another stormy sunday best spent on the sofa. A few issues ago I was writing about the vacuum of good personal task and knowledge managing tools and this newsletter now even covers two new projects in this area.

Manage your tasks with Vikunja Link to heading

A Vikunja is not only the name of a camelid living in the andes, but also a new task manager with a promising architecture and feature set. It already contains a go based API backend and a web frontend as well as a Flutter based mobile app and has many more interesting features on its roadmap like different views, webhooks and imap import.

Daily tasks and notes Link to heading

The second new contender in this category is simply called DailyNotes. What so intriguing about this entry is that it does not stop at managing tasks, but also blends it with the ability to store notes.

The repo is missing a screenshot, but the author shared an early screenshot on Reddit.

A nice introduction to Ansible Link to heading

Ansible is among the things I want to gain more knowledge about this year. And while searching the internet I cam across the nice and beautiful looking slide deck “Ansible without dropping the brick”.

The compiled slide deck can be found at https://kolibri.github.io/1.

“Hidden” features in healthchecks.io Link to heading

I have featured healthchecks.io here in the past and learned of a new feature of it last week. Maybe its not as new for users that frequently visit the healthchecks.io documentation, but it was at least new and unexpected to me.

Apart from waiting for checks to timeout healthchecks.io now also has the feature to directly signal a failing task by calling the /fail endpoint of a given check.

This can easily be combined with the ability to attach command output to a given check, to have immediate insight to why a check was failing without the need to dive into local log files. For users of the hosted service this feature is limited to 10kb bodies, but can be set to a higher value for self-hosted instances.

On top of that healthchecks.io now not only offers simple success/failure checks, but also measure how long a task took to complete, and will alert if a task has not finished in a given time.

And there was even another small gem hidden away in the documentation. There is even a simple dashboard to expose the status of checks. All the dashboard needs is a location to serve static files from and an API key.

Simple local network uptime monitoring Link to heading

Flatline offers simple network uptime monitoring by scanning the local network and presenting a historical overview of discovered devices.

While on the topic of monitoring.. Link to heading

Ciao is a simple dashboard to monitor http responses from given addresses. On status change it can send a mail or trigger a webhook.

A simpler to configure MTA Link to heading

chasquid has set out to make it easier to run your own mail server, but providing less complex configuration and protecting users from common errors.

It has an extensive documentation that even includes a how-to for a standard installation with Dovecot as the actual mail server.

What makes it quite interesting is its ability to use “hooks” to easily integrate third party services for for processing of messages with ClamAV/Spamassassin/Rspamd, which even makes automatic use of these services if they are installed. Sadly, though there does not seem to be support for LDAP for it as of now.

Another DIY Ngrok Link to heading

Another entry in the category of “how to expose local services to the internet”. What makes this one quite interesting is that it uses standard tools (here ssh tunnels and Nginx) to maintain the connection. Connections are monitored through SystemD, which will take care of bringing them up back again in case of a timeout.

Updates Link to heading

  • Run v0.7.1 - Run has set out to replace the usage of Make for non build-related tasks and wants to be come your go-to tool when it comes to managing wrapper scripts.

I am always looking for new projects to try out! Just send an email to selfhosted-newsletter@9wd.eu.

I hope you have enjoyed this issue. If this newsletter was useful to you please recommend it to colleges or tell them to subscribe to it via RSS.

Have a nice weekend! Felix