Tiny Tiny RSS and Synology NASes

Today I spent a bit of time to evaluate Tiny Tiny RSS, an Open-Source and web-based RSS client with API support and much, much more.

I simply wasn't too happy with my last Feedly experiments, namely: No plugins, no filtering / tagging / scoring support and, well, it's closed-source. So I decided to give Tiny Tiny RSS a try. Why? Maybe you've heard about Google Reader closing soon.

Luckily, Syno Community is offering a (beta) package for Synology NASes, like for my DS212+. To get this package you have to add Syno Community's package repository with a special parameter:

http://packages.synocommunity.com/?beta=1

(Note the ?beta=1 at the end)

After adding, installation should go pretty smooth. Oh, and did I mention you have to enable MySQL and Web Station before doing that? Otherwise it won't work. Really.

In case you're wondering what's your admin user default password (in case you didn't change it yet) for the MySQL server: it's empty, nothing, nada.

If Tiny Tiny RSS' update daemon is not running correctly, that is, your feeds don't get updated, see the next steps:

Stop the package in the Synology package manger.

Check what's going on by manually running

su -m nobody -c "php /var/services/web/tt-rss/update.php --daemon"

on the SSH command line.

If there's an error like "sh: /usr/syno/bin/php: not found" you have to link the existing PHP binary via

ln -s /usr/bin/php /usr/syno/bin/php

After that the regular "--daemon" should work and also update the feeds. Now you can start the package again in the package manager.

Hope this helps.

Tahoe-LAFS, a decentralized p2p file system in Python

While browsing through my "to-read" bookmarks I again stumbled upon Tahoe-LAFS, a decentralized peer-to-peer filesystem implemented in Python. This thing really looks promising, providing encrypted and (hopefully) secure storage of all your data across the web. Thaoe is not meant to be for the end-user (yet) really, but maybe there will be some nice addons to all the Dropbox clones out there which then finally could be used with end-to-end encryption. For non-geeks: This means that, if Thaoe is being used together with a service like Dropbox, nobody but you - not even by the Dropbox staff itself - can access your data anymore.

I'll have to play around with this a bit more in the next upcoming days. Let's see how it performs.

Oh, and here's the website in case you can't wait to get your hands on yourself: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs
 

What happened to Syncany? Not dead -- really?

I recently visited the Syncany page again to check what (finally) the status is: Apparently a news entry from April 2012 is there telling that the project is not dead. Well, at least something, but hopefully this won't end up being the next Duke Nukem Forever. Don't get me wrong: I'm really looking forward trying out Syncany as soon as it's ready, but competition (aka OwnCloud, CamliStore and such) is not sleeping. While I don't really believe in SparkleShare coming up with something really good anymore there must be a new alternative ...we will see (and hope).