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I’ve had this “problem” before, and I did not want to use the full Messenger app for privacy reasons as well. I had installed Messenger Lite, but it was discontinued a few weeks ago. I now have Facebook Lite, which also has Messenger, and you get notifications as well. It’s not perfect, but don’t give it too many permissions and you should be mostly fine. Using it in the browser is absolutely terrible, and you would not get push notifications.

That’s great to hear! There are still some apps on my phone that aren’t taking advantage of it then – or perhaps it has something to do with my custom ROM.

I’m unsure if this is still the case in the latest Android versions, but the terrible camera APIs in 3rd party apps/social media apps is still a big reason why my non-techy friends switched to an iPhone. Even if the quality of pictures using the stock camera app is good, if the photos that come out while using Instagram or Snapchat or whatever kids are using these days are low-quality, they’ll consider moving to an iPhone. Again, I’m unsure if the APIs already exist or if it’s just app developers that are not using them. Either way, there needs to be a push in this direction.

I personally use Firefly-III. It is completely self-hosted (there is no cloud version that I know of), and is quite feature-complete. Their data importer allows you to import transactions directly from your bank (check if you bank is supported, but all European banks are), so you don’t need to create anything manually.

For example, I have the data importer running daily, and then I only have to set the correct category for each transaction, which doesn’t take that long.

I’m in the process of migrating my servers to NixOS. It takes a lot of time and the learning curve is steep, but I have one config shared for all the servers and PCs. I have setup the servers to automatically pull the latest configuration everyday and even restart if there’s a kernel update.

This means I just need to update my laptop and push the changes to the repository, and all the servers will also update.

I haven’t had this setup long enough to know if things will break unexpectedly with updates tho. NixOS has a great feature where you can rollback to a previous configuration (generation) with a single command. You can always keep using containers to isolate updates, if you want (Nix allows you to declare those in the config as well).

As an example, you can take a look at my config.

EDIT: Systemd timers have an option to randomize the time a service runs, I use it all the time. The option for Nix’s config pulling is using systemd timers, so you can use that.

I’ve been using Restic for a while, and it’s backing up to a Hetzner storage box (1TB).

Restic supports encryption, compression, deduplication, and can forget old backups in a spread out timeline (configurable; e.g. save one yearly, three monthly and 7 daily).

On top of this I also use healthchecks.io to make sure all backups are working.

I’ve been wanting to switch to PhotoPrism for a while. Is face/object detection any good, compared to Google Photos? Do you need powerful specs, or can a low-spec machine handle it?

I self-host my own mail server. I don’t send many emails, but they seem to be arriving correctly whenever I do at the moment, but it wasn’t always like this. I’ve properly setup SPF, DKIM and DMARC, which helps a lot, but my IP address was blacklisted on some servers from a previous owner I guess. I have a VPS from OVH. I had to manually fill out some forms to get Microsoft Outlook to accept emails from my server. Despite that, it has been working flawlessly. I have my own domain since 2017, and I’d say the age of the domain is also important.