Maybe it was a phishing scheme to identify people’s IP addresses based on where they loaded the image from. In that case, each person would only receive one message. Fortunately I use a proxy, so they got nothing.

Actually, I just saw that the image could zoom in if I opened it in a new window.

Regarding your connectors: If you want to have the different parts of the keyboard connect by USB-C, then you would need to add a USB-C hub inside each part that could have downstream devices.

If you are willing to have each part be a different USB device, that would simplify the design a lot. Then, they could all connect to a USB hub.

If you want to minimize cable clutter, you might consider interconnecting the components with something like QWIIC, which is pretty small. It would also require doing custom firmware.

Electrical engineer here. I can only answer a few of the questions:

This will be a “USB Device” (as opposed to USB Host or USB OTG) so the correct USB connector to use is B receptacle, mini-B receptacle (obsolete), micro-B receptacle (obsolete), or C receptacle. You can pick any one of those. The obsolete ones still work fine, it’s just hard to find cables for them. Mini-B is actually very durable. Alternately, you could have a captive cable with a USB A male plug on the end.

KiCad has pretty good facilities for making your own component layouts. Many components you simply can’t find existing files for. Unfortunately, this is part of the life of circuit design. It should only take an hour or so per component.

Adding diodes can enable N-key rollover. If you don’t need that feature, you could skip it. If you’re going to the trouble of making your own keyboard, diodes are a comparatively small cost, so you should do it. The Chouchou keyboard uses a separate pin for every single key, so it doesn’t need diodes.

Yes, you can hide the parts in a case. But you could also just make the back of the circuit board really long, and there should be enough space for it. Picking out connectors and cables and stuff is always a pain, so try to avoid having multiple boxes if you can. The electronics should be pretty small anyway.

I have self hosted my email since 2006. I gave up on self hosting outgoing mail in 2021, but I still keep the server up for incoming mail, and still set up throwaway accounts on there.

The hard part of hosting email is getting Google and Microsoft to accept outgoing mail. Tons of businesses that do not have visibly outlook .com or gmail .com addresses are still hosted by those servers.

I had SPF, DKIM, and a static datacenter IP address with no reputation problems. I still couldn’t get through to Microsoft, not even in people’s junk mail directory, until they manually whitelisted my address. Microsoft didn’t allow them to whitelist a whole domain. Google was a little easier, but they added new demands monthly.

In 2025, I can’t get reliable delivery to gmail .com addresses even sending from a hotmail .com address in the outlook .com web interface.

Not sure how much you’re paying for your VPN, but a virtual private server can be had for about $5 per month. You’ll get a real IPv4 address just for you, so you won’t have to use non-standard port numbers. (You can also use the VPS as a self-hosted VPN or proxy.)

$5 per month doesn’t get you much processing power, but it gets you plenty of bandwidth. You could self-host your server on your home computer, and reverse-proxy through your NAT using the VPS.

Cloudflare has IP banned me before for no reason (no proxy, no VPN, residential ISP with no bot traffic). They’ve switched their captcha system a few times, and some years it’s easy, some years it’s impossible.

This survey doesn’t distinguish between levels of cloud service provider, so I was a little confused.

Virtual private servers, cloud virtual servers (like AWS), cloud-based software where you provide code or a program and the cloud system runs it on a server of its choosing, and cloud-based systems where someone else provides the software (like Google Docs).

Jellyfin depends on proprietary Microsoft .NET, even on Linux.

It’s still better than Plex and Emby, which are fully proprietary, and have no source code. But I will stick with sshfs with kodi, and nginx plus mpv for now.

Try going to http://000.000.000.000:8080/ in your web browser (replacing the 0’s with your public IP address), on your home connection. If it doesn’t work, it means that your port forwarding is probably not working. If the page loads correctly, it means your port forwarding is working correctly, and the problem is probably your ISP doing port blocking.

In my system, the raid arrays seem to do periodic data scrubbing automatically. Maybe it’s something that’s part of Debian, or maybe it’s just a default kernel setting. I don’t think it helps much with data integrity – I think it helps more just by ensuring the continued functionality of the drives.

When it’s running, you can type cat /proc/mdstat to see the progress.

That command will also show you if there is a failing drive, so that you can replace it.

Sure. First you set up a RAID5/6 array in mdadm. This is a purely software thing, which is built into the Linux kernel. It doesn’t require any hardware RAID system. If you have 3-4 drives, RAID5 is probably best, and if you have 5+ drives RAID6 is probably best.

If your 3 blank drives are sdb1, sdc1, and sdd1, run this:

mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md0 --level=5 -n 3 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1

This will create a block device called /dev/md0 that you can use as if it were a single large hard drive.

mkfs.btrfs /dev/md0

That will make the filesystem on the block device.

mkdir /mnt/bigraid
mount /dev/md0 /mnt/bigraid

This creates a mount point and mounts the filesystem.

To get it to mount every time you boot, add an entry for this filesystem in /etc/fstab

The man page at https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/mkfs.btrfs.html says:

RAID5/6 has known problems and should not be used in production.

So those profiles have unknown, unspecified problems.

But btrfs is safe on top of md-based raid1/5/6. It also has the advantage that you only need to encrypt one volume.

The easiest way to disable unnecessary services is to uninstall them with aptitude, or whichever package manager you like. Try terminating services one by one, and see if anything bad happens. If nothing bad happens, you can probably uninstall it. On the other hand, if the system does get wonky a reboot should fix it. Or, you can research the services by name and decide whether to uninstall them. (avahi-daemon for example is a good idea to uninstall.)

To make the GUI not run, uninstall your display manager (gdm, xdm, nodm, or whatever) and uninstall your xorg server or wayland server. There may be GUI programs remaining after that, but they will only be consuming disk space, not RAM or CPU.

If the battery is old and holds little charge, you may save a few watts by removing it and throwing it away, instead of letting the system keep it topped off.

Get a power meter, such as a Kill-a-watt device. Then, experiment with different settings. If it’s consuming less than 30 watts, you’re probably fine. If you live in the US, one watt-year is about one US dollar (or a little more), so for every watt it consumes, that’s about how much you will pay per year for its electricity.

draw .io is closed source.

Using a VPN (like Tailscale or Netbird) will make setup very easy, but probably a bit slower, because they probably connect through the VPN service’s infrastructure.

My recommended approach would be to use a directly connected VPN, like OpenVPN, that just has two nodes on it – your VPS, and your home server. This will bypass the potentially slow infrastructure of a commercial VPN service. Then, use iptables rules to have the VPS forward the relevant connections (TCP port 80/443 for the web apps, TCP/UDP port 25565 for Minecraft, etc.) to the home server’s OpenVPN IP address.

My second recommended approach would be to use a program like openbsd-inetd on your VPS to forward all relevant connections to your real IP address. Then, open those ports on your home connection, but only for the VPS’s IP address. If some random person tries to portscan you, they will see closed ports.