Cheapskate's Guide
The Cheapskate's Guide to Computers and the Internet
You need not spend large amounts of cash for decent computers and reasonable Internet services. If you know how, you can get them cheaply. This site is dedicated to showing you how.
A Review of Damn Small Linux 2024: A Distribution for Near-Vintage Computers
As nearly as I can recall, I first tried Damn Small Linux (DSL) some
time around 2005. Back then, my main computer was a creaky,
eight-year-old old Dell Latitude CpiA laptop that only contained 32
MB of RAM. I never managed to install the maximum amount (64 MB)
because I never found the required EDO RAM for what I thought was a
reasonable price. I don't remember which version of DSL I began
with, but I still have version 3.4.9 on a CD. At the time, DSL was
the only non-persistent distribution I knew that could boot a
computer from a CD and load fully into 32 MB RAM. It was incredibly
buggy, but it would get me onto the Internet with a reasonable
assurance that no malware had come along for the ride. I used it
whenever I was forced to interact with highly personal information on
line. The last version of DSL to come out was in 2008, so you can
imagine my surprise when a cheapskatesguide reader informed me that
a new 32-bit version had just come out, 16 years later...
Read More
Users of Open-Protocol Networks Must Defend Them Against Corporate Capture.
Corporate capture of open-protocol networks has been and will
always be a potential source of disruption. Open communications
protocols allow any network user to run a server that can be
reached by any other user, but when a company is able to dominate
an open network, the open nature of the protocol on which it is
based is insufficient to ensure that users will retain their
ability to communicate freely. The irony is that users have no
one but themselves to blame. Their loss of autonomy results when
they allow themselves to be seduced by corporations peddling
easy, cheap, or non-offensive options...
Read More
Saving Linux
I wrote an article
a while ago that was critical of Linux developers who refuse to
maintain distributions that run on computers that are more than
about 15 years old...
Read More
Now Blocking 56,037,235 IP Addresses, and Counting...
For the five years that the Cheapskate's Guide has been on the
Internet, I have been blocking the IP addresses and user agents of
certain entities that exhibit bad behavior. I have tried hard to
avoid denying access to
large blocks of contiguous IP addresses because I do not want
to lock out current and potential readers who have done nothing
wrong. I also try not to block Tor exit nodes and VPN's for
the same reason, but I cannot always tell when IP addresses
belong to either of these. Nevertheless, the large number of IP
addresses that I am forced to block reveals the magnitude of the
problem of the abuse of the Internet by those who either don't
understand what they are doing or just don't care...
Read More
The Slow Migration Away from Big Social Media May Be the Beginning of Something Much Better.
Question: What do you call a hundred lawyers at the bottom of the
ocean? Answer: A good start. Many people feel the same way about
the gradual migration of millions of users away from big social
media. We could argue about whether this is really occurring, but
many news articles over the past two years have centered around
Facebook's
shrinkage and the
exodus from Twitter to Mastodon. I think the contraction in
big social media is real, and I think it is very good news for
small social media, for social media users in general, and for
our Internet experience as a whole...
Read More
Building My Own Firewall/Router, Part 3: My Firewall Fabricating Failure
After spending over a month struggling to create a firewall to
put between the Internet and my current router and web server, I
have to admit defeat--at least, for the time being. The firewall
worked fine as a firewall/router, but it simply refused to forward
traffic from ports 80 and 443 to my web server. The worst part of
the debugging process was repeatedly having to take my websites
off line for testing. I am sure this was beginning to annoy
cheapskatesguide readers and Blue Dwarf users...
Read More
Building My Own Firewall/Router, Part 2
This is the second part in my series of articles on building a
firewall/router...
Read More
Building My Own Firewall/Router, Part 1
Consumers need better routers. This is especially true for those
of us who host our personal websites from home. Consumer-grade
routers are almost universally overpriced, insecure, and designed
to have short service lives. Even worse, most take away our
ability to do what we want with our home networks. They are
increasingly designed to prevent us from choosing our own DNS
servers, protecting our privacy, hosting a web server or email
server from home, and pretty much anything more than surfing the
Web and playing online games...
Read More
First Impressions of IPFire's Firewall Software
For years I have been looking for something that can significantly
harden a home network against Internet security threats and can
still be used by those of us who are not networking professionals.
I have tried a handful of routers, and I have tried installing
promising-looking third-party router software like OpenWRT and
OPNSense...
Read More
In July the Cheapskate's Guide Experienced the Self-Hoster's Worst Nightmare
For someone running a web server in his physical possession, his
worst nightmare is the server going off line while he is
traveling for an extended period of time. When this happens, he
likely has only one recourse, temporarily re-hosting with a web
hosting service--and fast...
Read More
Internet Centralization may have made Blocking Unwanted Web-Crawling Robots Easier
Many who self hosted personal websites back in the 1990's
and early 2000's have told me that they stopped, partly due
to the difficulty of filtering out bad web-crawling robots
on the Internet. Bad robots don't benefit Internet users, just
the companies that sell the data they collect. The Internet is
now filled with so many robots--good and bad--that
some
estimates are that most of the traffic on the Internet is
robot traffic. This is a problem because it can increase the
cost of a website's data transmission and electricity and worsen
its user experience...
Read More
Initial Impressions of the Nostr Network
The administrator of the Exploding Heads (EH) instance of Lemmy
recently announced
that at the end of August, EH would be leaving Lemmy and the
Fediverse and moving to the
Nostr network. He gave the
increasing culture of censorship on the Fediverse as his reason
for leaving. In fact, EH may
not have been the first to leave the Fediverse in response to
"defederation".
Rumors
suggest that Gab gave up on the Fediverse years ago for this
very reason, and that appears to be the beginning of the end of
the rosy view held by some that the Fediverse would be an oasis of
free speech on the Internet...
Read More
More Articles:
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Categories:
Buying a Computer
Cheaper Options for Consumers
Computer Repair
Computer Security
Core Articles
Decentralized Networks
Online Freedom and Free Speech
Online Forums and Social Networks
Online Privacy
Online Services
Seen on the Internet
Software and Operating Systems
Technology
Using Older Computers
Website Creation and Hosting
Miscellaneous
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