Now through early 2022 will be an exciting time for Big Bad Tech. Since this is a newsletter rather than a blog (for now), I thought it would be good to have everything I have planned listed out in one place. So, here it is:
Building a Home Server
The big announcement is that I’ll be creating a series of tutorials on building a home server. While you don’t need a home server to follow along with the rest of Big Bad Tech, having one means you have a dedicated machine for the work that’s easy to upgrade - something you’ll really appreciate as you begin to run out of storage space.
There’s really no limit to the customization and detail when doing something as big as building a computer, but to narrow things down for those who just want something working, I’ll be focused on writing guides to help you:
Decide if building a home server is going to be the best choice for you
Choose parts
Assemble the machine
Install an operating system (I’ll be using Ubuntu Server, a Linux distribution so it’s both free and open source)
Set up Sambashare for easy file access
Get a server proxy running
Configure your router to get access to your server
Purchase a domain name for access to your machine from anywhere
Set up services on your machine using Docker
If you aren’t interested in doing this much work, you can still follow along on some of the later material, but from personal experience, I didn’t start to get the sense that I was truly independent from big tech companies until I could run comparable services out of my own home and access them from miles away.
Reviews
Whether you follow along on the server build or you just want to get some replacement software installed on your laptop or desktop, there’s a lot of high quality, free, open source software out there to consider. So much that it might be too confusing to get started.
Big Bad Tech will always have software reviews, but in the coming months I want to focus on note-taking software that can help replace big tech options like Microsoft OneNote. You’ll see reviews on these, and possibly more:
Joplin
WikiJS
Tiddlywiki
Bookstack
MediaWiki
There will also be a comparison at the end to give you an idea of which one to choose given what you need it to do.
Understanding Why
I wrote an article a few weeks ago on why I think plain text is so important and why we should prefer it when we can to proprietary forms of data. Just above, I mentioned open source software and building a home server to control your own data. These, and other concepts, are part of my philosophy when it comes to technology, and I want to flesh out my thinking on this in a few articles. The goal is to establish the handful of principles that I use to make decisions and that inform the sorts of writing you’ll be seeing on Big Bad Tech. We all have a worldview that informs our choices, and I don’t mean to hide mine.
There will be an article on the importance of open source software and self-hosting coming in the next few months, but others are planned after that, as well as a final post summarizing everything.
2022 and Beyond
Ultimately, I plan to have Big Bad Tech become a website with a newsletter. The content should be easier to find that way as it builds up.
Some of the material - in particular detailed plans, configuration files, etc - may be paid content, but the tutorials, product reviews, and general articles will always be free on the website and newsletter.