I used to be a person who's like an extermist just around 2 years ago.

I always cared about peoples political ideas, things they use on their devices, what religion they believed and stuff like that. And in every case, I just tried to prove myself right to those who opposed to me.

And I was a person who gets offended by someone very easily. I guess you got what I'm trying to tell.

I was a person who always cares about stuff and stuff and stuff …. After a point that started to feel like hell.

The turning point of my life happened when I broke up with my ex-girlfriend.

When I broke up with her, I decided to review my personality and my past and found out that how that habit of mine was turning my life into a hell place.

I never had true friends because of that. No one ever wanted me as a close person or no one has trusted me ever. I always questioned that, but never found out the true reason.

This was mostly because my personality. But that changed when I broke up with her.

The most important thing I ever learned was not giving a fuck about things that has nothing to do with me. Like some ideas, religions, political views and etc.

And that has changed my life entirely.

I used the sentence "I don't give a fuck" as the my main ideology for a year and that helped me to change my oppositional personalty against people. And that has allowed me to have close friends and trusted ones once again.

Also this ideology has even changed my view on life. Especially my own life and my future.

This is why I titled this post as "The art of not giving a fuck". When done right, not giving a fuck becomes an art. An art that changes life in a good matter.

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I've been using that S10e for the last 3 months and it just reminded me how good the old compact and small phones were.

Smartphones started as small 4" computers in our pocket. And their only purpose was to put simple web functionality into our pockets and improve our communications. Such as e-mails, video calls, listening to music, etc.

Then humanity created social media platforms, and those platforms made their way into our smartphones.

Since that day, we started to use our smartphones not just for communication but also for content consumption and gaming. And that created a need for bigger screens.

In 2011 Samsung released the Galaxy Note line-up. The Galaxy Note 1 has featured a huge 5.3" screen. I'm calling it huge because the average screen size for a smartphone back in 2011 was around 4".

People loved that device. It had the perfect screen size for gaming, content consumption and productivity. And that has started the trend for big phones.

Since that day, smartphones kept getting bigger and bigger. Now, the average mid-range smartphone has a screen size of around 6.5". And with the release of Galaxy S25 Ultra, we got closer to 7" screen sizes. And it's almost impossible to buy a mid-range or flagship device with a screen size of less than 6".

Just like any other mid-range phone, my Xiaomi had a 6.8" screen and I was happy with its size.

Than I got this Galaxy S10e. Which has a 5.8" screen. When I first held it, it felt like an toy phone with its small size and I actually loved it. And I'll talk about it on a future post.

And that reminded how ergonomic and good the old smartphones really was compared to todays boxy devices. The most important thing is, that I can do everything only using one hand! Which was almost impossible with my old Xiaomi.

Now it's been 3 months since I started using it. And the only thing I want to say is. We need to bring this form factor back.

This is the future of the smartphones that were promised to us back in 2018. Small, ergonomic, has a unique design, performs well, and most importantly easy to use single-handed.

But in reality, people and phone makers are more convinced of the idea of "bigger is better" and that resulted in the end of compact phones like Galaxy S10e and the iPhone mini-series that only lasted for 2 generations.

I believe we need to bring compact phones back. Especially the ones with flagship features. But this is only possible if we collaborate as a community. So, if you want to tell something, feel free to reply this post via e-mail, Mastodon, X or at your own blog. My ideas may not be the best ones, fix me if I'm wrong or add on top of my ideas. This is actually more important than you may thinking.

Anyways, without any further words. Thanks for reading!

Thank You!

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08.03.2025

But it's also the distro that Canonical pushes Snaps. Which is a proprietary packaging format also made by Canonical.

Snaps are actually great for servers. Even I currently run my Mastodon server as a snap.

But for desktops, snap packages tends to be slow and take a lot of storage space.

Also it's server-side is closed-sourced and people have concerns about their privacy.

They aren't the ideal packaging solution for desktop use case when compared to Flatpaks, AppImages or even native packages.

So in this post, I'm going to show you how to remove Snaps from your freshly installed Ubuntu desktop and replace it with Flatpaks. Let's get started!

1. Add Firefox PPA

Before going any further, we need to add Mozilla's official PPA to our system to prevent triggering installation of snap when we try to install Firefox.

We first need to remove the snap version of Firefox. If you're currently following this tutorial from Ubuntu, make sure to note those commands somewhere you can read before continuing.

