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Greetings from western Canada
Name: Jon (JD) Watson
Age: let's just say I was a BBS SysOp before the internet existed.
I mostly post about: day to say stuff. I tend to lean geeky/tecchy and Canadiana, but I think a lot about lots of things and post topics can get pretty random. I keep it clean, mostly, so you can safely check out my content to decide for yourself :)
My hobbies are: journalling (privately, not necessarily online, but there is definitely overlap), writing, nerding out on home tech projects, self-improvement, and caring for my three dogs. If anyone ever asks you how many dogs is too many dogs, the answer is three.
I'm looking to meet people who: are Canadian OR have geeky job/hobbies OR see normal things in deeper ways OR are sane Linux users (AKA, not the alpha-nerd type of boor) AND are tolerant of the incredibly diverse state the world is in AND kind to things and people that can do nothing for them.
My posting schedule tends to be: Dailyish. Usually more than weekly but I doubt I can consistently hit daily.
When I add people, my dealbreakers are: right-wing crap in all its forms, both overt and covert. And, honestly, politics in general. I firmly believe that social media is the worst place to get news or reliably accurate information on anything, and politics has emerged as the most divisive topic to date. Thus, I am not interested in getting involved in political discussions as a general rule.
Before adding me, you should know: I overthink everything and will probably eventually bore you with some deep indepth post about the merits of square toothpicks versus round ones.
Age: let's just say I was a BBS SysOp before the internet existed.
I mostly post about: day to say stuff. I tend to lean geeky/tecchy and Canadiana, but I think a lot about lots of things and post topics can get pretty random. I keep it clean, mostly, so you can safely check out my content to decide for yourself :)
My hobbies are: journalling (privately, not necessarily online, but there is definitely overlap), writing, nerding out on home tech projects, self-improvement, and caring for my three dogs. If anyone ever asks you how many dogs is too many dogs, the answer is three.
I'm looking to meet people who: are Canadian OR have geeky job/hobbies OR see normal things in deeper ways OR are sane Linux users (AKA, not the alpha-nerd type of boor) AND are tolerant of the incredibly diverse state the world is in AND kind to things and people that can do nothing for them.
My posting schedule tends to be: Dailyish. Usually more than weekly but I doubt I can consistently hit daily.
When I add people, my dealbreakers are: right-wing crap in all its forms, both overt and covert. And, honestly, politics in general. I firmly believe that social media is the worst place to get news or reliably accurate information on anything, and politics has emerged as the most divisive topic to date. Thus, I am not interested in getting involved in political discussions as a general rule.
Before adding me, you should know: I overthink everything and will probably eventually bore you with some deep indepth post about the merits of square toothpicks versus round ones.
no subject
Hi! I've added you because of shared interests in indie web, Linux, and home labs. No pressure to add back, but if you want to know about me, my intro post is here.
no subject
Thanks for the follow. We do indeed seem to have some interest overlap. For home labs, I have two things sitting on my shelf that I get ideas for from time to time, but currently they are attracting dust. One is the obligatory raspberry Pi that has been a web server, and DNS server, and a NAS all at various times in its life. The other is a "BeeperBerry" which is supposed to be used to access the Beeper network (think, consolidated instant messaging), but it is a cool linux box in a Blackberry frame including the legendary keyboard so I use it for a variety of things, none of which involve Beeper :)
no subject
Ah cool! I currently have an old tower PC that's dual booted with Window and Linux Mint that I use as a play machine (my daily driver where the important stuff resides is a Mac Mini, and my work computer is a Dell running Windows that's managed by my job so I spend a lot of time jumping between OS). I'm contemplating wiping it and installing Proxmox, but I'm on the fence about all that. There are some things I definitely want to self-host, but I'm at that point where I'm realizing just how intensive this hobby would be, and deciding if I want to move forward.
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Email hosting, then and now, continues to be plagued by anti-spam measures. Getting a mail server running is not that hard any more, but making sure it is configured in such a way that things like sender callbacks work, and making sure the DNS records are set up so that DKIM, SPF, etc. work is another matter. And, if you don't own the IP, then you don't really have direct control over rDNS so you have to hope your host will make that record for you. Then...finally...even if you get all that working a lot of your outgoing email will still get dropped because residential IPs should not be sending email...it's really hard to get all that working, so email is something that I finally gave up on and allow a proper email host to handle that for me.
Web hosting is easy, and of course hosting anything non-mainstream is usually fine. I think the first application I discovered that took over the whole server and gave you a nice UI to work with was ISPConfig, then of course cPanel. Today, I run a YunoHost server. It is a really nice system...stable, maintained, reliable. You could check that out if you wanted to short circuit some of the config nightmares.
Strangely, I have not had a ton of container experience in my career. I use virutalization everywhere, but I guess I have never had that specific infrastructure engineering job where I would have leaned heavily on Terraform and other cloud configs. I do now many people that use Proxmox and love it, so I guess it works.
no subject
My name is Eric and I am into nerdy things like calculator (especially old HP ones and newer boutique ones made by Swiss Micros). I use Linux but also MacOS and Windows, I am a firm believer in practicality and specific-use for software and roll my eyes at anything sounding remotely dogmatic or religious about software with users (I am sure you know what I am talking about).
Vancouver Island I have recently learned has an amazing HAM radio community and this is slowly becoming my new hobby for 2026.
I can't say that I don't talk politics sometimes. But fundamentally I am a Blackadder-type who is sick of both sides. Read somewhere recently a person wrote in a political type post: clowns to the left of me and jokers to the right and I thought that hit pretty well.
I'll leave the adding up to you, if you are interested add me and I will be sure to add back.
no subject
Nice to “meet” someone local. I appreciate niche geekery so I’m definitely adding you back.
Yes…I once was a “actually, it’s GNU LINUX” guy but have aged out of all the silly holy wars about that. I also use the right tool for the job regardless of what it is. These days I work in infosec, though, so that pretty much means Linux because that’s where all the good tools are and also that’s what pretty much the entire internet runs on. But my daily driver is a MacBook although I admit I only use it because it’s “Linux enough” for me. I don’t disparage Windows users, it is just legitimately the wrong tool for most of my work.
So odd and cool that you mention ham radio. I have been looking at getting my license but haven’t done much about it yet. I’m interested a lot in that tooov and will also be pursuing that interest this year. Maybe we can compare notes.