For a couple months now I have been a little obsessed with backing up my media library (mostly music) in a way that is reflected on my primary laptop as well as on the server it is backed up to. Prior to this, I had Backblaze for all my backup needs, as well as Google Drive since I have quite a bit of space there. While these are nice, I wanted to own my backup too for my own peace of mind. A friend of mine recommended I look into Syncthing. Syncthing is essentially a light weight Dropbox/Google Drive/One Drive like system. You setup two computers (in this case a server and a client) and have them exchange unique ids. This allows them to identify themselves and sync data back and forth. It seemed like a simple solution, and FreeNAS (the linux based OS that runs my NAS server) had built in support for Syncthing.

While I am not a frequent flyer, I have been flying for a couple of years now. After today’s incident, I think it time that I vet my concerns. The ability to fly is a miracle, but the system around it is terrible. And that is unacceptable in this day and age. We have cars that can (mostly) drive themselves, but we can’t figure out an efficient way to manage a large pool of people to get from point A to point B?

I want to quit streaming services. I really do. I’m getting increasingly frustrated by them. It mostly stems from the fact that I own music, and integrating that into the experience is very difficult. I want to be able to take my music on the go with me, or at least some of it. However, I do value the algorithms around music recommendation and discovery as they do introduce me to new stuff. What I don’t like is how the streaming world seems to be hostile towards people like me who own music.

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about this topic. Maybe I’m getting old, not keeping up with the times, or I flat out just don’t get it. I would argue that this question trickled into my head years back when companies like Apple and Google made a shift to “Flat” UI/UX designs, away from skeuomorphic and realistic interfaces. While I understand the limits that come with basing interface design off of real life objects, the removal of such limits have caused a different problem.

Recently, I was asked by a friend to fix a Mac server I had set up a while back. Unfortunately, the server was borked beyond repair, so a reinstalllation of the OS was necesssary. This did cause me to look back at the guide I wrote for myself back in 2013. Below is an editted version of that guide for posterity should anyone else need it. I know it helped my friend setup a new server just fine. The guide is a tad dated, but not much has changed in the past three years (luckily).

As my New Years resolution, I decided to get back to work on my side project, Find My Bus NJ. As part of the 2.0 revision that I have been working on, getting a server up and running to handle my REST requests has been the top blocker. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I had been playing around with SSL on a local server. Going into this though, I knew it would take some more effort that the localhost setup. After doing much research these were the tools I picked out going forward.

Recently I have been playing around with how to remotely log into my NAS. For a while I have had it so that I have to pass my password into my terminal to login. However, this limits my ability to script my computer to do things that would send data back and forth without me interfering. Well, that just wouldn’t do so I set out to find a way around this.

There is a lot that goes into being secure with user data now-a-days. I’ve been playing around with getting a node server setup on a project I am working on because it required Google Places. Google Places recommends that you have a server with a special key (which they provide) hit their servers on behalf of your users. So your servers are hit by your users, and then you ask Google for the data that is needed via your server. Because of this, I was looking into what I would need to have a working server to do what I want. I had never done any server programming before, but I know Javascript so I figured Node.js was a good choice. I had looked at Express for past projects, but never used it do to the restrictions of said projects. The reason I chose Express is because it is built on top of Node.js, but is really good for routing and endpoints (from what I took away when I read up on it).

Personal, school, professional Gmail accounts, an iCloud account, and an account related specifically to my personal app. The amount of email accounts I had to manage was getting increasingly difficult. Not to mention, I’m an old time guy who likes email clients natively on my computer. I refuse to have multiple tabs open to try and check my emails. Being on OS X, my default app of choice is Apple Mail (though it was Postbox until 10.11, but that no longer works currently). Apple Mail has given me issues for years, and I have tried so hard to work with it, but again and again it has screwed up when I have multiple Gmail Accounts Linked. Time and again it would send from my Personal, but the receiver would see it as from my Professional. Absolutely aggravating. So I was thinking, how do I fix this? My options:

I’ve had my Freenas server for almost a year now, but while away at school I can only SSH into the server if I know what my IP address is for my home router. Main problem? The public IP is changed every few months, leaving me with no way of knowing what my IP will be in the future. There are a multitude of ways to pay for these things, but I’m doing it on the cheap because I don’t have money or care for a subscription service. So here is what you will need: