I’ve been slowly building out more self-hosted services at home, and one of the tools that has surprised me the most is Tailscale.
It’s one of those services that I understood conceptually before I really understood why I wanted it.
For a long time I avoided putting analytics on The Drew Archive. Not because I didn’t want to know whether anyone was reading, but because I didn’t want to build a site around collecting data on its visitors.
I have always had a soft spot for owning my own infrastructure. That goes back to my love for the open-source community.
These days, though, I do not have the time or freedom to go all in on open source the way I once might have. I am simply not in that phase of life anymore. And yes, I know that is partly because I have grown used to proprietary tools.
Comments are now live on The Drew Archive.
Until now, publishing here has mostly been one-directional. I could write an article, and readers could respond somewhere else—by email, in a private message, or on whichever platform happened to link to it. Those responses were useful, but they were separated from the article that prompted them.
I recently installed Hermes Agent on my Mac mini, where I already run OpenClaw.
OpenClaw has been stable and reliable for my use cases. I can reach it through Telegram when I am away from my computer, ask it to work on hobby projects, and use it as an always-available agent hosted at home.
I recently set up something I have wanted for a while: a hybrid AI agent system where my everyday agent can use both cloud models and a local model running on my own hardware.
Originally published on 2022-07-10.
Drew’s Web-Based Feed Aggregator # I created an instance of Yarr and wrote about it here as part of the archive’s record. RSS aggregators are the tool you should be using if you want to stay up to date with many different websites. Rather than visiting the web page directly you can follow a site’s RSS feed and be notified when a new article is published. RSS aggregators make news-aggregating applications and websites largely unnecessary, and they are better because they are not curated to push agendas or targeted news articles.
Originally published on 2022-07-10.
Drew’s Private Search Engine # Now hosted locally as a service. I have created an instance of SearXNG that is up and running, fully self hosted on my server.
Originally published on 2021-10-23.
Drew’s Library Server # I created an instance of Calibre/Calibre-Web and wrote about it here as part of the archive’s record.
Originally published on 2021-10-01.
Drew’s Video Conferencing Server # Jitsi Now hosted locally as a service. I created an instance of Jitsi and wrote about it here as part of the archive’s record.
Originally published on 2021-09-12.
Generate Atom or RSS feeds # In the spirit of building my own platform I created an instance of RSS-Bridge and wrote about it here as part of the archive’s record.
Originally published on 2021-08-17.
The case for why when given the choice between independence and dependence the default should be to choose independence # When given the option to choose between independence and dependence the defacto choice should be to choose independence, NOT dependence. Sadly, we (the collective American Consoomer) have that backwards. We have grown accustomed to trading away our independence, be that our privacy, personal data, or in many cases our very capacity to think independently. We trade it away for shiny new products that come with the promise of convenience. I say that last part somewhat tongue in cheek because corporations know what sells and employ a standing army of marketers who will sell you on why you need this new product or feature. If they do not get to you first then the dragnet of Youtube Tech Dorks will sell you on the idea with their latest Tech Review upload.