My father needs a new laptop. And I have one sitting around, that I abuse as a server. A waste of resources and not ideal use case for a laptop. So I took my homeserver, put a ssd inside and gave him a new destiny. My father is happy but I have no cloud anymore 😔. To reserve energy I chose to run the laptop only when I send a wake on lan package to it.

The why and how Ever since the end of the bush era 2008, every Intel chip comes with an embedded subsystem called the intel management engine. Every i3, i5, i7 and i9 processor has this engine. It is a black-box and has access to every peripheral device like RAM, camera, microphone hard drive, … even when the main processor is turned off. Some say this is a backdoor for the NSA, some say this is pure paranoia.

Intro Everyone needs a router in their life. Many don’t care which, some care and pay a lot of money and a few care a lot and pay little. The ideal scenario would be the last option. Today I teach you how. It is easy as pie and costs you about 30-40€. Also as always I’ll include some bonus hacks. Let’s start. GL.iNet a company that produces portable, privacy focused routers running OpenWrt I own a GL.

Shortcut Manjaro Linux with larbs.xyz on dwm and ly as session manager. Ok nerds, now bash me. n00bs keep on reading. Explanation Windows is a bloated, slow, proprietary piece of spaghetti code that is spying on you. Linux is the answer. Even for normies. You can have a nice desktop, great office software and even game with Wine staging or proton. Manjaro Linux is the best distro for people who want cutting edge technology without having a huge headache.

It is a hot summer and my brain is to overcooked to program anything… Suddenly a bright light appears of nowhere and screams at me: “You are a privacy slut! All your files are stored on Google Photos and OneDrive. You are using Gmail and Instagram. DO SOMETHING!”. So I did. I quickly deleted instagram and went from gmail to mailbox.org. But before I could delete all my files from those cloud services I needed an alternative.

Why host your own webserver? Why would you even care about the hassle of setting up your own webserver? Two reasons: It is most likely cheaper than any webhosting package Customizability I have a 2GB Ram VPS on netcup.de and recently was lucky enough to get it on blackfirday for 1,69€ a month. Currently I am hosting a couple of NodeJS applications controlled with PM2, a CouchDB installation and a couple of static sites.

Recently i was asked to configure a TV to automatically turn off and on on certain times and then display content in form of a website. A so called “kiosk screen”. I utilized a Raspberry 3b for this, set up Raspbian and wrote a short bash script that runs as a service on boot up. Part 1: Setup Raspberry Pi In order to have not only terminal output on our screen we need to install the full version of Raspbian, which comes with a GUI.