DISCLAIMER: - I have never learnt any dev language to date, and yet I have taught myself all of this

I had been pining for a VPS or a RaspberryPi machine for about 2.5-3 years in 2019 but I never actually dared to buy either because 1) I'm broke and they cost a lot of money, 2) it wasn't worth the effort to set them up and use them for my prototype purposes.

I came across the Google Cloud free tier and before realising that it wasn't a long-term solution but just for one year, I availed the free trial. I learnt that the type of remote machines I was looking for were called "instances" and that they barely had enough RAM to even run a Minecraft Bedrock Server. Regardless, I tried setting one up and it worked for a while - until I purposely tried to push its limits by flying to the ends of the map until the server couldn't keep up. That crashed the server and the instance along with it, to the point where I couldn't even ssh into it. This caused a hassle of a hard reboot and I slowly realised this was not the solution I was looking for because 1) it ran out in a year, 2) did not provide enough resources (512MB RAM) in the always-free tier.

So I started researching cheap VPSs as one does and found out about the always free tier of Oracle Cloud that was too good to believe. Mind you, all of this was before even knew how to work headless linux (Ubuntu), configure PuTTY or how the system of ssh worked at all. I signed up for it, got access to two 1GB RAM instances and within the span of a week taught myself to generate keys with PuTTY-gen along with using the keys to ssh into the machines. When I finally got access to the machines, I had to learn the basics of linux (like mkdir, rm, mv, cp, apt install etc.) from scratch. This took a while because I had only used them in the google cloud instances and I had already forgotten about most commands (at this point the commands are like the back of my hand). I learnt how to use nano, how to sparingly use sudo and stuff like that and my entire motivation for all of this had been to host my own Minecraft Server because Realms had not been out yet and using free hosting providers was a pain in the ass.

After I finally got used to it, I realised the network configurations worked very differently on Oracle Cloud because the machine was not opened up from the get-go and I did not know anything about internet protocols, ports, IP addresses or connections more than the average Joe. So even though I had a server running, I had no way to access it. It took me another week to figure out that I needed to allow ingress to the machine from the Oracle Cloud dashboard and also open up the machine ports through ufw to be able to access it. This finally resulted in my 1st breakthrough - my server was finally stable and accessible!

The Learning Curve

Oh man, troubleshooting programs you know nothing about teaches you the most about error handling. Of course, a couple of months after the Minecraft Server had been hosted I shut it down because I wasn't using it all that much and had instead started focusing on finding self-host solutions to problems I was having myself, the most pressing of which at that time was to find a password manager. Naturally, I came across Bitwarden because it was a no-brainer for my use case and I tried to set it up with docker. Little did I know that the official docker container was waaaaay above my instance's pay grade and it would never be able to run it. This caused a ton of problems because I kept trying to solve errors the console threw at me without realising that in the end, it wouldn't matter. After about 2 weeks I realised what was happening, refreshed the instance and used the Rust fork of Bitwarden called Vaultwarden (it was called bitwarde_rs then) as my docker container, and of course it worked like a charm. This was my second big breakthrough because I finally had premium Bitwarden features out my own labour and the Orcale Cloud free tier.

This bolstered my curiosity for self-hosting stuff and I experimented with hosting many other things like a transfer.sh instance, a URL shortner, two different temp file sharing services, an ArchiSteamFarm instance, a seedbox powered by qBittorrent, a Forum powered by Discourse and many other such things. This endeavour of mine taught me more than any one guide, walkthrough or YouTube video could have ever taught me. I learnt the idiosyncracies of Linux, of Ubuntu and the internet in general. I learnt how websites worked, how Ip addresses worked, how ports worked, how port forwarding worked, how reverse-proxies worked, how applications attached to ports and how building production environments with stuff like npm worked. This was a steep learning curve that I climbed within 6-7 months through these hobbies of mine.

As they say, doing the work yourself teaches you the ins-and-outs and that is exactly what happened with my experience to the point where setting up a service and a reverse proxy to access it from a subdomain of mine became second nature.

The Present

I recently undertook the project of turning my old OnePlus 5 (a beast for performance) into a Linux machine without root through AnLinux and Termux and I can proudly say that I have accomplished the same and I use it as a seedbox along with my PaperMC server for Minecraft. I run a Vaultwarden server for myself here and a couple of other things that I cannot share that are valuable and useful to me. How I did this specifically will be covered in another post that I shall be writing soon, so stay tuned for that. This has been a journey and I hope I never reach the horizon with this hobby of mine.

