25/07/25 - finally got me a vps

i did it!

been toying with the idea for quite a while now, but i never quite felt like i needed it enough.

however as i've been moving further and further from mainstream services, even the open source stuff started to feel not quite hackable enough, and the tipping point was the searxng instance i've been using going offline multiple times recently, forcing me to find something else that is consistently funcional.

so i just finished setting up a personal, private searxing instance, and i couldn't be more thrilled.

this also sorts the issue i was having where my browsers are all set to amnesiac settings, but i always had to make an exception for searxng because it saves my settings in a cookie in the browser. now i can just set everything how i want it server-side, and not worry about it anymore.

it also apparently fixes the issue i used to have when using a public instance where some search engines would block the engine (because of getting too many requests from the same ip, i suppose).

is it slightly less anonymous, since i'm now the only one using the instance? yeah, probably.

but i don't mind the slightly higher chance of being fingerprinted, since it would still be more effort than it's worth to connect said searches back to me irl.

anyways, i'll probably spend way too much time tinkering with this over the next couple weeks, and also write about it too much (even though i have several things i already want to write about here and just haven't gotten around to yet).

contact me at: tsukaj@tilde.club