To remove Firefox from snap run the command

sudo snap remove --purge firefox

Than we'll install Mozilla's apt repo key

wget -q https://packages.mozilla.org/apt/repo-signing-key.gpg -O- | sudo tee /etc/apt/keyrings/packages.mozilla.org.asc > /dev/null

Getting no output from this command means it ran with no problem. Now we can add the APT repo to our sources.list file.

echo "deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/packages.mozilla.org.asc] https://packages.mozilla.org/apt mozilla main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mozilla.list

After that we need to set the Firefox package priority to ensure that package from Mozilla is always preferred. Otherwise when we try to install Firefox, it'll be installed from Snap. Which we're trying to avoid.

echo '  
Package: *  
Pin: origin packages.mozilla.org  
Pin-Priority: 1000  

Package: firefox*  
Pin: release o=Ubuntu  
Pin-Priority: -1' | sudo tee /etc/apt/preferences.d/mozilla

Now we can install Firefox from Mozilla's repo.

sudo apt update && sudo apt install firefox

And now when you launch Firefox you can check to see it's from the Mozilla's Debian repo.

2. Removing Snap

Now we need to remove all the snaps we've installed and remove the snapd from our system.

Before removing snap, we need to stop it's systemd service.

sudo systemctl disable --now snapd && sudo systemctl disable --now snapd.socket

After that we can remove snapd from system with command below.

sudo apt purge snapd

At that point make sure to use the purge command instead of autoremove, otherwise all the mounts and stuff installed by snap will be left on our system.

3. Avoid installation of snap

As our last step, we need to add a preference file to apt to avoid installing snap. This is needed because programs like Thunderbird and Chromium-browser still triggers installation of Snap.

echo '  
Package: snapd  
Pin: a=*  
Pin-Priority: -10 ' | sudo tee /etc/apt/preferences.d/no-snap.pref

Now when we install thunderbird again from apt, we can see it installs without snapd.

4. Flatpak and Gnome Software

I personally prefer Flatpaks over Snaps because they're much better and more user friendly.

And since removing snap also removes the Ubuntu Software Center, we'll gonna replace it with the Gnome Software application.

To install Flatpak and enable Flathub, we'll use the commands below.

sudo apt install flatpak

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

After that we'll install Gnome Software with it's plugin for Flatpak

sudo apt install gnome-software gnome-software-plugin-flatpak

And we're done!

Now we can install applications from Flathub and APT repositories using Gnome Software with no need to worry about getting slow running snap packages on our system.

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22.02.2025

Which meant exactly one thing to me. Which was hosting a working email server at home.

I had to make sure port 25 was open for incoming and outgoing connections. For that I called my ISP, and they told me there wasn't any block on port 25.

And after I heard this, I knew I had to start building that server.

So I've built one using Mailcow. I've used my existing web server to build it, and at the beginning it seemed like it was working. I was able to send and receive emails from my Zoho mail account. And at the beginning, everything went great.

And for the first time in my life, I felt the true freedom of online services and thought I was unstoppable with my self-hosted infrastructure!

But there was a problem.

After using my self-hosted server for a week, things started to get weird.

Mails began to delay. Both incoming and outgoing mails were delayed. At first, I thought it was because the server was getting overloaded because CPU and memory usage was at peak levels.

Then approximately 2 days later, my server became unreachable from outside.

At first I thought the problem was on my server. And while troubleshooting it, I found out that my port 25 wasn't accessible.

So like anyone would do, I called up my ISP. Only to hear that my port 25 "seemed" accessible to them. But in reality it wasn't, and not just to big mail providers; it wasn't accessible from any other small mail servers either.

And after doing a quick web search, I found out I'm not the first one to have this problem.

Turns out, my ISP had some monthly limits on port 25 usage, and the only way to remove it was by getting a commercial network. Which costs a kidney a month.

Since I don't have money and oppurtunity to get that commerical network, I've waited until last week (which completes that 1 month period of limit) to try out if that block on port 25 would get removed.

The result was exactly like I expected. It didn't. And it's still blocked out.

The end result

So yeah, in the end, I ended up in the exact same place I was before.

I spend around an entire week trying to setup and fix that mail server and end result is just a huge road block from ISP.

And if you ask me what I'm gonna do now, the answer would be "I don't know". I can't use a mail server like that. And I'm already frustrated enough with that server before and after that ISP block and I don't think I'll try to create one at home from scratch ever again.

But who knows?

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07.02.2025

And this isn't a problem for me at all. Starting on this blog has thought me a lot of things about English language and things I wrote.

But the thing is, I was only reaching out to audience that speaks English.

