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A small Croatian collective sharing thoughts on privacy, FOSS, Linux, self-hosting & computer science. Project updates, news, and our honest takes. We believe in a free and open internet.
#FOSS #Linux #Privacy
Bloghttps://blog.foobardevs.com

🚨 OPT OUT & say NO to #GitHub using your interaction data to train & improve its AI models. 🚨 

GitHub is the next company to choose to opt you into having your data used - by default. 🚩

Opt out in Settings --> Copilot --> Features.

Under "Allow GitHub to use my data for AI model training" -→ Disabled.

It recently announced that if you do not opt out before April 24th, it will use your interaction data when using Copilot.

You did it! 🥳

European Parliament just decided that Chat Control 1.0 must stop.

This means on April 6, 2026, Gmail, LinkedIn, Microsoft and other Big Techs must stop scanning your private messages in the EU. #PrivacyWins 💪

Btw, without web search the abliterated model just says "I don't know" instead of the usual "I can't answer that" — which confirms DeepSeek's developers scrubbed the event from the training data entirely, not just trained a refusal on top of it.

Running a locally hosted abliterated (uncensored) DeepSeek R1 8B with web search enabled, and I got it to discuss the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in full detail — something the stock model refuses to do.

It's a decent reminder of why model weights matter as much as the model itself. An abliterated local model you control is a fundamentally different thing from a cloud API that phones home and enforces someone else's political red lines.

Self-hosted AI isn't just about privacy. Sometimes it's about who gets to decide what's true.

— Helix

#SelfHosting #OpenSource #FOSS #AI #LLM #Censorship

For a while, deploying apps meant a familiar ritual: SSH in, pull the repo, pray nothing breaks, repeat for every service.

Manual.

Fragile.

Exhausting.

This week I finally consolidated everything into a proper self-hosted control plane.

The stack:
→ aaPanel as the central dashboard which I heard about from a friend
→ Docker for containerised app isolation (absolute cancer)
→ PostgreSQL for database management (with per-app panels and log visibility)
→ DuckDNS handling dynamic DNS + automated HTTPS via Let's Encrypt (stayed up until 3AM on Sunday for this btw)
→ Netlify on the frontend side cuz it's easy to deploy

The difference is hard to overstate.

One dashboard.

Full log access across services.

Deployments that don't require me to remember 12 steps in the right order at 11pm.

It's not a perfect setup, aaPanel is proprietary-ish and Netlify is clearly not self-hosted, but it's a defenitely a step away from "I'll fix it manually when it breaks" territory.

Curious if anyone here has migrated from this kind of hybrid setup toward something fully FOSS.

Always looking for the next rabbit hole.

— UltraX

#SelfHosting #DevOps #Docker #FOSS #Linux #Infrastructure #HomeServer #OpenSource #Privacy #Sysadmin #Python #javascript #saas

Our blog is live — and so is its first article.

Helix wanted to try their hand at a physical DIY project for once — most of their work is purely software. The goal: build a portable temperature & humidity monitor from scratch to tackle a real problem at home: poor insulation and rooms humid enough to grow mold.

ESP32 + DHT22 + a few euros of AliExpress parts. The article covers the circuit design, prototyping, and some tricks along the way. It's a work in progress — more updates coming as the project evolves.

🔗 https://blog.foobardevs.com/posts/diy-esp32-temp-hum-monitor/

#DIY #ESP32 #IoT #SelfHosting

DIY portable monitor for temperature & humidity

The need for a hands-on project Almost all of my personal projects rely entirely on software solutions, in which I either set up existing tools or write them myself. Even though the projects and software in question vary greatly, interacting only with code can get stale after a while. This encouraged me to start a hands-on DIY project. It specifically appealed to me since I’ve rarely built anything physical during my education, so it was mostly uncharted territory. I looked for something in my daily life that would benefit from a simple device I could build myself.

FooBar Blog

The greatest threat isn't a catastrophic system failure. It is the slow creep of apathy. When we stop demanding transparency and settle for convenience at the cost of our agency we lose the will to build better ones. The end will be a whisper of "it doesn't matter anyway."

#Apathy #NoAI #enshittification #DigitalSovereignty #Privacy

Spent some time on Arch, came back to my work laptop on Win11 to find Microsoft had "gifted" me a file search app I never asked for — Recall quietly screenshotting everything in the background — plus a handful of other bloat now sitting in my uninstall queue.

I just want an OS. Not a surveillance box filled with unwanted software.

— SeBa

#Windows #Privacy #Linux

@mhoye We are using fail2ban for securing SSH and Crowdsec for requests that go through proxy.
For our use case, we'll probably change the default 4h ban time to exponential backoff as a middle ground since Crowdsec sometimes triggers false positives for our services.

PSA for fellow self-hosters: bots will probe your services. We caught one trying to scrape sensitive files via CrowdSec — .env variants, AWS credentials, config files, and more. Others targeted common PHP/WordPress misconfigs.

If you're running anything public-facing, assume it's being scanned.

#SelfHosting #InfoSec #FOSS #HomeLab