If you’ve got a collection of movies, TV shows, or music sitting on a hard drive, you’ve probably thought about setting up a media server. The big three names that come up are Jellyfin, Plex, and Emby. They all do roughly the same thing — organise your media and stream it to your devices — but they[……]
GIMP vs Krita — which image editor is right for you?
So you need a free image editor — you’ve heard of GIMP and Krita, both free and open source, both powerful, but you’re not sure which one to install. I’ve used both extensively and the answer really depends on what you want to do. Let me break it down.
What Each Tool Is Actually Made For
This is t[……]
AI Hasn’t Torched Junior Dev Jobs — It Has Changed What The Job Looks Like
A post doing the rounds this week looks at employment data and concludes that AI has torched the market for junior programmers. The headline numbers are striking — youth employment in software down, entry-level postings shrinking — and I am sure the data is real.
But I read the article and came awa[……]
Debian at 30: The Quiet Operating System That Keeps the Internet Running
I have been using Debian for more than fifteen years now. Not exclusively — I have used Ubuntu, CentOS, Fedora, even some BSDs here and there — but Debian is the one I keep coming back to. It is the operating system I trust with my servers, my home lab, and increasingly my daily driver too.
Debian[……]
How to upgrade Debian 12 (bookworm) to Debian 13 (trixie)
I’ve been upgrading my Debian 12 (bookworm) server fleet to Debian 13 (trixie).
Here is the successful process I ended up following for them all.
The process is essentially: update your package lists, switch the repository URLs from bookworm to trixie, and run the upgrade. Here is how I did it.
St[……]
Broadcom Torched VMware. Here’s the Open Source Lesson.
Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware sent licensing costs through the roof. Here’s what it teaches us about open source, vendor lock-in, and why the safe choice isn’t always safe.[……]
Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware sent licensing costs through the roof. Here’s what it teaches us about open source, vendor lock-in, and why the safe choice isn’t always safe.[……]
Testing Paperclip: What I Learned
Paperclip recently caught my attention as it allows you to orchestrate teams of specialised AI agents through a beautiful self-hosted web UI, so I had to give it a try.
What Works Well
The concept is solid: specialized agents for different tasks, all tracked through a ticketing system. The UI[……]
Re-share – Linux permissions 101
Interesting article on Linux permissions. It explains how to recognise which permission system might be in use (SELinux, ACLs), the meaning of the special bits (setuid, setgid, sticky), how umask works, and more.
The basic Linux permission model — owner, group, others with read/write/execute — is ju[……]
AWS dynamic IP ranges
Need to know the dynamic IP ranges used by AWS in a specific region? AWS publishes this as a JSON file.
curl -s https://ip-ranges.amazonaws.com/ip-ranges.json | jq '.prefixes | .[] | select((.region == "eu-west-1") and (.service == "EC2")) | .ip_prefix' | sed 's/"//g'
This filters for EC2 in eu-we[……]
Sys admin levels explained
Interesting article on the different levels and skill sets of System Administrators. It breaks down what separates a junior sysadmin from a senior one and the kind of knowledge you accumulate along the way.
Whether you are just starting out or have been managing servers for years, it is a good read[……]