lemmyvore

I took some photos at an event and I need to go through them and get rid of the bad ones (eyes closed, things in the shot, out of focus, blurred etc.) I'm not a pro photographer so no idea where to begin with photo apps. I've used RawTherapee and Gimp a bit.

What app will let me quickly browse the photos and handle (delete/tag) photo formats together (both the RAW and the JPG)?

I'm posting this in selfhosted because Gandi increasing prices actually helped me a lot with being more serious about selfhosting, made me look into things like DNS and reverse proxies and VPN and docker and also ended up saving me money by re-evaluating my service needs.

For background, Gandi.net is a large and old (25 years) domain registrar and hosting provider in the EU, who after two successive rounds of being acquired by investment funds have hiked up prices across the board for all their services.

In July 2023 when they announced the changes for November I was using their services for pretty much everything because I manage domains for friends and family. That means a wide selection of domains registered with them (both TLDs and European ccTLDs), LAMP hosting, and was taking advantage of their free email hosting for multiple domains.

For the record I don't hold the price hike against them, it was just unsustainable for us. Their email prices (~5€/mailbox/mo) are in line with market prices and so are hosting prices. Their domain prices are however exaggerated (€25-30/yr is their lower price now). I also think they could've been smarter about email, they could've offered lower prices if you keep domains registered with them. [These prices include the VAT for my country btw. They will appear lower in USD.]

What I did:

Domains: looked into alternative registrars with decent prices, support for all the ccTLDs I needed, DNSSEC, enforced whois privacy, and representative services (some ccTLDs require a local contact). Went with INWX.com (Germany) and Netim.com (France). Saved about €70/yr. Could have saved more for .org/.net/.com domains with an American registrar but didn't want to spread too thin.

DNS: learned to use a dedicated DNS service, especially now that I was using multiple registrars since I didn't want to manage DNS in multiple places. Wanted something with support for DNSSEC and API. Went with deSEC.io (Germany) as main service and Bunny.net (Slovenia) as backup. deSEC is free, more on Bunny pricing below. Learned a lot about DNS in the process.

Email: having multiple low-volume mailboxes forced me to look into volume-based providers who charge for storage and emails sent/received not mailboxes. I've found Migadu (Swiss with servers in France at OVH), MXRoute (self-hosted in Texas) and PurelyMail (don't know). Fair warning, they're all 1-2 man operations. But their prices are amazing because you pay a flat fee per year and can have any number of domains and mailboxes instead of monthly fees for one mailbox at one domain. Saved €130/yr. Learned a lot about MX records and SPF/DKIM/DMARC.

Hosting: had a revelation that none of the webpages I was hosting actually needed live dynamic services (like PHP and MySQL). Those that were using a CMS like WordPress or PHP photo galleries could be self-hosted in docker containers because only one person was using each, and the static output hosted on a CDN. Enter Bunny.net, who also offer CDN and static storage services. For Europe and North America it costs 1 cent per GB with a $1 minimum/mo, so basically $12/yr since all websites are low traffic personal websites. Saved another €130/yr. Learned a lot about Docker, reverse proxies and self-hosting in general.

Keep in mind that I already had a decent PC for self-hosting, but at €330 saved per year I could've afforded buying a decent machine and some storage either way.

I think separating registrars, DNS, email and hosting was a good decision because it allows a lot of flexibility should any of them have any issues, price hikes etc.

It does complicate things if I should kick the bucket – compared to having everything in one place – which is something I'll have to consider. I've put together written details for now.

Any comments or questions are welcome. If there are others that have gone through similar migrations I'd be curious what you chose.

I'm thinking of putting all my email archive (55k messages, about 6 GB) on a private IMAP server but I'm wondering how to access it remotely when needed.

Obviously I'd need a webmail client but is there any that can deal with that amount of data and also be able to search through To, From, Subject and body efficiently?

I can also set up a standalone search engine of some sort (the messages are stored one per file in regular folders) but then how do I view the message once I locate it?

I can also expose the IMAP server itself and see if I can find a mobile app that fits the bill but I'd rather not do that. A webmail client would be much easier to reverse proxy and protect.

I've repurposed a 32 GB M.2 SATA SSD as a bootable "USB stick" and I'm putting useful tools on it. So far I've got memtest, seatools, gparted live, system rescue, clonezilla, and a live install iso of the distro installed on my PC. What other great bootable tools am I sleeping on?

Hi, I'm trying to find the subtitles for Harmy's "Despecialized" Star Wars remakes and I was wondering if anybody has any ideas. The original website for Project Threepio points at a blog that seems abandoned and an old private tracker (MySpleen) that never opens to public anymore. Even just the English subs would be great (the original pack contained extensive language coverage in DVD format so I was given to understand it was quite large). TIA for any hints.

