I almost forwarded a port to check my home camera. The better path
A friend asked me last month how to peek at his porch camera from the office, and before I could stop myself I was halfway through describing port forwarding. Then I caught…
#linux
207 articles
When Linux won’t boot: a triage order that works across distros
A Fedora workstation dropped me to a GRUB prompt two months ago because a partial DNF upgrade left the kernel updated but the initramfs unregenerated. I rebuilt the initramfs in eight minutes…
When the right Linux distro is the lightest one you can stand
There is a class of Linux distribution that exists for one reason: the laptop in front of you is too old for anything else. These are not the distros that show up…
Collabora Office 26.04 hands the AI key back to the user
The office suite market in 2026 has settled into a pattern. AI is on by default. The toggle is buried five menus deep. The assistant ships with a vendor model you cannot…
Six ways to test an open port without installing telnet on Linux
You stood up a service, opened a firewall rule, or wired up a reverse proxy. Now you want to know if a specific port is actually reachable from where you are. The…
What your ISP can actually see about your browsing in 2026
The honest answer to whether your ISP can see what you do online is yes, more than most people expect, and the gap between what HTTPS protects and what the ISP still…
8 DuckDuckGo settings that earn it the default slot
I run DuckDuckGo as my default search engine, and the honest answer is that I am not there for the privacy pitch alone. The privacy is real, but the day-to-day reason is…
15 terminal calendars worth installing on Linux in 2026
I keep a paper notebook for sketching and a digital calendar for everything else. The digital side lived in a browser tab for years until I wanted a calendar I could open…
Nine Rust publishing tools matched to the work they fit
Rust static site generators have split into recognizable jobs. One wants to build a conventional website from a single binary. Another turns Markdown into a book. A third treats connected notes as…
I stopped opening ports to reach my smart home and you should too
My Home Assistant install used to live behind a port forward on my router. So did my NAS, my printer, and a long-forgotten Raspberry Pi running Pi-hole. Every one of those was…