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Self-hosted IP-phone network
  • Ah yes that makes sense. I was taken aback by my latest install of freepbx. I feel it wasn’t as aggressive during the Digium days but it definitely left a bad taste in my mouth.

    I heard good things about free switch, although it seems like a paradigm change. I’ll have to check it out.

  • How do I know if a project has a good documentation?
  • What are you trying to understand and what type of project are you looking at? Are you looking to run a program or use a library?

    Good documentation to me is here’s how to get this installed, here’s a basic overview of getting started, here’s all the methods/functions with their arguments and a description, and optionally some very basic examples programs to sanity check everything is working ok.

  • What's best suited for low-tech
  • Oh yes! Even better. People having Linux machines just hanging around is rare so I didn’t even consider it.

    I did a little looking and found instructions for hosting a matrix server here:

    https://element-hq.github.io/synapse/latest/setup/installation.html

    Once you get a bit comfortable on the command line give this a try!

  • What's best suited for low-tech
  • Excellent - that site is nice and basic. A good first project.

    Seek out some resources on HTML, CSS, basic Linux command line and nginx and start playing around. If you’re on a Mac you can do all this locally then rent a small VPS from digital ocean or the like for about $5/mo to host everything on the web when you’re ready. I can’t speak to options on windows.

    On your last comment it looks scary but if we break it down it’s not bad at all.

    while true ; do Programs are (super) basically made up of if “this” then do “this stuff”, and while “this thing” do “some stuff”. While true means run this next bit of code (until done) forever.

    nc -l -p 80 -c

    nc is a program (netcat) that reads/writes data to a network. - in Linux denote options for the program. These are saying listen, listen on port 80, and run a command.

    ‘echo -e “HTTP/1.1 200 OK\n\n $(date)”’;

    The command netcat will run. This is HTTP protocol magicness and $(date) is a Linux command that prints the date.

    done Ends the loop

    Ez pz.

    If you have a Mac you can probably run this in terminal and check out what it does (do take care in running commands from the internet tho).

  • What's best suited for low-tech
  • All good. Learning and exploring is part of the journey! For example hosting a website can be as simple as running a program

    (egwhile true ; do nc -l -p 80 -c ‘echo -e “HTTP/1.1 200 OK\n\n $(date)”’; done)

    or as complicated as an entire application with multiple databases and processes.

    For your first goal - what do you want your website to do? Blog? A bio about yourself? Are you interested in creating the HTML or do you want to focus on getting someone else’s application (eg matrix) up and running?

  • What's best suited for low-tech
  • Do you have more specific goals? Running a home server and website isn’t really programming, more sysadmin work. If you want your website to be a web app that’s a different story.

    For arduino work C would be the most directly relatable. It’s a simple language but can be a bit tricky since the language itself doesn’t do much hand holding for you. Arduino does make it a bit easier though.

    The C Programming Language is probably the best programming book ever written for any language.

  • Static site generator (SSG) alternative to Squarespace?
  • I don’t know what you’re doing and what you’re really asking.

    You want a static site? Hugo or jekyll.

    You can host them with git hub/lab pages for free.

    There are options for contact forms but it will require additional setup. Searching for what you want + platform + tutorial should help point you in the right direction. (Eg https://discourse.gohugo.io/t/is-it-possible-to-add-a-contact-form-to-a-site/1550/3)

  • Global net?
  • Ok. Probably echo link then. In short - the repeater uses the internet as another transport. Other repeaters can link up, or you can even use their application to activate repeaters right from your computer.

    You can also do similar things with other digital modes (DMR etc) but they require special radios that speak that standard.

  • First time on the air
  • Parks On The Air.

    Essentially a spotting/sked network for people operating out of state parks. You can “hunt” stations from home or you can “activate” a park by visiting one with your equipment, setting up and making 10 (IIRC) contacts. It’s a nice way to get out and explore some local parks!

    https://docs.pota.app

    There’s also SOTA - summits on the air, which is similar but operates from the tops of mountains.

  • Another question por favor
  • What band are you looking to operate on? I’d say most of us got our start on repeaters so I’d say that’s the place for a simple beginner voice transmission. If you haven’t seen it yet you can use this site to help find ones near you:

    https://www.repeaterbook.com/index.php/en-us/

    Otherwise there are 2m and 70cm calling frequencies, I believe 146.52 and 446.00, but repeaters would be more populated.

  • First time on the air
  • Congrats! If you haven’t yet, check out pota. Gives a nice little set of goals and community for outdoor operating.

    And start studying for your general! The test isn’t much more difficult than Tech but the increase in privileges is night and day!

  • What’s your go to low effort bread?
  • The NY Times no knead. It’s just so easy. It doesn’t make the best loaf but the effort to tasty ratio is pretty damn good.

    And since you asked for biscuits - I’m in the north so I don’t know any better but these are so simple and come out so good. I do replace the shortening with cold butter though. I didn’t like the taste of vegetable shortening.

    https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/20075/basic-biscuits/

  • InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)M_
    m_randall @sh.itjust.works
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