E-Books Forever – A Review of Calibre

Our Philosophy is that technology should be durable and that you should own things yourself. That includes electronic text. A Kindle is a nice way to read things, but if you buy books through Amazon and let them host the material for you, it’s not permanent. Someday, there won’t be an Amazon. You don’t really own the book unless you have copies of the files yourself.… Read more

The Definitive List of Self-hosted Stuff

This is the first post in a new category called Resources, where we will be posting about things to make your big-tech-independent life a bit easier. These aren’t really reviews of software, so they didn’t really belong there. With millions of apps and services you could check out, it’s hard to know where to begin. Here at BigBadTech, we like to cheat a little bit and use the Awesome-Selfhosted page when we start looking for alternatives in particular categories.… Read more

Wiki.JS – A Wiki for your Home

Everyone has some idea of what a “Wiki” is; at the very least we’ve all ended up on Wikipedia for some reason or another. The term was invented as part of the MediaWiki project, which itself was built to create Wikipedia. The term is somewhat ambiguous, but in general it refers to collaborative software where any use can edit content, content is broken down into individual pieces of information, and you can edit the content from a web browser.… Read more

We’re Back!

The last newsletter went out back in March, and the last post on this website followed shortly after. That’s four and a half months ago, and it’s reasonable to wonder if this project was abandoned or if there are any plans for new content. The simple fact is that this site is the product of one guy, and as my own personal project it has to be balanced with all the other things I’m working on.… Read more

Home Server Series Part 6 – Your First Self-Hosted Service

What good is a server that doesn’t have a service? In this post, we’ll look at using Docker to set up a Bitwarden password management service. In subsequent posts, we’ll add the ability to access this service from outside your home network securely and reliably. Dock What? If you want to run a single service on a server, you can install it, run it, and forget about it.… Read more

Home Streaming

If you’re like most people today, you don’t really buy physical movies anymore. You have half a dozen streaming services and watch what’s available. You might keep a DVD player for that pile of old disks you bought years ago or a Blu-ray player for the new releases you can’t stream yet, but you mostly rely on some Big Tech company’s services to get what you want.… Read more

The Power of Plain Text

 I see technology as a tool; as a means to an end. That end will vary, but seeing technology as a means and a tool invariably leads to some philosophical conclusions. What’s Plain Text? The words on the screen you’re reading right now are plain text. You can check it for yourself if you’d like by inspecting the source code of the page.… Read more