These two months of my life have just been a lesson in patience. Four main things happened that made me realise that my life revolves around the principle of “the next big thing” or the next big event in my life that I look forward to, to drive forward and stay motivated to continue on whatever I’m doing. The first one was my third year end semester exams that happened till the 3rd of June, and trust me when I say they were a draagggg. We had days in between to study and the exams themselves were 12 hour, open-book essay type tests. Due to anxiety of performance on the day of the exam all of us used to sit the entire day trying to finish and revise our answers until the very last second and consequently burn out, which in turn prevented us from studying for the next exam effectively. This went on for about 12 days if I am not wrong, and by the end of it I was a zombie not by virtue of not getting enough sleep, but by virtue of having “overclocked” my brain for the first time and losing absolutely all energy after the exam season while constantly looking forward to the last date and time at which I would be free of using it and when the exams would have ended. After that, my family had planned a vacation somewhere, and the only relevant info that I’m gonna share here is that multiple cities in out itinerary could only be travelled between through cars. This brings me to my second test in patience – the sheer travel between the cities on our itinerary was about 8-13 hours long on an average. This meant long durations of time just sitting in the car doing nothing because I had already slept and had therefore nothing else to do except wait for us to reach the next city. I hate road trips due to 2 reasons – the long hours of uncomfortable travel (and by uncomfortable I mean not on a bed), and the fact that you literally cannot escape a situation where your car breaks down. Thankfully the second scenario never came into play in the vacation but the uncomfortable travel surely did. I quickly became the king of long hours in a car even though I still hated the car travel simply because I was forced to cultivate my skills of keeping myself occupied in cars for a long time very thoroughly. It made me realise that all I kept looking forward to, was the destination of the journey all the time.

My third test happened during my internship which was almost immediately after the vacation, because the place where I interned was the first 9-5 internship/job I had ever had in my life. Even though I got a lot of work done and never had “free” time, I still needed a break frequently from the mundanity of it all, and in all my breaks all I remember looking forward to, was going home and exactly how much time was left before I could leave the office at 5. Lastly, in addition to these short term tests of patience that had occurred in this short span of time in the summer, I had already been waiting, saving for, and looking forward to getting Kaedehara Kazuha in Genshin Impact since January of this year. That’s 6 months worth of grinding, pining, saving and hoping that I get enough primogems to guarantee a copy of Kazuha (spoiler I now have had him for a day and it was all worth it; he’s amazing), but again, the theme of this long term goal had been me looking forward to something; i.e. getting Kazuha.

Now I don’t know whether such an outlook of life is shared by a lot of people or not because I have met people who seem to think life is monotonous despite all the little things that might make someone happy and I have also met people who believe that life is what you make of it. I personally do not think into such things nor do I usually self-reflect because I prefer living in the moment and take what is being given to me, but this time, this pattern of longing was too hard to ignore and not reflect on. I do believe a lot of people function in this same manner as me, going through disproportionate hardships and annoyances just to reach or get, a time or an item, that deludes them into thinking that it was worth it. Either way, these short and long term goals are what keep me afloat in the sea of the unpredictable and frankly insignificant life of mine, and I like it this way because through this approach there will always be light at the end of the tunnel regardless of how long, or how narrow the tunnel is.

Just my two cents of this week, a proper faithful drifty ramble haha, hope you can gain something from this. I for one, learnt more about myself and I actually liked it so this was immensely helpful for me.

Alr, I’ll see you soon

~dw

Now here is why I am excited – I have been saving up for Kazuha since I got Ganyu and Zhongli, back when they first re-ran in January of 2022, soon after which I lucked out by winning my 50/50 with Venti. I had basically saved 2 pities for a guaranteed Kazuha and when Venti re-ran I couldn’t help myself so I ended up wishing for him. But that is all in the past as I regained the one pity that I spent on him, and also saved up a little extra. This little saved extra had now amounted to about a little more than another whole pity, so I was running around with 3.25 pities in Primogems. Then came along Mr. Arataki Itto, who is also one of my favourite characters in the game so I decided I would drain anything above the 2 pities I absolutely need for Kazuha, on this guy. I tried to gain as many primosgems as I could on top of the stuff that I already had, and funnel them into wishing for Itto and voila! On my 81st wish, after having scavenged and begged, borrowed and stolen primogems from every last chest that I could find, I got…another Jean. Yeah, I finally lost my 50/50 having won the last two, and got my first 5 star constellation in the game, even though I still don’t have Diluc, the first 5 star the game has had since launch.

