This is my phone. It’s a 2016 iPhone SE, and for the past seven years, it has been my main computing device and the centre of my digital life. It’s outlived four laptops, three pairs of headphones, survived through dozens of trips away from home over three continents, a couple drops, and one close call with a broken umbrella in the fierce Ontario summer rain. It’s had two battery replacements, some lint picked out of the sleep button, and a few scratches on the screen from keys and grit.

I’ve realized recently that I have to very carefully create boundaries around my hobbies to protect them. I like to take pictures. Sometimes of my cats, other times of neat things I see while traveling or exploring, and always to document things that I find interesting in the physical world. The encroachment of legitimacy It starts with a cheap sewing machine before spiraling into boxes of fabric, rare and vintage patterns, accessories and notions.

While there are plenty of IOT security cameras that promise privacy, none of them really do. Eufy recently got busted for secretly accessing peoples' feeds, Unifi got breached, and literally every off-shore IOT device is slurping as much metadata (and regular data) off your devices as they possibly can. It’s not hard to understand a need for secure and private home security devices. Despite its age and legacy, ZoneMinder is still by far the most capable and complete solution for this.

With Mastodon quickly becoming a refuge for former bird-site users fleeing the new regime, many are considering self-hosting their Fediverse instance. There’s many good reasons to do this, such as privacy, data ownership, or even maintaining consistent performance while larger communities struggle to on-board an influx of new users. But, as always, self-hosting means new responsibilities! In this case, to ensure that the data is safe and secure, operating correctly, and to ensure that the server is not disseminating malware.

Anybody who runs an internet-facing webserver has seen their fair share of spammy scanners in the logs. It varies server to server, but some of mine get up to 15,000 scans per day. Almost all of these are harmless network mappers, but they still annoy me. Many are compromised hosts or belong to hackers & organized crime rings. While it’s possible to create false positives, it’s probably safe to block all of these.