Tech | I did this!

Fight Enshittification

2025-03-27 Tech Society

My data belongs to me. And I want to own the products I buy.

In 1999, I registered my first domain and have been an early (and young) adopter of the WWW. It was the times of geocities, sourceforge and phpBB where everybody would build their own (private) website, create new forums for their hobbies or chat with tools like ICQ. Blogs and RSS where new formats and “web 2.0” was not even born yet. Later tools shifted more and more to company controlled service like facebook, google or amazon and the 💩 enshittification began.

I’ve seen a lot of services coming and going. The decline often happened because of decreasing quality but what frustrates me the most is the “lock-in”-model and the lack of interoperability. My enthusiasm for open source might be one of the reasons why I strongly advocate against the walled gardens big tech has introduced. And it induced me to use alternatives wherever I can.

Improved Monitoring

2025-02-14 Tech

TL;DR: I am aggregating my monit data with kuma, have an import script with IaC and better notifications.

I’ve been using monit as my primary monitoring tool for years now. It is low on resources, runs on all my relevant systems (mainly debian/ubuntu servers, raspberries) and is able to monitor both exposed services like webservers and internal metrics, e.g. memory or cpu load. And what I really love is the ability to deploy monit via ansible-playbook including set up a webserver with certs and get and store all my configs in files. This way everything is in a source code repository (git) and can be re-used/restored.

But I was never really happy with the notifications and aggregation.