Beginner

In my previous post about self-hosting for everyone I painted a hopeful picture: managed self-hosting where anyone can own their data. I glossed over something that bugs me. Hardware costs money, and the maths works out very differently depending on whether you’re a business or a person. So let me lay out two rules that both sound completely reasonable. Then watch them collide. Rule One: Own Your Hardware This is the whole point of sovereignty. You buy the box, you run the box, nobody can pull your data out from under you. As I argued in Sovereign Infrastructure, I want to understand and control what I run. Renting that from someone else reintroduces exactly the dependency I’m trying to escape. ...

Here is how most people store their digital lives in 2026. Photos go to Google. Email goes to Gmail. Documents go to whatever cloud came bundled with the phone. Passwords sit in a browser owned by an ad company. Every byte lives on someone else’s server, governed by terms nobody read, in a jurisdiction nobody checked. We hand it all over and we call it normal, because the alternative looks like a second job. ...

You wake up. It’s dark. Somewhere a fan is humming. Your eyes adjust. You’re in a container. Metal walls, a few small windows, and through them: stars. Just stars. No Earth anywhere. There’s a note taped to the wall: “You have everything you need to survive. Nothing goes in, nothing goes out. Good luck.” I bring this thought experiment up when I’m in the right mood with friends. It sounds like science fiction. What it actually does is strip away the thing most of us never question: the assumption that there is an “outside” that absorbs our mistakes and refills our supplies. ...

I used KeePass for years. Then 1Password. Then Bitwarden. All decent tools, but every one of them felt like too much. Too much UI, too many features, too much friction to wire into the way I actually work. Every time I reached for a password I was reaching across an app boundary, and that small interruption added up. Then I found pass. It does exactly what the name promises: it stores passwords. I want to walk you through it the way I learned it, starting with the one command that hooked me, then adding layers until you can see my full setup. ...

GPG is one of those tools everyone keeps meaning to learn and never does. The docs are a wall of text, the terminology is its own dialect, and the error messages are cryptic in both senses of the word. I put it off for years myself. The thing is, you keep bumping into it. GPG sits under pass, under signed git commits, under encrypted email, under verifying that the binary you just downloaded is the one the maintainer actually shipped. If you care about owning your security instead of trusting a vendor to handle it for you, you end up here eventually. ...