Sunday, June 26, 2022

Thoughts on Roe v. Wade

 I think there is a gross misunderstanding of what happened last Friday when SCOTUS overturned Roe v. Wade by Republicans. This was not a small government move to take the Federal government out of the decision making process when a woman is deciding if she wants to carry a child to term or not. What actually happened was SCOTUS unilaterally removed the rights of women to make those choices and placed in the hands of State governments.

This is not a move to give women more freedom, it is a move to give State government more control over women's rights. When Republicans talk about "States Rights", they are not talking about moving power from the Federal government and placing it in the hands of State governments, what they really mean is they want to take rights and power away from individual people and give those rights to the State governments. It is no surprise that Clarence Thomas stated that next on the chopping block is birth control, gay sex and gay marriage. It should also be no surprise that Republicans in the House and Senate are saying that if they take control of Congress next year, they will bring forth bills to ban abortion nationally.

This is not now and never has been about "States Rights" or "Small Government", this is and always has been about removing the fundamental right to privacy and control of the population. Think about this, if women do not have the basic right of bodily autonomy, then neither do men. If women do not have the basic right to privacy, then neither do men. If gays do not have the right to choose their life partners, then neither do straights. If the State government can regulate gay sex, then the State government can also also regulate straight sex.

I know this sounds suspiciously like a slippery slope argument, however in the case of Clarence Thomas and these various Congressmen, they are telling us in in plain straight understandable language who they are and what they are planning to do and I think we should believe them. Ask yourself this, how many States have laws on the books making sex outside of marriage illegal? The answer is 7 States. How many States have laws making adultery illegal? The answer is 18 States. Now please by all means, tell me again how this is a slippery slope and it will never happen.

Sunday, June 12, 2022

r/selfhosted

 Yeah, it has been a good long time since the last time I posted anything here. It is a wonder I even still bother to maintain this site. The fact of the matter is, I really just want to retain the domain name, so I pretend to blog every now and again to justify the $12 a year it costs me to keep it. To make even weirder, I have been offered money for this domain name, $2000 to be exact, but I turned it down. The exact reason I turned it down is a bit vague, but I am sure subconsciously I have a good reason.

I have been working on this blog post now for at least a month. I originally was just going to talk about setting up an ESXi virtual machine server, but since then the project has grown to the point where I am self hosting a small pile of services. Below is a screen shot of Homer, one of the services I setup. Homer's only job is to serve up a nice webpage with links to things I use. It is really just an overly complex landing page, but it works well and makes things look pretty. I am not going to get into the links or the streaming services, these are just external links to websites I go to reasonable often. The Applications and Servers is where the more interesting stuff is happening.



Meh!, between taking a screen cap and uploading the above image, I changed my mind, I am not all that interested in talking about setting up my own cloud services. While I enjoyed learning how to use Ubuntu Snaps and Docker Containers, it is honestly not a particularly interesting subject and there are tons of websites and Youtube videos on how to set this stuff up. While I set this up on a machine with 16 GB of RAM and 5 TB of storage, you could easily do the same thing on a Raspberry Pi, minus the ESXi server of course. If you really are interested in what I did, I got started with this Youtube Playlist.

pi-hosted on the Novaspirit Tech channel

The process he is following will work perfectly fine on any old Intel/AMD based system you have laying around that was built in the last 10 years. I think you could get by pretty well with 4 GB of RAM, I have seven Docker Containers running and it is consuming less than 1.6 GB of RAM. The amount of storage you need depends entirely on how much room you need for NextCloud and Emby.

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