# Frequently Anticipated Questions

## Questions noone asked, but could maybe

### *Why bother running a Tor hidden service if you're gonna put your full name on it?*

One, because I think hidden services are neat and I thought it'd be neat
to make one. And two, if I really needed to be anonymous, I would
probably self-host or find a hosting provider somewhere else, or
reconsider using the Internet all together.

The hidden service has a benefit though, mostly to *you*. You don't need
to expose your IP to me or to anyone else to access this site.

### *How come I can't access your main domain?*

Honestly, I wouldn't know if my site is blocked elsewhere, but I may
have blocked your IP for the following reasons:

- You attempted to ssh to my server (I use fail2ban and employ private
  keys, I block all failed attempts)
- You tried to pass some weird or malicious HTTP request (again,
  fail2ban)
- Someone else on your IP tried to do one of those things

This is part of the reason why I run the site as hidden service since
you can still read my nonsense anyway through that, but if you think
this might be an error on my part, you can email me.

### *You wrote all this in vim? Why tho?*

Neovim more lately, but yeah other than large projects, I prefer using
vim for editing. Mostly because it's easy to edit consistently across
servers and because I just spend so much of my time in the terminal
lately that I'm used to it.

### *Why OpenBSD?*

Honestly, I though the fish was cool.

![puffy](/static/puffy.gif)

I don't know the artist of that one unfortunately, I just found it on a
forum.

Besides I've installed Debian lots of times so I figured, why not try
something different? It's pretty cool as a server OS. Just a lot of
homework. I'm sure it's good as a desktop/laptop one too, but it's not
different enough for me to move all my data.

For what it's worth, I use Debian sid for a daily driver.

### *Why bother making your site from scratch? It looks like crap*

Eh. I feel like if what I say isn't interesting, prettying it up won't
help keep attention that much. I like simple sites like this one. It
forces you to poke around more. Poking around is a good thing.

### *Why does your RSS feed update me on old stuff?*

Because I made it to set the publication date to the last write time of
the file. Change is important and I do it often, because I'm often
wrong.

### *Why is this site public domain? What does that mean?*

This site is "licensed" under The Creative Commons CC0 or "No Rights
Reserved" license. This means that any file accessible on my web server
which I created (which is the text you are reading and the code that
generates it) belongs to the public domain as far as legally possible
and I reserve no right to it's re-publication, re-use, or
re-distribution with no expectation of compensation. So if you find any
use of the information I post here, or the little flask app I wrote to
run the thing, you are free to use it without any fear that I'm going to
slap you with a lawsuit. This does *not* include most of the images; I
try to link credit where I can for those.

A lot of people might prefer a BSD or GNU style license for their
code and I agree that there are many cases where *that* is the preferred
option. But it doesn't make sense for me; at least not for a homepage
like this. I'm not sure about other people, but most of my ideas are not
my own; they come from reading a history book or doing a textbook
exercise or an off-color joke. So without getting on a soapbox, I guess
you can say the idea of "intellectual property" never made too much
sense to me in general.

I get that people have to get paid. I get that people are afraid of
someone else taking credit for their work. But for this site at least,
I guess I just don't really care. If someone really finds some way to
profit of some random guy's Linux tutorials and unqualified thoughts
on the world I honestly think *they* deserve the credit not me. I have
no idea how I'd do that; I'm not sure I'd even want to waste my time
with all the marketing nonsense of the modern web. And on the second
point, if someone "steals" my work it's not exactly hard to figure out
it was published here first--a Google search will prove that. But even
if that weren't the case, I still wouldn't mind. I'd be glad that this
stuff is useful at all. That would be a nice surprise.

*Not* everything that is *linked* to on this site falls under the same
guidelines, so be sure to respect that author's copyright; I tend to
link stuff that is generally pretty free to use, though.

### Why don't you highlight URLs you dinosaur?

Because I think it's kinda deceiving. It's one thing to highlight a
word that leads to a place, since the user doesn't have expectation of
where it's going to lead, they'll tend to hover to see where it's going.
A full URL looks like it's going exactly where it's going. A user won't
think twice about clicking on
[https://facebook.com/](https://fwesh.yonle.repl.co/).
They will if they see
[totally not a virus](https://fwesh.yonle.repl.co/). If
you're giving out the full URL anyway why bother linking it? Every
browser in the world has double-click (or long-press) to highlight the
URL automatically, then right-click, and open in new tab.