Computers

As you may have guessed from the existence of this website, I am fairly tech-minded. I enjoy tinkering with computers and software. Somehow, I’ve picked up the hobby of self-hosting things, meaning I try to run services on my own computers, instead of using some online service. For instance, instead of using a Dropbox account, I have a NAS in our office which gives me access to my files. In fact, this website used to be hosted on a Raspberry Pi 4. I now switched to a VPS (i.e., someone else’s PC), because there is less chance this website goes down when I do something stupid. The VPS hosts this website, plus some other services. The raspberry is still at home, quietly sitting in the back of a cupboard, running even more services. These other ‘services’ are stuff like a personal wiki (using 'Dokuwiki' - this website is secretly also a Dokuwiki by the way!), and a personal Google photos alternative ('Immich'). Of course these things are all very useful, but I could have just used a (free) online service instead. The reason I host these myself is because it gives me a little better control over my data, and, maybe even more importantly, I enjoy the setting-up and playing with these things.

I have never received much training (apart from a 6ects “Programming in Python” course in my BSc), so I am mostly self-thought. I am not sure how (or why) this started, but it made for a good COVID induced hobby. If you want to know more about my tinkering, take a look at the pages below.