I've never been a heavy email user, nor have I ever given much thought to the tools I used to handle them. Lately though, as this pandemic carries on, I've been spending a lot more time ‘socially distanced’ in web-based email clients in an attempt to stay in contact with others. Fighting Google logins, account switching, and bouncing between providers is, at best, annoying. I came to the conclusion that it was time to consolidate my numerous email accounts into a single standalone client.

Native support for plugins was added to Vim back in 2016 with the release of version 8's packages. Since then, I've moved from Pathogen in favor of this new feature. Although not a true replacement for existing plugin managers, when combined with Git it accomplishes the same goal. Being a believer in the less-is-more theory, it just seemed like the right thing to do. It has proven to be very easy to maintain and I don't miss Pathogen at all.

Enabling a firewall and securing SSH are two essential first steps when setting up a new server. In this tutorial I'll take you through the process I go through for every server I spin-up regardless of its use. I'll be using Ubuntu 18.04LTS on Linode, but this should apply to almost any recent Debian based distribution. If you're using a different VPS host or are on your own hardware there may be differences regarding root access and packages installed by default, I'll try to make note of this when needed.

WireGuard has risen in popularity over the last year or so with several adoptions by commercial VPN services. Its simplicity and speed make it a great choice for a private VPN replacement and having recently been accepted into the net-next maintainer tree for inclusion in an upcoming kernel, I figured now was a good time to give it a try. So, I retired my Raspberry Pi running PiVPN at home and instead set up a LXC in Proxmox to tunnel all my mobile devices through.