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👩‍💻​ My So Called Sudo Life: Jailbroken Kindle x Windows edition ​

I just used a Windows PC for the first time in 20 years possibly?

Long story short, I typically manage my Kindle 4's contents with a Macbook Air from 2013 that still works wonderfully.

But! The old Air stayed behind in Paris, as I just arrived at my parents' in Italy with my Macbook Air M4. And the Kindle would not mount on it, no matter what I tried (even checking USB connections in Terminal). Last resort: I asked my parents if I could use their PC.

Dad got upset because with the first micro USB cable the computer wouldn't recognize my Kindle... so he launched #copilotai looking for help and I literally screamed "Nooooo I don't want any of that, quit quit quit immediately."

A different cable did the trick, I installed an earlier version of KOreader and it seems to be better... but the books aren't rendering yet, they're all gibberish, so I may have to install Calibre on my parents' PC and re-convert all the books.

Why going through so many hassles? Did you ever see how gorgeous Simple UI is for KOreader? A total game changer.

Sorry for the GitHub link, but it's either this or Reddit or YouTube, so choosing the "lesser evil" (debatable, I know):

🔗​: https://github.com/doctorhetfield-cmd/simpleui.koplugin

I'll share photos as soon as I get it to work... it already took me upwards of 6 hours to get KUAL and koreader to install on my ancient Kindle. Nobody is stopping me now, I'm super super motivated to get it to work 😅​

#MySoCalledSudoLife #NoAI #Microslop #Kindle #KindleJailbreak #koReader #SimpleUI

Hello Fedi friends. Sorry if I've been a little MIA but I've been preparing my most important presentation to date advocating for the Fediverse... happening tomorrow morning.

Happy and excited and nervous... it's one for the memory books... (and a secretive one at that!) I'll share more as soon as I can 💖​

A very #MySoCalledSudoLife day.​ This morning I:

1. Created my first cron job (I will look into systemd timers this weekend, just in case)

2. I bought a Heltec v3 kit - so I can try off-grid mesh communication when I'm at my parents' in Italy later this month

Thanks for all your help and advice with cron jobs! I really appreciate 🙏

#AskFedi: is there a script / way to automate the restart of dnsmasq every 24 hours… on a VPS that runs on Debian 12?

(Funny how this would have sounded like a foreign language to me a mere year ago) 😆

Update: THANK YOU for the cronjob recommendation. Now looking for a tutorial that’s easy to follow for a newbie like me 😅

I really appreciate all the advice, YOU’RE THE BEST 🏆

#MySoCalledSudoLife

So yesterday I bought @b0rk's amazing zine "How DNS works."

My printer somehow messed up the job and ended up printing LOTS of extra copies... my 5-year-old saw pages lying around and asked if she could use them. I said sure.

She's been coloring them for the past 10 minutes and asked me who made the illustrations. I said "Julia Evans". My child asked me: "Are you friends?" and I had to explain to her that no, we are not friends. Sick burn from my child: "Why?" and "I have more friends than you. 26 at school!"

Then: "Which language is this in?" and "Can you translate what it says?"

So I have the honor of explaining DNS to my child.

And now she's expressly asking me to send the photo of her coloring to Julia. So here it is, with Julia tagged since she has DMs muted from people she doesn't follow 😅​​

just leaving this here...

🔗​: https://bsky.app/profile/jay.bsky.team/post/3micqcyeawc2g

#Bluesky #SameOldSameOld #OpenWashing #NoAI #AIcritic

Oh happy day!

First time in a week I can use GoToSocial without restarting dnsmasq 🥳​

This is not at all a problem with GoToSocial (to be clear I LOVE it and have zero complaints). It was just a matter of increasing dns-forward-max from 150 to 300.

The #YunoHost Forum is always a fantastic place to find solutions. ​ recommended, thank you @yunohost     ​ 💖​

🔗​: https://forum.yunohost.org/t/strange-dnsmasq-logs-cant-post-on-gotosocial-unless-i-manually-restart-dnsmasq/41953

#MySoCalledSudoLife

I've spent 3 days combing through system logs... 1000% NOT recommended as a way to have a nice day ​

On the upside it's cool to see how comfortable I am moving around terminal. I always have a lot of fun with CLI ​

Oh the highs and lows of #MySoCalledSudoLife 🥲

In 10 minutes I leave the house to pick up my little one from pre-school and I look forward to the next few hours away from my computer. Bliss!

