boringproxy VS Lunar

boringproxy - Designed to be very easy to use. No config files. Clients can be remote-controlled through a simple WebUI and/or REST API on the server.

A couple of years ago I've read about this concept (already forgot the name) of using self hosted data storage with cloud applications. Basically, you as a user own your data and only permit the cloud hosted web application to access it - not own it and manage in your place.

I was thinking of a similar concept, but in the context of mobile applications. The mobile application itself would be accessible via Google Play Store/App Store, but the backend part would be self hosted and upon opening the application you would have to specify how to access backend.

My question is how would I access the backend if it was hosted on let's say rpi running in the living room? It's not a problem as long as I'm within the home network, but I want seemless network transition without losing access when entering/leaving the house. I was told https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/products/zero-trust/access/ could be used for this, but to me it sounds a bit of an overkill to use it for an application which would never be used by more than a single digit amount of users. This looks more suitable: https://github.com/boringproxy/boringproxy

Finally, someone in the above project's Matrix room directed me towards boringproxy - https://github.com/boringproxy/boringproxy. This was the perfect solution. No lengthy config files, easy to use and automate. Setup took about an hour and now everything is back up and running. The only issue I've currently not been able to solve is one where the container seems to use a websocket, which keeps getting timed out (will investigate this further tomorrow).

boringproxy (GitHub) is my go-to for this sort of thing. Thanks for the announcement, I'll have to do a head-to-head and see how they stack up!

boringproxy

Am I the only one who thinks SQLite is still too complicated for many programs? Maybe it's just the particular type of software I normally work on, which tends towards small, self-hosted networking services[0] that would often have a single user, or maybe federated with <100 users. These programs need a small amount of state for things like tokens, users accounts, and maybe a bit of domain-specific things. This can all live in memory, but needs to be persisted to disk on writes. I've reached for SQLite several times, and always come back to just keeping a struct of hashmaps[1] in memory and dumping JSON to disk. It's worked great for my needs.

Now obviously if I wanted to scale up, at some point you would have too many users to fit in memory. But do programs at that scale actually need to exist? Why can't everyone be on a federated server with state that fits in memory/JSON? I guess that's more of a philosophical question about big tech. But I think it's interesting that most of our tech stack choices are driven by projects designed to work at a scale most of us will never need, and maybe nobody needs.

[0]: https://boringproxy.io/

[1]: https://github.com/boringproxy/boringproxy/blob/master/datab...

This is the commit that seems to have broken the docker image.

I use https://github.com/boringproxy/boringproxy

It’s done in a similar way on macOS: a dylib is added to the bundle and an LC_LOAD command is added to the app binary. The dylib is the first thing that runs because of using the constructor attribute, like this: https://notes.alinpanaitiu.com/Injecting%20a%20DYLIB%20into%...

The nice thing is that a signed app will refuse to load a dylib that does not have the same signature. So crackers will be forced to change the whole app signature which can be easily detected in app code.

I have that kind of protection in Lunar (https://lunar.fyi/) and Clop (https://lowtechguys.com/clop) and it seems to be good enough as they have no recent cracks.

Pretty sure Lunar [0] can do this for you, and you can buy a lifetime license.

[0]: https://lunar.fyi/

I've had good luck with the Lunar app - it manages my Dell and LG monitors on an M2. (No affiliation) https://lunar.fyi

Wild! I am working on exactly the same thing now for Lunar (https://lunar.fyi), and I'm also calling it Night Mode ^_^ what a coincidence

I've been trying to make "white regions in dark backgrounds" less painful for months, but doing that at the system level on macOS is incredibly hard. I see you're doing it with CSS filters, which make sense in the limited scope of an article. But applying something like that on the whole macOS UI would cause confusion.

I already use something similar on the iPhone: I read on the Kindle app which has white text on black background, then I have a full red Color Tint filter on the Triple Back Tap shortcut which I use before reading. Very similar effect to your solution, although I don't have images in my books.

I was comparing anti-piracy measures with DRM, I don't have actual DRM in my app. I can't block users that really bought the app from using it (which is what DRM is notorious for).

But I do have a license verification for the Pro features (https://lunar.fyi/#pro), and that is what people are cracking in the app. I only added more protection around this verification.

Lunar

There's no Reduce White Point on Mac as far as I am aware. However, you can use the fantastic Lunar [0] app to achieve this, as it supports "Sub-Zero Dimming".

To use it, I think you just need to start Lunar, and then press the Reduce Brightness button on your keyboard until it goes below the minimum Mac allows.

[0] https://lunar.fyi

As the dev of a macOS app that breaks all the time because of external hardware, the tone of the article hits close to home. (I’m talking about https://lunar.fyi/ whose brightness control commands can be blocked by USB-C hubs, “smart” monitors, too long cables etc.)

I had to disable public GitHub issues on the app repo [1] because people seemed to fuel each other with spiteful comments and “why can’t you just!!” sentences.

The contact form still attracts many such “entitled” people and it hurts to wake up to such messages, but at least I can choose to ignore those if I can’t bring anything to the discussion. There’s no peer pressure.

These people are expecting too much from a handful of developers who are sharing a lot of free work and time that could have been spent better than hunting new IDs in URLs and updating regular expressions.

[1] https://github.com/alin23/Lunar

Last year I bought a second computer for my music studio. I wanted to use the same set of 2 monitors and wired keyboard + trackpad on both machines.

I wrote simple scripts to switch my monitor inputs with keyboard shortcuts (even simpler with Lunar, amazing new Mac app — https://lunar.fyi), which saved me from having to press annoying input-source buttons.

But I couldn't for the life of me find a simple, suitable software controllable KVM switch. That still requires the hardware button to be controlled, so frustrating.

Some people like the process of writing code, more than the end result. I had a few months of that feeling, but nowadays it’s rarely about writing for me.

Just the other day I used Copilot to explain the disassembly of macOS KeyboardBacklight code, so that I can turn off the keyboard lights when using Lunar’s Blackout (https://lunar.fyi/#blackout)

It even helped me generate the ObjC function signatures from assembly and use the right calling convention in Swift afterwards. It really feels like magic.

I would have no joy in writing that code, it’s mostly bridging and translation anyway. I just need it to do this thing so that people can take advantage of it.