Me being weird
Well I'm coming up on 35 years now. Kind of weird how quickly time flies. With all of my shenanigans with tech lately I thought I would write up a blog post about what I have been up to with my tech.
First, I want to mention how weird I am. Or maybe the word is progressive? If there is a newer better way to do things that rarely anyone does because they have always done it the old way, I usually want to do it. Some examples of this are: IPv6, ActivityPub, using 24 hour time, using UTC time zone on personal devices, RSS, blogs, etc.
In otherwords, I am trying to avoid mainstream things, not because they are mainstream, but because there is a better way to do it and everyone else is complacent with how things are. This is not a problem, I am just weird and pushy in wanting things to change and improve so I am never stagnant but always growing. Hopefully to others this isn't too off putting; I truly don't think badly of others and how they do things. I'm just a tinkerer in every aspect of my life.
Now, my tech. Lately I have been getting into hosting web services lately. It started with a Plex server, but then because I wanted to set up my own hosted Mastodon server so I could have my special username with my domain (@rhett@rogersfam.co if you were wondering). In order for me to do that efficiently I learned how to use Docker. I'm still learning it, but it went from me running Docker alongside Plex on my little Mac Mini server, to getting a NAS and running Docker containers (web services) between the two. Since then I probably have around 20 different services I have spun up, and even more that I have tried and then shut down later.
In the past month or two, I have been obsessed with IPv6. For you non tech people, you probably know what an IP address is. It looks something like this: 192.168.0.1. This is an IPv4 address. There are 4.2 billion possible addresses with IPv4 and with our very connected world, we are already out of usable addresses. IPv6 is a solution to the lack of addresses. An IPv6 address looks like this: 2001:db0:500:5::12. This provides 16^32 different addresses, a number that if I calculate and write out here will go over everyones head including my own. Basically we should never run out of addresses with this new way of doing addresses.
Now if I haven't lost you yet, here is the fun bit. IPv6 has been around for more than 20 years now. But nearly half the internet still runs on IPv4. The main reason for this is a lot of the larger companies that have widely used websites do not support it and don't want to go through all the work it takes to convert everything to IPv6. And then even if they do, they still have to run IPv4 because so many people on the internet still use it. So they have to run two different protocols to do it until everyone uses IPv6.
Ok I will stop talking about IPv6. But it is a good example of a thing that I want to fully support because it is a much better way of doing things, but the world at large just doesn't want to adopt it because things are fine how they are. Fine, but not great. Unfortunately, most people are ok with only fine and don't want to make effort to make things great. This also goes for me wanting to use the internet as originally intended, with people being able to connect to each other through their individual machines and not only through big tech companies (i.e. Apple, Google, Facebook, etc.)
Going back to my services, I am now running a Plex Server, Mastodon, FreshRSS, Gitea, Mealie and I am working on getting a Matrix (private messaging) server, a NextCloud server, and a private DNS (PiHole) server running. On top of that I spin up new macOS and iOS apps more frequently than I can think about, just because I have some new idea.
Hope you enjoyed my not quite so little blog post. I'd love to hear from you so feel free to leave a comment, message me on Mastodon, or email me. Have a great one!