Where Are The Wise Men?

Mike's Ramblings

My Personal Cloud

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I've been having an ongoing conversation with a good friend of mine for a long time about email management. We want to keep our emails so we can find them later, and either don't trust or don't like the interfaces what GMail and other free providers give us. In that vein, early this spring, he sent me a link to the Sovereign project on github that is, essentially, your own cloud server with storage, email, et al.

What he didn't know at the time was that I was lamenting all the cloud services I was using (and spending bits of money on) but still not feeling in control of what was where. Add that to the fact that I've never really trusted a cloud storage service like Dropbox, Box.net, GDrive with my files. Yes I had all of them and had files in all of them, but never really dedicating anything to any of them, i.e. paying them money.

So I tried it out -- I got a cheap VPS and ran the Ansible scripts, taking out the things I didn't need (like, I haven't been on IRC for years!). As time as went on I tweaked things and simplified my digital services by replacing them with things on the server.

This is what I use:

ownCloud

This is really the most important item on this list, and probably the most surprising one to me. I have learned to like cloud storage, now that I feel like I have some control (and, honestly, some space to actually hold things). I'm using it to hold my ebooks I store in Calibre. I still don't have room to put my music on there, but I'm toying with the idea of upgrading the VPS so I have the room. I have all sorts of documents there for work. The Android app is great for most things -- it doesn't keep an entire folder in sync but, luckily, ownCloud implements webdav so I can use existing tools like FolderSync. ownCloud also keeps contacts via CardDav so I can keep my own copy of contacts.

This personal cloud storage is great, but I use the syncing abilities to keep track of other things. So Todo.txt has replaced Remember The Milk for tasks and KeePass2 has replaced LastPass. The last one was hard for me to let go of, but I'm actually now happier now with KeePass2.

On the Android side, the official Todo.txt Android app utilizes Dropbox for syncing, but a little research I found Simpletask Cloudless and Keepass2Android, using the fore-mentioned FolderSync to keep the files in sync. At most they are an hour behind, which is fine for me.

gitolite

This wasn't end the original version of Sovereign that I installed, but I'm glad that it was included. I do like having my own private git repo that I don't have to pay Github for. I disabled cgit mostly because I didn't see the need for it, for just me. Though I have included others in a couple of my projects.

selfoss

When the Google Reader Shutdown happened and I looked for self-hosted alternatives, selfoss didn't no pop up on my searches. But I'm glad that the it was included with this! It's very clean, lets me scan the articles from my feeds quickly. The mobile version (through my mobile browser) is actually better than the full-screen one, IMHO.

wallabag

Wallabag is another new-comer to Sovereign but I like it a lot -- it has replaced Pocket for me. It works just the same as Pocket, but with an added feature of saving articles to epub. I haven't actually done that yet but I fancy putting together a cookbook with it. Wouldn't that be cool?

There are other things I like -- using OpenVPN when using an open wifi connection, automatic backup to Tarsnap, and just having a SSH prompt at my exposure, when I need it.

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