I just posted a message on #YunoHost's support forum and noticed this label next to my name: "Honorary muse" – who did this, LOL? 😳​

Thank you @yunohost I'm honored 🥰​❤️​

Just a regular morning, upgrading my #YunoHost system packages in Terminal via #tmux 🤗​

(thanks again @teapot_ben and @drfyzziks - I'll stop tagging you now, I promise, but I'm just so grateful for your advice)

#3GoodThings:

🎤​ Yesterday morning I attended @aprilorg's Conférences éclairs. It was amazing to reconnect with Isa and see inspiring presentations, like Natacha's work on @lessanspages, Éric Le Bihan's #Linux4All, @julie's talk about #Strapi, @bookynette's talk on "what kind of volunteer are you?" and the closing presentation by Olivier Deiber on "Repairing the Future."

🔗​: https://wiki.april.org/w/Assemblee_generale_28_mars_2026

🎨​ In the afternoon we took our 5-year-old to the #Louvre Museum for the first time, she'd been obsessed with the Mona Lisa for 2 years and it was amazing to show her the original... as well as other paintings by Leonardo.

🎟️​ Grateful that I had signed up for the Amis du Louvre (their annual membership program) so we were able to skip the lines to go in (200 people in front at least). And now I can take my little one to the Louvre whenever I want, since it's free for people under 18. So cool!

As a new, very green, very basic sysadmin, something missing from the manual vs. let’s ask a LLM mode is… the human element.

Aside from ethical considerations (environmental costs, stolen training data, erosion of skills and critical thinking), I will always choose “manual mode.” Why? I love receiving tech advice from people on the Fediverse.

I will forever remember that it’s @ilja who encouraged me to start self-hosting with #YunoHost.

I first heard about #FreeBSD from @stefano

Earlier this week I learned about #tmux from @teapot_ben and @drfyzziks

Today @antoine_ali helped me get this GoToSocial instance to federate again by restarting dnsmasq.

I know if I run into issues I can just shoot a DM to my tech mentors @stereo and @jan

Let’s not forget the beauty of human connections 💖

testing testing... I have issues with broken federation for this account 😭​

hopefully things are working now. if you see this please like or reply

Update: it seems to be working again!!! MAJOR THANKS TO @antoine_ali who recommended I restart dnsmasq to fix the problem 🏆​ I owe you big time!!! ❤️​​

Oh happy day!

This newbie #sysadmin is VERY HAPPY because in less than 5 minutes I:

• installed tmux (thank you for the recommendation & instructions @teapot_ben and @drfyzziks)

• upgraded PeerTube from Terminal using tmux

now the stakes weren't super high because I did this for my second VPS which is running test apps... the real challenge will be to do this on my primary VPS and my in-production PeerTube instance.

Grabbing another coffee, taking a VPS snapshot and trying this.

As always THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT AND ENCOURAGEMENT. I couldn't do this without you 💖​

Oh but the larger point in this message was to vouch for tmux - it really is super beginner friendly. I know NOTHING and I was able to easily install it and use it. So you could recommend it to your normie friends for sure ☺️​

#MySoCalledSudoLife #YunoHost

THIS IS A POST IN PRAISE OF SNAPSHOTS.

My PeerTube upgrade was a horror show: lost server connection during the upgrade and then PeerTube was automatically removed from my YunoHost server... the routine backup by YunoHost of PeerTube didn't restore... in short: bad, very bad outcome.

I hyperventilated for a few minutes and then... hit "Restore" on the VPS snapshot I had captured before the maintenance operation and... everything went back to normal.

Heart still beating a little fast but I am in AWE of the powers of SNAPSHOTS, ouf.

#sysadmin #MySoCalledSudoLife

Updating my PeerTube (from v. 7.1.1 to 8.1.3)... saying a little prayer that it will all go smoothly (for the sake of my Fediverse intro video). I love that #YunoHost creates backups before upgrades...

