting a cheap but very sluggish flash drive, consider buying a USB SSD that looks like a regular thumb drive but is way faster and only slightly more expensive.” I haven't bought a cheap flash drive for quite a while, so did not really realise these SSD thumb drives were available. But they look worthwhile considering especially if the data volumes are a bit more. They are certainly a lot more compact and mobile than carrying around whole external SSD drives. See

How-To Geek

Please stop buying standard USB flash drives in 2026

Don't buy a plain old USB flash drive, buy this instead

#technology #storage

Make Jellyfin look like Spotify and Plex: 5 clients you need to install “Are you looking for a better way to enjoy content from your Jellyfin server? There are tons of clients to choose from made by passionate volunteers, and each brings a unique experience.” What I love about these types of apps, is that it leaves your Jellyfin untouched in the background. These are all different front ends, and you can switch between them without losing history of what you've watched, faved, etc. So test away. Interestingly too, some will run from inside a browser tab too, so no need to even install, although some additional codecs and methods are supported by the dedicated desktop app. Apps covered are: * Finamp * Fladder * Feishin * Void * Wholphin See

How-To Geek

Make Jellyfin look like Spotify and Plex: 5 clients you need to install

These fan-made Jellyfin clients totally redefined my home media server

#technology #jellyfin #opensource

FireWally Is A Great Firewall App for Mac, and It's Free “Most people haven't actively managed a firewall in at least a decade, assuming they ever have. But keeping track of which applications are using the internet—and how much data they're using—is still useful at times, as is blocking apps from accessing the net entirely.” Yes free on a Mac is a feature! But despite that, it could be a useful app especially when roaming. It is for Mac only though. The linked article also has a link to the page in the app store to get the app. See

Lifehacker

This Is the Best Firewall App for Mac I

FireWally is a free Mac firewall app that lets you manage data access from the menu bar.

#technology #security

Jack Dorsey’s Bitchat App Sees Downloads Spike in Uganda Over Internet Shutdown Worries “Recently, the app drew attention during Nepal’s Gen Z protests, where it supported protesters in overthrowing the government. On September 4, authorities banned 26 platforms, including Facebook, X, YouTube, and Signal, to curb demonstrations against nepotism and a digital tax. Downloads jumped from 3,000 to 50,000 daily, with 48,000 in Nepal alone on September 8, equating to 38% of global installations. Users leveraged Bitchat’s mesh networking capabilities, with each node extending reach up to 30 meters in crowded areas, to organise marches that culminated in arson at the parliament building and the regime’s fall.” Bitchat is a decentralised peer-to-peer messaging application that operates over Bluetooth mesh networks. No internet required, no servers, no phone numbers. This also means ideally you want to have installed it BEFORE any outages. It is an open source and offline mesh chat application, which means each device acts as both client and server, automatically discovering peers and relaying messages across multiple hops to extend the network's reach. It is similar to what Meshtastic does with license-free radio. There is zero registration required, and therefore it is also not easy to identify anyone using it. It does now also have Geohash channels, where someone on that channel will extend it to the Internet, if available. The Internet side can use the Tor network if available. Broadcast messages are public, but if you know someone's handle on Bitchat, you can chat with full end-to-end-encryption. It has an interesting feature to emergency delete all chats, keys, etc when you triple tap on the app title. And apart from protests and censorship resistance, it is also ideal for any natural disasters where infrastructure has been knocked out. The app runs on iOS as well as Android. See

Gizmodo

Jack Dorsey’s Bitchat Sees Downloads Spike in Uganda Over Internet Shutdown Worries

Ugandans have good reason to believe there will be a blackout soon.

and get the app at

bitchat

#technology #opensource #decentralised #protests #disasters

5 costs of self-hosting that nobody talks about I can attest to all of these reasons. Just today and yesterday I've been solving an issue with my docker networks grabbing 192.168.x.x addresses ranges (after the upgrade to OMV8 overwrote the daemon.json file I'd customised to prevent this). And two days before that I was having mysterious freezes on my server which “eventually” came down to a cheap Chinese 2A power supply to one of my RAID disks (well I'll know for sure after a new ATX power supply arrives tomorrow). So, yes you do save subscription costs, but you spend more time diagnosing issues, additional costs upgrading hardware, and taking your data in your own hands. I still think it is worth it, but to be honest, it may really not be a cost saver at all. If I think of what I've spent on server hardware, UPS devices, additional NAS drives, a network cabinet, a firewall and switches that support VLANs, a VPS hosted service, etc. I'm suspecting if I put that US$900 or so aside and just used it for subscription services, maybe I'd still have money left ;-) Some services, like my password manager and todo list manager, I do actually pay for cloud services, because they are absolutely critical and cannot be down. But there is also the fun factor to self-hosting, as well as having home services up when the Internet is offline. See

