Uses

Some of the Software that I use on my day to day and I could recommend.

Most except those marked with "⚠️" are OSS. In that case, I'll try to give an OSS alternative anyway.

# Email

• Thunderbird: My desktop email client of choice. I know that the UI used to be outdated and horrible, but it has come a long way recently. If you have not used it in the last couple of years, give it a try!
• ⚠️ PurelyMail: Email hosting service. The pricing model is simply divine: ridiculously cheap and no extra fees for arbitrary nonsense. My two main concerns is that it's all run by a single guy (Hi Scott!) and that it's US-based (so no GDPR). I solve the former by having very good backups and the latter by not thinking about it. If those concern you anyways, mailbox.org and Migadu looked really promising, although they fail on the "extra fees for arbitrary nonsense" aspect.
• addy.io: Anonymous Email Forwarding service. If you are inside the Proton ecosystem, go with SimpleLogin, it'll be basically free. If not, it's clearly missing a "middle" tier in order to push customers into buying Premium, which I find pretty shady. Addy's pricing model avoids this nonsense.
• mbsync: Command for downloading all my email into Maildir using IMAP, which is then backed up using Borg. It requires an afternoon of reading man pages, but works like a charm. Might do a post going through the basic configuration in the future.

"JuSt sElF-HoSt yOuR EmAiL In sOmE ChEaP VpS" – No, thank you, I'm not that crazy.

# Backups

• BorgBackup: What does the heavy lifting in my backup setup. It has many commands with many arguments to learn. As my use case is pretty standard, and I'm not retired yet, I didn't bother learning to use it directly.
• Borgmatic: A config-based backup program built on top of Borg. This is MUCH nicer to use! The documentation has examples for everything, so in the end it's just a matter of taking bits from here-and-there. You can have everything working in a couple of hours.
• ⚠️ BorgBase: Where I host my client-encrypted offside backups. Cheap, GDPR-compliant and has a nice UI that does the job. Cannot ask for more.

# Monitoring

• Uptime Kuma: Beautiful WebUI to monitor the websites and services I maintain. If you would love it to be config-based as me, check out Gatus. Last time I checked, its UI was still too limited and clunky for me though.
• Scrutiny: Another WebUI to monitor, in this case, SSDs and HDDs health in my Home Server. If you don't use something alike, do so right now. I'm sadly talking from experience here...
• DockProm: The monitoring Swiss Army knife for the lazy self-hoster. If you used Grafana before, you know how much of a pain is configuring all this. It's easier to start from here and tweak what's needed.

# Files

• Nextcloud: Where I store my files. If you installed it a few years ago maybe you don't know of Nextcloud AIO. It's a pleasure to use.
• TinyFileManager: An stupidly simple file manager webapp. A bit more clunky than Filegator or File Browser, but it gets the job done. You could argue that I'd be better off with a basic SFTP server, and you'd be right.

# Books

• Calibre Web: Where I store my eBook collection. The WebUI is a bit rough sometimes, but I mostly use it to upload and retrieve eBooks, nothing complicated.
• Calibre Desktop: I use the Desktop program to send the eBooks to my Reader. An integration between Calibre Web, Calibre Server and Calibre Desktop would be a joy, but I never get around to do it.
• Reading Timeline: What a shameless plug, isn't it? In more seriousness, it's what I use to record the books I read (and get a nice diagram for free!).

# Music

• Navidrome: Self-Hosted Music Streaming service. Pretty self-explanatory. If not, check out the demo.
• Maloja: WebUI to visualize your scrobbles (aka. the songs you've listened to). Simply put, like Spotify Wrapped but in a colossal scale. If you are curious, you can actually load all your Spotify history and see an absurd amount of statistics about everything, it's simple and quite fun.
• Multiscrobbler: Allows me to scrobble simultaneously from Navidrome and Spotify into Maloja. Not needed if you just use one of the two.
• ⚠️ Symfonium: Amazingly good Music Player for Android. It's 6€ for life-long license, and it's well worth it. If you want something free (as in beer) and OSS, check Tempo, it's also very good.

# Tasks

I don't want fancy GTD features, just a task list with synchronization support.

• Errands: Simple Desktop Task Manager, part of Gnome Circle.
• Tasks.org: Mobile Task Manager. At first the feature-cluttered UI drove me away. Thankfully everything can be disabled.
• Nextcloud Tasks: Nextcloud App to keep both above in sync using CalDAV.
• Mind: Simple WebApp for setting reminders using push notifications or emails.

# Feeds

• FreshRSS: RSS Aggregator with a great WebUI. It can also be used as a Reader, although I prefer...
• Newsflash: Desktop RSS Reader, part of Gnome Circle.
• Read You: Mobile RSS Reader (don't use it much, tbh).

# Notes

• ⚠️ Obsidian: Note-taking desktop and mobile app. Would love to recommend Joplin in its place, but the UI/UX Obsidian is simply flawless. I don't use any of the fancy features of Obsidian either, it's mostly a pretty Markdown editor for me.
• Syncthing: File syncing program I use for syncing the Markdown notes across devices.

# VCS

• ⚠️ GitHub: Where I upload by public repos. I know that GitLab is OSS and has many more features. My problem is with the latter, it's just overengineered for my use case. Plus, I would need a GitHub account anyway, as I use it in part as a portfolio.
• Gitea: A Git-Hosting WebUI to manage my private repositories. Why don't use Github's? Because this way I can track TODOs with repo issues and be messy about it, without worrying about how it's gonna look when I make it public. Go wild on the discussions with yourself!
• GitNext: Android client for accessing my Gitea instance. I'm always ready to file an issue for that pesky mantainer! (aka. myself).

# Home Server

A lot of what I host on my Home Server is scattered through the previous sections. Here you have some more:

• Homer: A dead-simple config-based Homepage for my services. I actually don't use it much, as I have SSL on all my domains, and it's faster to write the URL (with browser autocomplete, of course). I have a tutorial how to do that here.
• Material for MkDocs: Where I host my internal documentation for the Home Server with a nice WebUI. Is fully documenting an infrastructure that's just managed by myself too much overkill? Yes, of course. What were you expecting?
• Tailscale: Main VPN to access the server remotely. It's more comfortable to use than Wireguard and less buggy than ZeroTier. If you prefer going the Wireguard route, I can recommend WG Easy as a WebUI for your server or wireguard-install if you just want a quick headless installation.
• ZeroTier: Backup and Guest VPN. At the time of installation, Tailscale Free Plan only included a handful of devices and modifying the given IP was not allowed. As needed both features for easily giving restricted access to friends and family to my server, so I chose ZeroTier for that. All in all, not so much of a recommendation, sorry :(.

# Website

• Zola: My SSG generator of choice. Very opinionated in its structure, which may be a bit confusing at first. However, once you understand it (quite easy thanks to great documentation), everything comes very natural and simple.
• Hetzner: My VPS provider. Great prices and polished WebUI. They have datacenters in Europe, which is also a huge plus for me because of GDPR compliance.

# Other

• Ansible: My Infrastructure of Code tool of choice. I use it to orchestrate everything on my servers. I live peacefully knowing that I can erase one of my servers and have it back and running with a single command (and some backup restoration). Learning the basics is not hard thanks to Jeff Geerling's course, which you can follow using my notes.
• Caddy: As you can tell by this post, I'm in love with this Web Server. I slap it over all my web projects.
• Dracula: The theme I used everywhere during my Arch Linux ricing days. Apart from looking great, it has an amazing support. I also really liked Catpuccin, but I discovered it too late.