We can call this Tsuite, inspired by Toot Sweet (a Chitty Chitty Bang Bang candy invention), and is meant to provide some functionality offered through third party collaborative documents. The main point is to have a self-hosted, free-and-open-source alternative, albeit with more bare bones functionality. Ultimately the goal is to be functional enough to allow ... Read more
There are several white label options for search and if one considers advertising a viable business model to engage in, then consider Bing or Infospacehttp://www.infospace.com/partners/. Consider the case of Izito and related country code tlds, as well as MonsterSpace, both are pure play partner deals with nothing technical in their own right, with traffic and ... Read more
This is really about how to get off of Gmail/Google Email for Domains/Gsuite. It is not difficult to get off of Google Drive, and Google Photos, as well as Google Docs and Google Sheets, and the like. But there are certain advatages of Gmail/Google Mail, and the free version of GSuite, which I've been using for ten years or so.
Dropbox Paper is a product I really want to like. For one thing, the promise of better editor is something long unfulfilled. And taking some design cues (or perhaps merely unrelated similarities), Medium did do something nice for the blogging environment. By extending it as essentially a wysiwyg Markdown+ editor, drag and drop-friendly, with handy ... Read more
This is a setup of several items, starting with Debian 9 on Amazon AWS Lightsail. This has server basics and apt, and then follows with links to additional articles. In general, after several years of running CentOS on Linode, and then Amazon Linux AMI on EC2 and Lightsail, I find that Debian 9 is simply faster, just as secure, and at least slightly easier to use.
Note: as of Sep 2020, Debian 10 is now available on Lightsail
I will update this soon (mid-2020) to Debian 10 - Bullseye (stable) on AWS and Debian testing on the desktop. I consider this combination to be very good for intermediate users as it keeps them up-to-date on the latest testing build (when things break, that is a learning opportunity), as well as having access to most recent versions of applications, utilities and support libraries. Debian is a huge linux ecosystem which is generally well-supported by a very large community. For one's production desktop environment, Debian testing is an excellent balance of up-to-date application availability and community supportiveness. Together with the extremely stable desktop environment using Openbox/LXDE, very low system requirements are needed.
To be honest, once getting the hang of Openbox/LXDE, I do not see any advantage to Linux Mint or Ubuntu, for that matter (besides the personal repositories). Cinnamon (available on other distributions than Mint) is buggy, memory hungry, and requires a bit of customization. Openbox/LXDE offers nearly the same kind of required customizations, but demands many fewer resources and is nearly crashproof. In my opinion, the good parts of Mint do not include cinnamon, rather applications such as Nemo and Pix, which can of course be installed and run without Mint or Cinnamon.
Note: instructions for installing and configuring phpMyAdmin also included below. Related Artices in Debian Services and Applications - Debian on AWS Lightsail - OpenVPN on Debian + UFW Firewall - Nginx and Letsencrypt on Debian - PHP & MariaDB on Debian - Grav CMS on Debian As of December, 2018 there are decent performance gains ... Read more
Dropbox is a cloud storage and sync service, with additional editors/apps, such as Paper and Showcase. For various reasons, those additional Dropbox apps are not useful for our use cases. However, storage and sync are excellent in and of themselves, and generally superior to Google Drive which is the only real alternative. What Dropbox gets ... Read more
It is a good idea to get PHP and MariaDB on Debian set up before Nginx (except the PhpMyAdmin which can come after). Related Artices in Debian Services and Applications - Debian on AWS Lightsail - OpenVPN on Debian + UFW Firewall - Nginx and Letsencrypt on Debian - PHP & MariaDB on Debian - ... Read more
Google likes to remove functionality on free products to induce upselling. This is a common tactic in many software/SAS models. However, the cost of adopting Gsuite is very high, relative to free. Essentially a 5-10 pack of mailboxes with $5/month for the least expensive Gsuite paid option. That's $300-$600/year. What is sadly missing is a ... Read more
Google Drive (GDrive) and other cloud storage alternatives such as Dropbox and Microsoft Ondrive all have the serious drawback of keeping one's information in a third party cloud repository. Privacy and security are generally compromised this way, even when paying for storage (as opposed to having an advertising model, which is worse in many ways).