While this isn't necessarily a problem, something about it feels off. I haven't come across many Turkish writers who produce content similar to mine or the content I follow. And while I'm a Turkish writer that writes in English, I'm just concerned about my content may not reach out to Turkish people.

Because majority of Turkish people does not understand English.

And address that, I'm going to start another blog under the tr.yyilmaz.com.tr and starting today, I'll create all my content in both English and Turkish.

I'm just exited about this dual-language approach. I hope it goes well and would allow me to reach out various people just like I did with this blog. Thanks for checking out!

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13.01.2025

When 2024 has started, I wrote a huge section of a physical notebook that contains various stuff that I was expecting from 2024.

And today I reopened that notebook and read everything from start to end just to noticed that I had a completely different route than I expected. And I believe that's much better than the one I wrote there.

But in a nutshell it's been a great year, I have completed the first year of my college life, explored new places as a part of my job, got my new Megane 4 and things like that.

And I expect nothing more from 2025. I'll turn 21 in 2025 and all I want is a good academic life and nothing more. Because my future depends on it.

Anyways lets keep that post simple. Because there are other things to write about. How was your 2024, and what you're expecting from 2025. Feel free to reply this post via E-mail or Mastodon!

But other than that, I wish you all a great 2025!

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28.12.2024 - 76/100

They all live in the perfect world. With all those clickbait content.

Let me give you an example. If you spend 30 minutes on it, you can easily find a post titled "How I started to make 50K a month from blogging" or "How I turned my hobby projects into an app with 100K MAU". Or it's something like a "10 Javascript hacks that no one knows" and goes with things that almost everyone uses.

And when you click on them, they just tell the same thing with all other similar clikbait posts that looks legit. After reading them, it makes you think "I can do that too" and than you realize it won't gonna work out like the clickbait post has told you.

This is the problem with Medium and it's big publishers. I'm not telling you every Medium writer is same. Of course not, I'm also a Medium writer.

But when majority of bloggers does this, it becomes a problem. Because it makes hard to reach out to quality content that's written by small ones.

Because of that, I cancelled my paid Medium membership and stopped reading from there. Because I had enough of those clickbait content over there.

Always remember guys. We aren't living in the perfect world, if you're giving advices to others, always consider that first.

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30.10.2024 - 75/100

• Why Blog?

November was an extremely busy month for me; I barely had any time to write or even read any blogs that I follow.

But when I do follow other blogs and read what people have written, it gives me motivation to write something.

And when I write my posts and people read them, it gives me motivation to write more, study more, etc.

Basically, I blog because I love it, and it gives me motivation to get things done.

Hopefully, see you in the next one!

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25.11.2024 - 74/100

I actually started this project back in April 2024 just as a design idea and than things have completed themselves and we're here at the stable release.

I hear you asking the question "why another link shotener while we already have thousands of link shorteners?"

It's a valid question. Currently, vexxit.xyz doesn't offer anything groundbreaking compared to other basic link shorteners. But I'm planning tons of features that'll make the vexxit.xyz shine in the darkness.

It's another posts topic because I haven't shared the complete roadmap yet. But when it'll becames avaliable, I'll add talk in detail about every planned feature. It's just a matter of time and my motivation.

Since then, I've written around 6,000 lines of code, and I'm constantly improving it. Despite a low-key announcement on the NextJS Discord server and a post there, vexxit.xyz already has 20 monthly active users.

And thanks to the bug reports I got from those people, vexxit.xyz has became stable.

So if you want to try it out, you can follow the url below and give it a shot! And don't forget to share your ideas about it via email or the Mastodon.

• https://vexxit.xyz

Until next time!

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16.11.2024 - 73/100

At that point, I was already late for my classes and I need to be quick. But my daily phone which was a Xiaomi Redmi Note 13 Pro 4g was just died. I plugged it in, nope. Tried to reset it or boot into recovery mode, nope. Tried to connect it to my laptop, "Unknown USB Device" and nope.

It was completely died and I had only one option. Which was switching to my old iPhone 7 Plus, which I mainly used as a portable hotspot device for my second sim.

So I swapped the sims and started my day. At the beginning not much stuff changed. I had everything already setup there since it was already in active use.

And yeah I spend an entire week with it. It was my only daily driver and it actually felt great. Like back at home after a very long trip.

I'm not gonna do a full review on it since I already did that on a old post.

• [Archived] iPhone 7 Plus review - Is it still usable in 2023

And I noticed that. It's still an great phone to use in 2024. The battery life is trash and software starts to show it's age as some apps no longer supports iOS 15.

