blog – Derek Jarvis – Programmer, Problem-solver, and much more…

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Posted March 19, 2022

NFTs

Chapter 1 A few of my friends and family have asked me about NFTs. About a year ago I started talking about them and people looked at me like I was crazy. Now that they're all over the news, people want to know - so I'm writing my thoughts here :). In order to understand NFTs, we first need to understand blockchain. Blockchain is essentially a ledger of transactions that [...]

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Posted February 28, 2021

GALACON 2021

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Posted October 25, 2020

Atlas-ian Mistake

You may know that I used to proudly show that I have worked with Atlassian JIRA for many years. I have written countless customizations and even plugins for it. Trained hundreds of people, and ran many successful projects. It all ends now. Over the last 10 years, they have been neglecting the Server version. Many highly requested bugs and features simply went ignored and were "not prioritized." Atlassian was too [...]

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Posted October 25, 2020

Go Go Golem

A few months ago I stumbled across an interesting usage of blockchain technology: golem.network . To put it simply, it allows you to rent our your computer to do work for other people in a safe and decentralized way. This means that desktop computer you have running all day doing nothing can now at least be making you some money to offset the electricity bill. At first I started as [...]

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Posted August 17, 2020

Being Social, but not a slave

I've ranted about it in many posts before, so I will try to keep this short. Facebook and all the other "free" service providers are basically evil. They are in the business of taking personal and private things from you and in exchange they offer you something of value... Sound familiar? The kicker is that what they are offering you is actually a pittance - worth almost nothing. If someone [...]

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Posted June 23, 2020

Jitsi because Zoom is EVIL

Many of the services we use because they are easy to use. And for many of these services, their owners have bad intentions and we know it - but we want what they're offering and we don't know a good alternative. I've written about this in my Leaving the GAFAMily post, and in a few others. The latest issue, in this crazy virus-y world, is video conferencing. Enter Zoom. You [...]

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Posted March 26, 2020

Leaving the GAFAMily

What is GAFA(M)? This is the name given to the services offered by the tech giants: Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and sometimes Microsoft. Why do these companies get grouped up and named like this? Because they all have a common issue: they trade technology and convenience for their customer’s privacy and/or unreasonable amounts of money. They are a bit like a hydra: many heads of the same beast, and it [...]

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Posted March 26, 2020

Going Off Grid

It's funny, the idea of going "Off Grid" in the real world often involves moving to the woods, digging a well for a water supply, and other slightly crazy things. Going "Off Grid" in the online world actually makes you go more "On Grid" than ever before. It requires you to learn a bit more, and understand a bit more - but it is so worth it. I was constantly [...]

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Posted March 1, 2020

How to NOT migrate Nextcloud

When I started on this journey, I thought I was going to write a post about how to move Nextcloud from one server to another. I had a few ideas in my head about how I could go about it. In the end, NONE of them worked very well (for various reasons). So, this is more about how to NOT go about moving your Nextcloud. The silver lining is that [...]

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Posted January 29, 2020

YUNO SELF HOST?

I already posted about my move away from WebFaction, so I thought I would give a brief demo of the steps it takes to set up a simple WordPress blog. In my opinion, it's not that hard. There's a hiccup here and there, but it's just a one time thing. This whole process can be done in 15 minutes. Get ready for the picture storm. Pick a server I personally [...]

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