XDA

5 costs of self-hosting that nobody talks about

Self-hosting is awesome, but few veterans mention these potential downsides

#technology #selfhosting

Stop Using Your Keyboard and Start Using Handy, a Free Speech-to-Text App “In recent years AI models like Nvidia's Parakeet and OpenAI's Whisper, both open source, have made great strides in turning human voices into text. Both excel at correctly adding things like punctuation and capitalisation, and you can run them right on your computer. The problem? They're both a little complicated to set up. That's where Handy comes in. This is a dead-simple, totally free application that can set up either of these models on your computer and give you a keyboard shortcut to use it.” So whilst Handy may work well on some other desktop environments on Linux, I had quite a few issues trying to get it to work on Wayland. For a start, I had to run an environment variable before it would actually even display the window (WEBKIT_DISABLE_DMABUF_RENDERER=1 ). The suggestion to use wtype for the paste insertion did not work for me under Wayland at all as it gave this: `[ERROR] Failed to paste transcription: wtype failed: Compositor does not support the virtual keyboard protocol`. I had to use the one called dotool. When I tried to use the direct paste method, it kept chopping off the first character, but did insert it where it was supposed to be. In the end, I found the best thing that actually worked was to use no paste method, and I just press control V myself after I finished speaking. So for this to work, you also want to change the setting for Clipboard Handling from Don't Modify to Copy to Clipboard. It's really not ideal, but I must admit, I suppose if you've got quite a bit that you need to type, then it actually can be quicker to use handy and just do one or two basic edits. For other types of text entry though, it might still be better to be able to have that precise control you have when typing on a keyboard. For other types of text entry though, it might still be better to be able to have that precise control you have when typing on a keyboard. I've actually dictated this post using Handy to enter the text here. And I must say that the grammar and everything is quite precise with all the commas in the right places and so on. So yes, it can actually save you a bit of time. Even when you need to pause to think, it actually removes that, or should I say, just dictates it correctly without the pauses. So for me that's quite handy because I pause quite a bit to think sometimes, and that might not work with some voice dictation, especially if they think you've got to the end you know of your sentence. But also from this you can see it does become a bit long-winded when you're thinking aloud. So still I probably might just revert to anyway just using my keyboard for text entry. But your mileage may vary. There are versions offered for Windows, macOS, and Linux. See

WIRED

Stop Using Your Keyboard and Start Using This Simple, Free Speech-to-Text App

It’s called Handy, and it uses AI models to accurately convert your speaking voice into text—all for free.

and their GitHub project at

GitHub

GitHub - cjpais/Handy: A free, open source, and extensible speech-to-text application that works completely offline.

A free, open source, and extensible speech-to-text application that works completely offline. - cjpais/Handy

 #technology #opensource #dictation

This New Android Smartphone Is For Everyone Who Misses the Blackberry — And Has A Hidden Advantage Everyone is covering how this device works in tandem with your existing phone, and are not really emphasising that this can also work as a standalone device with its own SIM card. But be that as it may, for me the bigger thing in modern times is, this useful companion device could be snatched by mobile phone thieves, and you'd still have your main device safely in your pocket or bag. It's often the data that is worth more than the cost of the device. Yes, that's the bigger reality of today, with so many walking around and using their phones on the go. I very rarely actually field any voice calls nowadays as most of the phone interaction is done on social media posts, Signal, etc as texting. A bonus for many may also be that it has a 3.5 mm headphone jack (although I've long been using a USB-C to 3.5 mm jack plug on my phone). See

Lifehacker

This New Android Smartphone Is For Everyone Who Misses the Blackberry

Clicks Communicator is a BlackBerry-like smartphone with a physical keyboard. There's also the Clicks Power Keyboard, which is a power bank wi...

#technology #smartphones #theft