But other than that you still can do the basic tasks such as texting, video and voice calls, web browsing and etc in this phone. But when it comes to some social networking, gaming or video streaming. Battery drains like hell and gaming on this phone is questionable.

Yesterday I got my Redmi Note 13 Pro fixed but I guess I'll stick to this 7 Plus for a while.

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29.10.2024 - 72/100

With the latest release of Mastodon bunch of new features came out. But most importantly, the author tags became accessible for everyone!

I mean accessible because author tags wasn't a feature that came up with this release. It's been around since July 2024 but it was only accessible on certain servers that's running the unstable nightly builds of Mastodon.

But now with the release of the 4.3, we can add our profiles to our content around the web. Here is how you can do it:

1-) Add website URL to your profile

To prevent other websites from using our profile on their content, we need to add our own website's url to our Mastodon profile.

To do that, you can go to your **Preferences -> Public Profile -> Verification **section and add your website domains to place called Author attribution like below.

Than click on save changes and we're done with out profile.

2-) Add author tag to your website

Now you just need to add the Mastodon creator tag to the section of your website

<meta name="fediverse:creator" content="@username@server.domain" />

For NextJS

If you're using a NextJS based platform for blogging like me, than you can add this section to your metadata object to get the same result.

custom: {
  "fediverse:creator": "@username@server.domain"
}

And we're done! Now when you or someone shares something from your website, your profile will be shown like the one above.

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12.10.2024 - 71/100

My personal Mastodon server has filled up all 128 GB of storage.

It's been just 4 weeks since I made the migration from my web server because of the low storage space it had. And before migration it only used about 10 GB space.

After I migrated it over to virtual server with 128 GB of storage, I disabled all the media limitations I had. Because using Mastodon without media was no different than browsing web without Javascript.

And that led to filling up the storage space just in 2 weeks.

When that happened, I used Mastodon's built-in tootctl tool to remove all the media cache stored on the server, but this wasn't the complete solution. Because cleaning that cache only releases around 10 to 20 GB and I believe it's not enough for a Mastodon server.

So I decided to bump the storage space for the Mastodon server from 128 GB to 256 GB and created 2 different Systemd timers to remove the cache in every hour and another one to delete the entire media storage and fetch it again in every 2 weeks.

Now it's been 2 weeks and everything goes great so far. Timers and scripts I created works great and after the last media refetching which happened exactly 2 days ago, server storage usage has down to 40 GB and came back to around 110 GB.

I haven't given much detail on this post because I'm currently working on a guide on how you can setup your own Mastodon server from scratch, and I'll share all my experiences and scripts over there. But you need to wait a bit. Because posts doesn't write themselves lol.

Thanks for checking out, see you all in the next one!

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08.10.2024 - 69/100

As some of my readers will remember, when I failed the #100DaysToOffload challenge at the beginning of 2024, I mentioned that I was keeping the counter active to see when I'll reach the 100.

And now I'm at 70. I never felt any closer than that and I'm still keeping my hopes for reacing to 100 before 2025. We'll see!

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08.10.2024 - 70/100

September was a great month. I had a lot of free time, and I believe I spent that time in the most productive way possible.

I had one of the best vacations I ever had, finished my side projects, started back in college, and most importantly, I've successfully put my life in it's order back, and everything's been great!

And now we've entered October. And if you ask me what I'm expecting from it, my answer would be academic success.

I don't know what else to write. I just wish a great October for everyone. I hope it brings you the luck and success you need or want. 

If you want to share your own messages, you can always mention me over at Mastodon or leave a reply via email below. Until the next time!

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Batuhan Y. Yılmaz - 30.09.2024 - 68/100

I was diagnosed with ADHD back in 2010, and it really shows itself in every f*cking thing I do. Including blogging.

I love writing long posts that exceed well over 10,000 words, but because of myself, writing one of those posts takes around a week to finish. And when it does, I really lose my motivation to write stuff, and recovering that motivation takes time.

When I started #100DaysToOffload challenge back in January 2023, it felt like an easy challenge to get in. But as a result I only able to write around 38 posts. Also not mentioning that I had start from absolute 0 when 6th February earthquake hit us.

That changes now!

After this post, I'll focus more on writing short daily posts and hopefully complete the challenge that I failed from beginning.

Until next post, thanks for checking out!

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28.09.2024 - 67/100

Currently I'm running 2 servers at home to serve as Mastodon, Nextcloud, a private Git server, my websites, web analysis, Uptime monitor for other servers and Minecraft.

Yeah thats a lot and my current servers are not enough for that amount of things.

I had countless times where my websites were down because of Mastodon using the entire server or Nextcloud with huge database tasks.