Anyway, VPS snapshot, then upgrade... all fingers and toes crossed

The first ten minutes I spent on social media this morning made me feel all kinds of things. Why is it that people who routinely use LLMs are so loud and brash and proud, making these tools appear as essential and inevitable?

A post by a dev whose app I use said something along the lines of: "no use exercising your coding skills, AI is too good now, you can't compete with it anyway".

Another post by a user on an instance I try to engage with wrote - literally: "tired of overthinking every decision?" and then disclosed he had created an AI that will "run a weighted decision matrix so you don't have to." In all seriousness.

What is this dystopian world where human qualities are devalued, critical thinking is discarded and surveillance capitalism is ignored at the altar of AI worship?

If they are loud and proud, maybe so I can be too... but in the opposite direction.

This weekend I will start the MIT's Missing Semester class (the 2020 Lectures, so pre-AI) because in this brave new world hyping up techno-fascist LLMs, knowing the basics of code are essential IMHO.

So my March "project" will be a deep dive in MIT's Missing Semester and my April project will be off-grid mesh radio communication.

What about you, what are you doing to resist?

Special props to @emilymbender @cwebber and @tante for being outspoken on these issues... you're my beacons of hope

#NoAI

Dear Fedi friends,

Thank you for yesterday's responses to my toot asking for advice. I went out with family, then had a call, then dinner and by the time I checked my phone before bed I had something like 71 new mentions filled with superb tips. I really appreciate.

Now, TWO THINGS:

1) I have been waiting for this day for a year now. The perfect opportunity to use my custom emoji ​ as in: please no more advice, I'm a little maxed out as it is, I have 2 years of resources to occupy my time.

2) I will probably compile a summary of the advice in a blog post for #MySoCalledSudoLife series so it can be useful to others. With credit obviously 🙏​

Thank you so much for your generous help and have a great day!

​ ​ ​ ​

Dear Fedi friends,

The normalization of "vibe coding" in certain environments is pushing me in the exact opposite direction.

I, a normie (ok maybe a semi-technical person), would like to learn some basic computer programming*.

*** Update at 10pm ***

I’ve been offline for the past 6 hours and I checked my notifications before going to sleep: 71 new mentions 😳 thank you for all your generous advice, I’ll respond one-by-one tomorrow morning. Good night! ❤️

****

I need some advice about where to start because I'm a little clueless in this regard. Maybe it will help to share my goals, so that you can tailor your advice:

1) I'd like to become much more proficient using CLI... so that one day for example I could migrate a #YunoHost app to a new server without breaking anything

2) I'd like to be able to confidently run remote backups with rsync

3) Security: I need to learn how to turn my VPS or Raspi into a fortress

4) Eventually I'd like to learn #FreeBSD

Where does one even start?

I'm based in Paris, France, speak French, English and Italian, but remote learning is preferable because my child is in school only 4 days a week and has 2-week holidays every 6 weeks of school (thanks to the French educational system, don't ask me).

I'm super motivated to learn all these things, I just don't know where to start.

*Edit: maybe I'm just dreaming of becoming a proficient sysadmin

#AskFedi #MySoCalledSudoLife #NoAI

Good morning Fedi friends!

Monday mornings mean: my weekly ritual of manually backing up my #YunoHost installation (my VPS does automatic daily backups of the whole VPS, but I say: better safe than sorry).

This latest backup is pretty big, because of my increased use of #NextCloud. So in reverse order, from biggest to smallest we have:

1) #GoToSocial : 5.8 GB
2) #PeerTube : 4.3 GB
3) #NextCloud: 3.7 GB
4) #Pixelfed : 1.6 GB
5) #LinkStack : 92 MB
6) #Fail2Ban : 362kb

Happy #selfhosting everyone! And in case you missed it, my self-hosting guide for newbies via YunoHost is available here: https://blog.elenarossini.com/a-newbies-guide-to-self-hosting-with-yunohost/ (with 4 articles so far).

Have a great week everyone!

#MySoCalledSudoLife