I’ve been with 1984.is for a couple of years now. I think my domains cost around 12 Euros a year each. Their web GUI works fine and I’ve never needed to contact their customer service, so I cannot comment on that.

Openwrt generally works great on x64 PCs. Thiss machine will most likely be more beefy than your home router and could become your main firewall. It can handle adblocking and vpn client for all PCs on the network as well or whatever your need, as openwrt can do many nice things no commercial router can do out of the box. Install openwrt on your home router as well and use that as access point (connected via cable). You will improve your wifi signal as well. If your machine does not come with rj45 lan ports, install usb3 to rj45 adapters to the usb3.0 ports. They will give you the full 1000 mbit speeds.

You need to change the nginx config (for the website you will be hosting your services at. /etc/nginx/sites-available/yourdomain.com

You can reroute all http requests to https in that config.

Watch a video on how nginx works and how to set it up, and then look for example nginx configs for your services. It’s a pretty standard setting nowadays so the syntax should be easy to find.

I think nginx can be setup to work locally only, but do you even need it for that? It’s primary use is to proxy http requests to the different websites running on your server, enable https via letsencryt and so on, I think.

Dawn sounds very interesting. It seems to need 802.11k and 802.11v on all AP-nodes, I am not sure they are supported by my hardware though. I’ve never heard of those standards, so it seems unlikely.

I also just read about a user complaining about crashes related to dawn. Does it run stable and does it also switch to the 5ghz band or does it seem to prefer 2,4ghz, as another user noted three years ago.

Do linkwarden instances federate, so that it can act as a decentralised way-back-machine?

Try oeffi, it’s a great app for public transport.

Podcasts are a leftover from the non centralized and non-monetized internet of the past. Because is that most Podcasts are still available as rss feeds, so you should only ever get adds if they are spoken by the Podcasts hosts. Ate you taking about those? Only something like sponsorblock would help against those. I use antennapod (fdroid) on android to listen to Podcasts. Sine hosts always start their podcast with an add, but you can autoskip the first minute of a certain podcast with antennapod every time. It has a setting for that. Antenna pod itself is foss software without adds.

Another option would be to install an im server that is low on resources and not eating your sdcard. I think xmpp would work a lot better on a pi. Prosody, ejabberd or snikket should work nicely.

Ditto.

There is no need fire up a dedicated machine to do this. Use your router/ap running openwrt and connect a hdd via usb. The machine needs at least 128 Mb RAM (256 mb would be better). Install the transmission package, set it up, add a gig of swap space on the hdd and you are good to go. The AP runs 24/7 anyways so there will be very few extra power consumption. Vpns often don’t allow port forwarding (mullvad has stopped support recently if I remember correctly). You can just be a passive node and not often ports, that should work good enough. Consider seeding parts of sci-hub. it’s a project worth supporting imho.

You can just download once of the parts below with less than 12 seeds and set it to host without ratio:

https://phillm.net/torrent-health-frontend/stats-filtered-table.php?propname[]=seeders&amp;comp[]=<&amp;value[]=12&amp;propname[]=type&amp;comp[]===&amp;value[]=scimag

Maybe try the searxng matrix support chat, I think there might be a few developers around that could point you in right direction:

https://matrix.to/#/#searxng:matrix.org

They also have a Mirc support channel is that is more your cup of tea.

I had this problem around ten years ago where I wanted to be able to disable the esp (which prevents powerslides) in my VW Caddy. I found a hardware/software kit on aliexpress that went for around 30$. Maybe have a look there, I don’t know how new your car is and what model it is, but if somebody made an aftermarket kit for your car, there might be a cheap copy of that available from china.

Mine worked fine, I could disable the annoying option where the car always gives 3 consecutive turning signals, no matter how short you move the lever. Also daytime lights could be enabled, and whatnot.

Turning off the esp was not even an option with this board computer unfortunately so I had to interrupt the power line of a sensor with a switch to archive that, which I found out on an obscure German forum thread years later…

Gamemode should take care of that. I think it’s enabled by default when you run games via lutris.

https://github.com/FeralInteractive/gamemode

I would try to find something a bit newer. Core 2 Duos are really power hungry. Find one with an i5 processor and a T at the end of the number, like i5 3450T or something. This will be a little less performant but run at 30 watt max compared to the core 2 duos 150 watt. Fujitsu esprimo are also a good cheap option and both lenovo and Fujitsu offer rather tiny pcs that work excellent for severs.