Or the most recent one, Git server were unresponsive because of the Minecraft server were overloading the CPU.

Yes even tho I split everything across 2 servers it wasn't enough to keep everything working fine at the same time.

So what I decided to do is simple. **Put everything inside a Virtual Machine! **

After that though, I started to look for services that uses the most recourses and decided to put them behind a virtual machine. Those services were simply Mastodon and Git server.

Upgrades

The server I'm planning to upgrade is codenamed as "dublin-server". I currently has 16Gbs of memory and 1.5 TB storage as a 1Tb HDD and 500GB Sata SSD.

To make the services I have run under a virtual machine, we need a bit more memory and a faster storage.

To achieve that I went into a local tech store and brought parts below.

My initial plan for memory was to buy an 32Gb kit and only use that kit. But they were hell expensive and I decided to go with 24GBs of total memory instead by combining the Lexar Thor 16Gb kit with 2 4Gb sticks from server.

Since I was gonna run virtual machines on this server, I brought an Crucial P3 1TB NVME SSD for it's speed and reliability.

I installed all those parts into Optiplex, setup VMs, filled up that SSD, pushed those rams to their limits and everything went great!

So for those wondering here is the current hardware configuration of the system.

I have different plans for my current servers and computers in future, like getting rid of my current Optiplex 7050 workstation and building a better rig maybe I could build a new server too, I don't know.

But until that this server will continue to serve as Git, Mastodon and Minecraft and as a NAS to my other devices.

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22.09.2024 - 66/100

I know this because I've sacrificed a VM to open those links.

I had to delete all those links by hand and that wasn't easy. But I didn't banned his/her account to see if he/she gonna try that again.

[Edit before posting]

That guy tried the same thing once more and I've banned his/her account to prevent malicious stuff.

[Edit section ends]

Of course I won't gonna give that account a 3rd shot.

I guess I have to put a limit for maximum amount of links you can short in a tiny amount of time.

This surprisingly showed me how well my application runs because I saw no error reports on server console.

So all  this means all the work I've done in past was worth it and thing I created works pretty great!

I wish that wasn't happened and I didn't had to ban that guy from vexxit.xyz but I'm actually happy because that showed me how well my application runs.

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16.09.2024 - 65/100

Which basically stands for livin in a Mediterranean small town and enjoying the life.

And this is basically what I've been doing in Antalya for last 2 weeks.

And it's awesome. My days start with fishing at the Manavgat River and continues with BBQ at seaside with the loved ones.

Than we go to bars with my cousins at Side town, where every tourist goes.

Then the sun sets and we all return to our houses and take a rest until next day. Where we'll do similar things once again.

This is how my life goes since I quit my job and started this vacation. And I've been really enjoyed it.

It helped me to release the stress I've built on past 6 months and I really feel relaxed. I wish this dream could last forever but just like everything, it'll end soon and I'm happy about it.

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07.09.2024 - 64/100

This is because I had a rough job. The place I've been working for last 6 months had some problems on it and I had to do job of 4 people at the same time. At the beginning I had no problems with that. But after passing 2 months like that and only getting paid 1/4 of the job.

I decided to quit. And trust me it was the best decision I made in this year.

Now I have plenty of free time that I could use for many things. But this time I'll just try to relax for some time and then decide what to do.

Thanks for checking out!

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01.09.2024 - 63/100

I'm not a left wing or a right wing person. As some admins of major fediverse servers calls me "far-right" and finds this as a reason for banning my account.

I just don't support the movements that left supports and ideologies that right supports. Like I don't support the religious stuff of right and movements like LGBT and multi-culturalism that most of the left supports.

This is because I live in a middle-east country. And Turkey has saw lot's of different governments with different ideologies in mind. And I can easily say that supporting those movements and ideologies will backfire in any case.

Like in Europe, the left movements has been backfired and far-right has gained traction. But same will happen to that far-right movement too. People will change minds and no one can prevent that. Like I don't have the same political opinions as myself from last year.

Also some people are very fragile on politics. And discussing an political opinion could end up in situations that no one would ever be in. And I have experienced that so many times. Some of them ended up with account bans, Discord server kicks or even threat of death. And those people didn't just supported only the right or left.

And because of that I don't prefer the politics or political discussions on social places. Because most of the time, it ends up in bad situations that no one would ever want to be in.

Because of that I'm always leaving every possible political opinions and ideologies to a side when I'm doing something. And I suggest the same to you. Otherwise you would need to block a lot of people thats interested in your projects.

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13.08.2024 - 62/100