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). ... Read more
First, there are two kinds of DNS records: those for client look, and those for a server. Client Lookup - DNS Resolvers I don't trust Google DNS, though for a while it was the go to DNS, and easy to remember at 4.4.8.8 8.8.4.4 and 8.8.8.8. For privacy, for me, there are two options, with ... 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 ... Read more
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
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
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 ... 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
Note: as of 2022, our household moved from Xiaomi to Samsung phones (similar spying, different government), and ditched the increasingly annoying Mi Box for a Google Chromecast (and Google Nest in a different room). We still love things like wired earbuds and backpacks from Xiaomi, but are suspicious of anything with any greater electronic footprint. ... 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