I need a very simple method for non-advanced users to share each other's screen explicitly when they need help. They're running XFCE on Manjaro and the machines involved are using Tailscale. Edit: SSH access is also available, with key authentication.

I need something super simple because they are remote from me and from each other and any graphical setup will have to be assisted sight-unseen over phone. So ideally just (1) install something (which I can do for them over SSH), (2) pick something from the Applications menu and maybe (3) press a big "START" button.

It's also ok-ish if the remote capability is present all the time and I can connect without their explicit permission, but you can see why it would be best if they did something to enable it...

I've been looking for a solution but all I find is stuff that's way too complicated OR starts a new desktop session instead of showing the current one.

Edited: to clarify I'm not the one who will be remoting-in and to mention SSH is available.

TIA

I've been using Gandi for over 20 years, almost since it was founded. Since being acquired in 2019 by Montefiore Investment and this year by Total Webhosting Solutions their service have become more and more expensive and have finally priced me out.

For context, I administer a bunch of domains, mailboxes and HTML websites for my family and extended family, and I prefer services hosted in the EU because of GDPR and local availability.

This post is meant as a list of practical decisions in 2023 for the small time selfhoster. If anybody wants to comment on what Gandi (or rather TWS) is doing feel free to do so in the comments, I'm curious myself.

Prices I've mentioned use my country's VAT so will vary slightly for you.

Domain names

Domain names have always been a bit on the expensive side with Gandi but they used to include a lot of features for free with them (SSL, DNSSEC, mailboxes, a small static website, WHOIS privacy, local contact for TLDs that need it etc.) and what they added extra was proportional to the base TLD cost.

For the next renewal all my domains were slated to jump to €28 across the board. If you have domains with Gandi try adding some renewals to the cart and check in advance.

I had to look for an European registrar because I have lots of European ccTLDs that the usual suspects like Cloudflare and Porkbun don't support.

I'm moving to INWX.de and will be saving 25-60% per domain. This takes into account WHOIS privacy where needed for an extra 5€/domain (EU ccTLDs are private due to GDPR but we own a couple of TLDs too) as well as local contact services where required (price varies by country).

Email

I manage multiple mailboxes but they have low traffic and low storage requirements. Gandi will be offering them at €55/mailbox/year. I'm not questioning their pricing, 3-4€/month for email is common, but typically charged by email-focused services.

Anyway, this per-mailbox model would price us into hundreds of euros for resources that go 99% unused. I'm switching to Migadu.com, who allows unlimited domains and mailboxes (within common sense) under a single account and charges for the conflated storage space and emails sent/received across all mailboxes.

Migadu tiers start at 20€/year for 5GB and 200/20/day (soft limits).

Webhosting

We were using Gandi's smallest hosting package for about 100€/year, which was slated to jump to €135. Not an outlandish price for your typical PHP + MySQL hosting, especially since it had some VPS-like features. Then again the typical webhosting service would include a couple of mailboxes and some other goodies.

This was a good opportunity for us to reevaluate out hosting needs and realize we can ditch PHP+MySQL (if we really have to revisit it we'll consider VPS offers in the future). It's mostly static sites, image galleries and a bit of blogging. We've cached all our stuff as plain HTML/CSS/images and moved it to BunnyCDN.

Bunny lets you define a file bundle, gives you FTP access with a unique username+password, lets you pick the extent of replication, puts a CDN on top of it, and lets you point a domain name to it. Also throws a bunch of web server-ish features on top like rules/rewrites and Let's Encrypt SSL.

They actually offer more features than that but I've just mentioned the minimum you need for serving a bunch of static websites.

Bunny pricing starts at $0.01/GB (with a minimum of $1/month) and you pay as you go.

Nameservers

Since we're doing this I've taken the opportunity to dab into DNS. Turns out it's not that hard. There's only like half a dozen of commonly used DNS record types and everybody's helping you with them – email services like Migadu generate the email-related ones for you, registrars and managed DNS services generate the SOA for you, they have forms that tell you what fields are needed etc.

There are lots of managed DNS options. Registrars usually include nameservers and let you mess with the records so INWX was one choice. Bunny offers DNS service that integrates with their CDN. deSEC is a completely free service I'll be using as backup.

All of the above also offer APIs so a bash script will be taking care of dynamic DNS.

So I got a notification that Google is going to retire the reminders feature from Calendar and make it a Tasks feature instead.

The only reason I was using Google:s Calendar app was for their reminders (and because they've made it impossible for third party apps to use reminders).

The most important part of reminders for me was the way they worked, by putting up a notification that didn't go away until manually dismissed. Very useful for important stuff like taking a medicine.

Any suggestions for other apps that have similar notifications? It would be great if they were a calendar app, and even greater if they are synced to a calendar over a standard (like CalDAV etc.) so I can self-host it.