I still had some wishes left and spent it all on Itto, desperately hoping that I might hit pity early and snag my now guaranteed Itto before Kazuha finally comes along but alas, it hasn’t happend yet. So, there are two ways this can go – First, that I actually somehow hit pity early and get Itto, which would be absolutely awesome, or second (and the more probable), I do not hit pity with Itto at all but this in turn helps me get Kazuha faster, since he would be guaranteed (with a considerable pity already in the bank after wishing for Itto) and then I will have about 1.5 pities for Kazuha’s weapon. Wishing on the weapon banner is something I’ve never done before because it is essentially a money hogging machine and a scam due to the atrocious amounts of gacha that goes into getting the weapon that you want. But this time it is different because the two weapons in the mix are Klee’s best-in-slot (BIS) who I already have and Kazuha’s BIS who I will get, both of which I want and even if I lose my 50/50, I have chances of getting a 5 star bow, that my Ganyu desperately needs. So the chances of me gaining a great, useful 5 star weapon from this weapon banner are odds that I can actually play with and therefore I deem okay for me to wish. I do hope I get Itto though, I have a built Gorou and relatively good Husk of Opulent Dreams artifacts too (I had started pre-farming assuming that I would get him).

So there it is, I am excited for Kazuha, I am excited for the co-op events, I am excited for the Golden Archipelago, and I am excited to see what comes my way from the weapon banner, all of which if I do not get an early Itto within these last few days of his banner. I hope the Genshin nerds understand how good this opportunity is, and if you are wondering whether you should pull for Kazuha – he is without question one of the best characters in the game, from any and all perspectives you look at him. His character backstory is insane (he is the only character who has dual wielded 2 visions, and he’s driven by his best-friend’s death), his personality is amazing (he’s a laid back anemo Samurai), his gameplay is immensely fun (can work as a support, sub-DPS or DPS) and he is the god of Genshin meta at this point of time (absolutely cracked buffs from his burst). His character lines and animations are also fucking wonderful and lastly, I personally love his elemental skill to the point that I think it might be the best in the game. So if you have any remianing wishes at all, you should go for him without question.

Alright, that is my hype rant of the day, I shall see you soon with my Kazuha.

UPDATE July 13: -

~dw

First of all, you should now be able to tell which websites are selling themselves for the ratings as soon as you see a website name one of these as their top most VPN. On the other hand, if you see a website talk about Windscribe, Mulvad VPN and to an extent even Proton VPN, that is the one you want to rely on (with a grain of salt). Windscribe’s free tier offers one of the best and safest VPNs for anyone, with around 10 locations (some with multiple IPs) and an actual good history about logging and handing over of information – i.e. not doing both of those. The speeds are also great and non-obstructive for general use (browsing, streaming, accessing geo-locked content) while Mulvad VPN has the absolute best privacy of any VPN ever. It does not have a free tier but has one fixed price that never changes which is $5 monthly. Any plan you take will be calculated on that price without any discounts and hidden fees because that is what their USP is – privacy has a cost that cannot be discounted. The speeds can get slow at times for bandwidth heavy stuff like streaming or watching videos, but for general browsing and torrent, it is bulletproof. Now Proton VPN is really sow and when I mean slow I mean like webpage-failed-to-load kinda slow at least in the free tier so even though it is also a good (costly) option for privacy, its free tier is absolute crap and I only recommend using it if you’re planning to take a yearly subscription. Otherwise it simply isn’t worth it.

If you have a steady income, and want the top priority on privacy with decent speeds on your VPN, I would recommend Mulvad but if you do not have the cash to spare, Windscribe’s free tier is the ONLY free tier out of any and ALL VPNs that is actually good and works well.

Those are my 2 cents on VPNs and you are free to disagree but then you would be dumb and giving the safety of your data away while actively paying for it lmao

As usual, you can comment down here or send me an email at drifty@003274.xyz Alr cya

~dw

In addition to all this, for further damage control, WhatsApp just said that they would be postponing the requirement of consent from users for their new policy by three months. What this means is that WhatsApp is trying to give its users the blatant message that, whatever happens, they aren't going to actually change their policy, but will do everything except that in order to retain their users. As is pretty damn evident, this is sleazy scumbag behaviour and I personally believe no one is going to fall for it, so take my advice and leave WhatsApp for the better alternatives like Signal and Telegram.

This isn't to say that the alternatives are easier to use, or better in every way than WhatsApp, but if you're interested in retaining the information of your digital footprint, leaving WhatsApp (and in fact all the Facebook subsidiaries, especially the main Facebook app) is the best pathway to freedom at this point of time. I have personally been using Signal and Telegram both for a long time (3+ years) by now, and I can vouch for Telegram to be even more user-friendly, and secure than WhatsApp. Of course, the final choice is yours, but I hope this little something that I've written changes the way you feel about this cursed conglomerate giant and its application.

~dw