000 — Recap 2020

Starting 2021 with a weekly roundup of things I found online in the previous 7 days. These notes are not articles because they will be more or less what could be collected in 2–4 tweets.
This is also a test to see if setting goals to create a little more and have a sustainable archive of notes is something that I will be able to do longer than just some weeks.
But before we dive into all those great things I found it is time to round up what I used the most in 2020 and what I changed to make my life easier.

Top 5 used Tools, Websites, Newsletters i found to be very useful and worth using/subscribing 2020

• Unsplash
  I reached 5 000 000 Views on my upload Photos, and work with it daily
• Umami
  Getting rid of everything Google and hosting analytics software on my own
• Sidebar
  Some of the most high quality links to check out every day
• frontend.horse
  I try to reduce the newsletters I subscribe to but this newsletter always offers some interesting articles and ideas if you are interested in frontend development or if you are a designer that likes to explore what is possible.

What changed/made life easier

HomeAssistant

I love to record data and statistics of anything I have in my life. BUT, it is important that this data is not used “against” me – so cloud services (My Cloud https://media.ccc.de/v/froscon2020-2598-my_cloud_i_rule_my_data_and_i_rule_how_i_communicate) are not that high on my list of usage.

To control data and keep an overview of my home I set up HomeAssistant as my go to Smart Home Solution. German talk about HomeAssistant: https://media.ccc.de/v/froscon2020-2595-smartes_smart_home_mit_home_assistant
More about this will be in an upcoming article this year.

Synology Nas instead of FreeNAS

I love to create my own solutions for anything technology related. The same thing happened for my NAS. It was running 24/7 and since my home setup is focused on performance and low power usage it was easy to create a computer that was using about 30 Watts while still offering decent performance. FreeNAS was the OS of choice and it was the first attempt to work with ZFS.
After 8 years tho I decided to switch to Synology so I need less time to administer the NAS. Don’t get me wrong, FreeNAS is a great OS, but updates were not always smooth and flashing a second USB-Stick to boot with a previous Snapshot was one of the most common things that happened.
With Synology I got a closed system that runs smooth, costs about the same as the FreeNAS hardware I used in 2012 but has state of the art-ish hardware that runs everything I need without problems and still offers me full Gbit speed. It can also runs HomeAssistant!

Rspamd

Moving on from Spamassassin to Rspamd made life easier. Spamassassin has become bloated and slow, Rspamd offers faster and better spam scanning and offers a nice interface to track all the stats of your mail server.

If you understand german and want to learn more about Rspamd you can listen to an interesting talk about it: https://media.ccc.de/v/froscon2018-2149-rspamd_aus_der_perspektive_des_hobbyadmins