Cheapskate's Guide

> It means that more than one percent of the IPv4 real estate on the Internet (and probably much more) is occupied by people and organizations who are either clueless or just do not care how much the rest of us are paying to keep our websites on line.

Oh, tell me, how much? The whopping $5/month? Oh, maybe this is a high load WordPress/like CMS running on LAMP stack... so $8/month?

> I wrote the following small PHP script to search though my Nginx configuration file and tally up the number of IP addresses that I am blocking.

Holy shit. Blocking bots through nginx configuration, more so, blocking 56M addresses through nginx configuration...

Okay, for those of you who never did the thing or have no idea:

Just use the firewall (most of the time it is built-in in your OS), use some way to tell the firewall about the 'offenders' (eg fail2ban though there are options) and don't ever block something indefinitely, it's totally meaningless, just use timeouts.

If some Bob got his computer infected in 2015 and that computer tried to access /wp-admin.php then there is absolutely no reason to assume what in 2024 the IP address Bob's computer had in 2015 is still 'malicious'.

Automatic activity like the scans, bruteforcing and whatever is all about opportunity. They are searching for an easy opportunities to exploit and scanning a server what actively blocks you even for 30m at time is just pointless, there is way, way more opportunities in other places than wasting ~4 weeks…

You don't have to be old to experience this problem. This was my take on
techno-clutter from a few months back:

https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/techno-clutter-farnell.html

A more funny story:

Back in school, when we were about 17 years old, another kid told me
that his Great Uncle had died, and caused him much stress. He'd never
met this distant relative, so I enquired, why was he worried? Great
Uncle Ben-Ali had named my school-friend, who he'd heard about only
through a grandparent but "taken a shine to", as the sole heir and
benefactor of his estate - 5 acres of harsh scrub land about 200 miles
into the mountains of Morocco containing a shack and two donkeys. He'd
received a letter, which was very specific that he was now responsible
for the welfare of the donkeys.

Today, this would probably be the start of a great scam, but this was
in the 1980s before people "had internet". Many people would have just
ignored the whole situation, but my friend, true to his conscience,
enlisted Arabic translators and sent letters back and forth to North
Morocco for months. Eventually the fate of the donkeys was secured.
It was agreed that Ben-Ali's neighbour, whose land they had already
wandered on to, would have the donkeys, and the shack would go back to
the village/local-government.

OP first needs to decide what the actual problem is they want to solve.

> Either they are filled with bugs, refuse to install on my computer's hard drive, require too much RAM, run too slowly, lack important drivers or codecs, are no longer actively supported, do not support 32-bit CPU's, are too difficult for novices to use, or have other highly-annoying problems like, for example, poor use of swap space.

Most of these problems could be tackled without having to invent a whole new distribution – bugs can be fixed, swap usage can be tuned, drivers can be packaged and added, etc. Any of these, apparently, would make one or several currently borderline useful distribution into a fully usable one.

Or maybe not, going by OP's other blog posts (e.g. https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/surf-internet.html) they're proud of not understanding how Linux distributions work. ("the same number of bugs as the average Linux distribution"?!, Complaining that lightweight distributions don't have as many preinstalled programs as big ones, dpkg -i'ing random packages designed for other distributions, …)

I have a laptop from 2009 or 2010 running at 800 mhz with a 32 bit CPU. It has to run an older version of Ubuntu (18.04) because nothing supports it nowadays. Even 32 bit packages are hard to get. I see no reason to use antiX or other esoteric distros since ubuntu runs fine on it and supports the hardware. I doubt antiX supports more hardware.

Someone else recommended it here, but I don't see the advantages over a robust package repository like ubuntu 18 or a minimal ram only distro like puppylinux. https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/antix.html

Funny enough I got puppylinux running from a dos (windows) partition and running out of RAM on just 2gb on a Toshiba Portage m200. I've even got Windows XP Tablet edition running on SSD, but it can't really connect to much online due to the TLS limitations. And newer versions of the linux kernel don't support the wireless chipset. It is also difficult putting an old non-PAE kernel into a newer distro.

TLS really killed the utility of a lot of older computers with regards to using the "modern internet".

https://cheapskatesguide.org -- Cheapskate's Guide to Computers and Internet. Low-end and frugal computing in the 21st century. Long, opinionated posts on a pink(!) background.

http://ranprieur.com/ -- Ran Prieur. Frugality, societal collapse, "dropping out", and beyond. Has been constantly blogging for ages; it's really interesting to see how his views have changed in time.

http://joeyh.name/ -- Joey Hess, former long-time Debian developer, author of git-annex. Frugal living and computing in the wilderness (he used to do everything on a 9-inch Dell Mini 9).

https://datagubbe.se/ -- Carl Svensson. Great long-form essays on frugal computing and, uh, what has gone wrong after 1994 or so.

http://len.falken.ink/ -- I just really like the "layout", even if it feels a little pretentious to some. IIRC, his essay "Writing for the Internet across a Human Lifetime" also had some feedback on HN.

http://viznut.fi/en/ -- Viznut. Demoscene, "low-end technical extremism", permacomputing. Updates are rare, but the older pieces are well worth a read.

> is that just a meaningless buzzword now?

Very much, yes. If anything that word is now a warning sign. Thanks mr. minimal nerdy dev for having me download a minimal 9 MB auto playing header video over my mobile plan on your landing page[1].

This[2] is a better example of "minimalism" (I have to wash my mouth now). Notice something? Not a single mention of the word "minimal" in the entire article. Aaand, developer tools says it's 84 KB of data. Compare that to the the 13800 KB of the nerdy.dev landing page. Funny, [2] seems to be 164 times "more minimal" than [1].

[1] https://nerdy.dev/

[2] https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/low-bandwidth-hosting-tips.html