drhoopoe

In the US, many public universities allow access to the public, including use of computer terminals that will allow access to paid databases. In many cases, you could bring in a usb stick and save copies of articles downloaded from such databases, or at worst you could pay a small fee to print some stuff out. AFAIK, that kind of access varies state by state though, so you need to call university libraries near you to find out.

I’m a college professor in the humanities (religious studies, history). Got into linux about 5 years back, partly because it comports better with my lefty politics than the alternatives, but also just because I’ve long been a closet computer nerd. I currently run a couple of proxmox servers on old optiplexes I grabbed off ebay. Full *arr stack with jellyfin on docker, a Tails VM for TOR stuff, NAS (omv on a vm), some other dockerized stuff: linkding, radicale, alexandrite (a self-hosted lemmy client, which I’m currently writing this on), various backup utilities.

It’s basically just a hobby for me, though the switch to linux has also totally changed my academic workflow, e.g. I do all my writing in nvim + latex now, use syncthing to sync my home desktop, laptops, and office computer, etc. I dig divesting myself from corporate computing to the greatest extent possible, appreciate the privacy benefits, and generally just enjoy the community-driven spirit of the whole thing.

I mostly use debian + docker or alpine + docker for this kind of thing (usually running as VMs on a proxmox server). Both are utterly reliable in my experience, though I’ve been tending more often toward alpine these days, because it’s just so light and simple. I haven’t tried any of the immutable systems, in the general spirit of why fix what’s not broken. I don’t even bother with snapshotting either, though that’s mostly because I use some of the proxmox tools for backing up the VMs.

I love linkding, couldn’t live without it.

With that minimal self-hosted version, do you know if you can log into it using the firefox extension on linux? The only client they mention is the iOS one.

I write for a living (academic) and have also been keeping personal journals since I first learned to write. For my academic writing I’m all digital, but I always journal by hand. In my experience there are quite very different types of thought and composition involved between the two, and I value them both immeasurably. So now, I don’t think paper is ever going away.

Digital is also shitty for long-term text storage, frankly. Data formats change constantly, software to read stuff changes constantly, disks go bad, the power goes out, and so on. The only thing that comes close to rivaling the durability/reliability of paper kept in a dry dark place and free of bookworms is clay tablets, and they’re a real hassle to make and lug around. Archivists know that if you really need to preserve a text you print it on paper and store it appropriately.

This whole timeline is terrible. No writer would dare submit the screenplay.