Data Collection

...is supposed to be hosted from my home over Tor(surfing instructions) by using Raspberry_Pi_3 and a ~1TiB USB HDD, but in practice the Tor got blocked somehow, it did not penetrate NAT, and hence the blog related set of files is served from the Raspberry_Pi_3 by creating an SSH tunnel to my VPS, which is hosted at core.eu.

The reason for trying to use Tor for publishing those blog related files is that hardly anybody bothers to read my blog and therefore it is monetarily cheaper for me to serve those few GiB of upload traffic per year from home book shelve than to start paying for hosting the ~500GiB of files that hardly anybody bothers to download and to mess with the various "we-closed-our-service-Foo-because-our-business-direction-changed" type of situations. To avoid leeching on the Tor network I always run a Tor relay, whenever I have a personal VPS.

Yes, serving from a Raspberry_Pi_3 at home book shelve is slow from upload speed point of view, but as of 2025_04 I believe that in the long run the Internet should move many functions, not all, but still many, from the real-time availability based model to the idea used at ZeroNet, where people have their own local versioned copies and the local collection of those versioned copies gets updated in the background.

Raspberry_Pi memory card images do need to be rewritten to memory cards about once a year, because that's the time that Flash memory can retain data with "sufficiently small" amount of bitrot, but it's still smaller amount of maintenance than messing with classical online file hosting. Electricity wise, as of 2025 about 10W 24/7 costs in Estonia about 1.4€/month, so my self-hosting fee for that Raspberry_Pi_3 file hosting server is at most about 3€/month, not counting hardware cost. USB HDD takes about 10W.

...or may be I'm just so fed up with depending on other people's hosting services that this whole classical www at softf1.com domain is a shoddy compromise to start with and I have came to a conclusion that my home page should actually be a folder of files that is served through multiple channels and the classical www is just one channel out of many, a disgustingly centralized and outdated channel that costs me literally about 200€/year in various domain registration fees alone. So I'm hosting the softf1.com, including its email, at the cheapest Estonian hosting service that I could find: about 13€/year, planet.ee. For really big files, like 100GiB virtual appliance images, I use 1fichier.com premium account with 10 year hosting prepayment. A list of various less popular and/or "Alternet" browsers, various information exchange tools:

• aMule may sometimes crash or hang, but can still be useful for publishing and downloading files. On Linux it MIGHT be available even from standard package collection.
• Agregore seems to be Windows specific, but at least some Linux distributions have Amfora command line Gemini reader as part of their standard package collection.
• Bitmessage is a P2P email client/server that truly works. It's GUI is not that comfortable to use and You may want to copy-paste Your email text in some encrypted form, but as a channel for delivering plain text in P2P fashion it works really well in 2024 era Estonia.
• copies_of_3rd_party_software
• Dillo is a lightweight HTML browser that has a derivative named Dillo-Plus that I have created a 3rd party build script for easier building.
• Gophie is for the Gopher protocol, for surfing the Gopherspace.
• Lagrange Gemini protocol browser
• NetSurf is a lightweight HTML browser that MIGHT be used for surfing HTML that is crafted with Amaya WYSIWYG HTML Editor.
• RetroZilla depends on The Internet Archive.
• Supermium is a Windows specific Google Chrome fork that works on both, Windows10 and on WindowsXP. Its main feature is the support for older advertisement blockers, but it works also with the Ghostery Ad Blocker and with the SingleFile HTML-page saver and with "some form" of Vimium or Vimium-C Vim key bindings plugin. Some Google Chrome forks also support the CheerpJ Java Applet runner and the Tab-Snap tab URLs to clipboard copyer.
• TorBrowser is for the .onion domain.
• Transmission is a BitTorrent protocol client. BitTorrent protocol is really useful for downloading huge files (read: ~100GiB VirtualBox appliances). On Linux it MIGHT be available even from standard package collection.
• UNISON is a tool for uploading huge files (read: ~100GiB VirtualBox appliances) over network connections that tend to break during upload. Unison is like a BitTorrent client, but for uploading files. It allows to download too, but its BitTorrent-like downloading capability is a fine bonus, not a unique feature.
• QuiteRSS is for plain HTTP blogs that have RSS index.
• qutebrowser is a modern HTML browser for those, who like to use Vim keyboard shortcuts.