It’s 2025. And let’s be real — online privacy is still treated more like an upsell than a right. I started caring about digital privacy back in 2014 when I realized just how much metadata could say about you, even when your actual content was encrypted.A VPN, I found, wasn’t a magic shield — it was a rerouting trick. A sleight-of-hand for your internet traffic. The ads scream “Get a VPN and you’re protected,” but the reality depends entirely on what you’re trying to accomplish.
The first time I tried to fix the reduced water flow on our kitchen sink, I was feeling confident. I took everything apart like a seasoned IT pro diving into a misbehaving service—cleaned out every bit of debris I could find. It felt like progress. But then, after I reassembled it all? It was worse. Like “no internet connection but all the lights are green” worse.
Back in 2019, I was searching for an automated way to sync photos from our phones—something seamless that my wife and I could rely on. I started experimenting with AWS and stumbled across OwnCloud, a solution I had heard of but never used. Curious, I spun up a VM and tested it out. It didn’t take long for me to realize that this was exactly what I had been looking for—a self-hosted alternative to the ever-growing ecosystem of cloud storage services like Google Drive, iCloud, and Dropbox.
In this post, I’ll walk you through the step-by-step process of how I set up this site as a self-hosted blogging solution. This guide covers everything from creating a lean Alpine Linux container on Proxmox, configuring the Hugo environment with all necessary packages, to automating the build and deployment process via a custom script. I’ll also share tips on using Visual Studio Code (VSC) with SSH plugins to manage your container seamlessly.
Since it’s February 14th, I’d like to wish you a Happy Valentine’s Day! Now, getting back to the main focus of this entry… let me remind you, twelve days ago, Phil saw his shadow. Yes, I know it’s all tradition and superstition, but up until Groundhog Day, we had no snow. Since then, in the northeast, we’ve had three storms! So it is safe to say that winter is in full swing! Driveways have been transformed into a form of manual labor and daunting tasks - snow removal!