• 4 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: April 27th, 2024

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  • Me and my GF are currently doing this. Some recommendations from personal experience:

    • Pimsleur is really nice for getting from 0 to being able to speak and understand some amount. It’s very much less overwhelming than jumping head-first into grammar. You can find torrents for it. It’s also a really good way to learn to listen to and speak Japanese out loud, something most other resources lack.
    • everyone recommends Genki, and I concurr; it’s a good book series on grammar, with plenty exercises. Will really help filling in the gaps where you have gotten a feeling for things with Pimsleur, but are not able to grasp the underlying concepts intuitively.
    • don’t shy away from Hiragana and Katakana. They are easy to learn (seriously, spend an afternoon on each and then do kana.pro for a week and never look back). Ignoring this will prevent you from using most learning resources.
    • use Anki; again, everyone says this, because it’s true. You can download a pre-made pack for Genki. 10-15 cards a day are a good leisurely pace, allowing you to tackle a new chapter in Genki approximately every 7-10 days.
    • don’t fall in the rabbithole of watching YouTube videos on learning Japanese. Just study instead. If there’s a concrete thing you struggle with, look for a Video on that topic. Most of the geberal advice videos seem to come from English-speaking folks for whom Japanese is their first foreign language (which is great! Don’t get me wrong!), and the resulting information ranges from obvious to questionable.
    • decide if you want to learn Kanji (if you don’t know them anyways, given your stated experience). I’d recommend it. It’s actually quite fun, and if you want to watch Anime in Japanese, there’s a good chance you’ll have to use Japanese subs for a while to help along anyways…
    • most people online seem to suggest only learning to read Kanji, because “you never need to handwrite things today anyways”. I call bullshit. It’s marginal additional effort, can actually help you with recognition, and if you ever end up needing / wanting to write by hand, you’d have to start all over otherwise.

    Lastly, no, it is not a waste of time. Apart from anime, a new language means new ways of thinking, of challenging yourself, of being able to experience people and culture through a new lense, and potentially increasing job opportunities.

    Plus if you ever end up visiting Japan, it really comes in handy.

    Feel free to ask any followup things that I’ve forgotten about…

    Edit: I forgot to mention: I am nowhere near fluent yet, and do not claim the suggestions above as “ultimate Japanese learner advice” or anything like that.

    Also, very quickly you’ll start noticing phrases, words, topics when watching anime or japanese videos or music, even if you can’t follow the full conversation. That’s what really motivated and kept me going early on.


  • Grew up on it. My dad set up a Ubuntu 4.10 PC for my brother and I when we were 3/5 (no internet, obv), and it stuck.

    Used Windows for a brief time in highschool to be able to play online with friends.

    Went right back to Linux when going to university. Will never change back, both for ideological reasons and because Linux is just better.

    Next step: NixOS on a phone




  • TBH, it sounds like you have nothing to worry about then! Open ports aren’t really an issue in-and-on itself, they are problematic because the software listening on them might be vulnerable, and the (standard-) ports can provide knowledge about the nature pf the application, making it easier to target specific software with an exploit.

    Since a bot has no way of finding out what services you are running, they could only attack caddy - which I’d put down as a negligible danger.


  • My ISP blocks incoming data to common ports unless you get a business account.

    Oof, sorry, that sucks. I think you could still go the route I described though: For your domain example.com and example service myservice, listen on port :12345 and drop everything that isn’t requesting myservice.example.com:12345. Then forward the matching requests to your service’s actual port, e.g. 23456, which is closed to the internet.

    Edit: and just to clarify, for service otherservice, you do not need to open a second port; stick with the one, but in addition to myservice.example.com:12345, also accept requests for otherservice.example.com:12345, but proxy that to the (again, closed-to-the-internet) port :34567.

    The advantage here is that bots cannot guess from your ports what software you are running, and since caddy (or any of the mature reverse proxies) can be expected to be reasonably secure, I would not worry about bots being able to exploit the reverse proxy’s port. Bots also no longer have a direct line of communication to your services. In short, the routine of “let’s scan ports; ah, port x is open indicating use of service y; try automated exploit z” gets prevented.


  • I am scratching my head here: why open up ports at all? It it just to avoid having to pay for a domain? The usual way to go about this is to only proxy 443 traffic to the intended host/vm/port based on the (sub) domain, and just drop everything else, including requests on 443 that do not match your subdomains.

    Granted, there are some services actually requiring open ports, but the majority don’t (and you mention a webserver, where we’re definitely back to: why open anything beyond 443?).