ppngx VS Kanboard

This has been posted a few times already, but I cannot tell you how life changing Paperless NGX is for organizing PDFs. As someone who wrangles all of the insurance and bills for my house, this open source software is so damn good.

https://docs.paperless-ngx.com/

I maintain Bash script to quickly set it up locally on Linux with Podman. Give it a spin if you want to kick the tires.

https://github.com/jdoss/ppngx

If anyone is looking to kick the tires of Paperless NGX quickly, check out my little pet project [1] for running it with Podman. I use it every week to scan papers from my Brother ADS2800w which will SFTP the PDFs into a directory for Paperless NGX to consume.

I just updated my install to v2.0.0 with a simple podman pull and a systemctl restart of my paperless pod and everything looks great. Hats off to the contributors of the project. Every update, even major ones like this have been really smooth.

1: https://github.com/jdoss/ppngx

If you are looking to quickly setup Paperless-NGX check out my little side project https://github.com/jdoss/ppngx. It will setup everything you need to run Paperless-NGX (PostgreSQL, Redis, Tika, Gotenberg, PaperlessNGX, and SFTPGo) inside a Podman Pod on a Linux based system. You can optionally set it up to start on boot via systemd.

I run this locally on my workstation and send PDFs many times a week from Brother ADS2800w scanner via SFTP. Paperless NGX has reduced my home office paper piles to almost zero. It is a fantastic open source project and I am very thankful it exists.

I only use Podman for my workloads these days. Docker was always a headache for me on Linux. Podman allows me to quickly do whatever I want with containers and I can use systemd or a simple bash script to easily create services on my workstation or in production with Nomad with https://github.com/hashicorp/nomad-driver-podman

I am super thankful for the team of developers that work on Podman. It has really come a long way since 2.0 and they are very responsive to issues in my experiences. If you are using Linux as your daily driver and you use Containers give Podman a try. Here are some examples of the things I have done with Podman.

https://github.com/forem/selfhost

https://github.com/jdoss/ppngx

https://gist.github.com/jdoss/25f9dac0a616e524f8794a89b7989e...

https://gist.github.com/jdoss/ad87375b776178e9031685b71dbe37...

I setup https://paperless-ngx.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ with a Brother ads2800w scanner and I no longer have a pile of paper mail sitting by my desk. I just scan it, tag it in Paperless-ngx, and then shred it. I just pushed up my script here if anyone wants to give this a try:

https://github.com/jdoss/ppngx

I will most likely move this to a Hashicorp Nomad job on my home server once I find the time.

Linux Mint with Cinnamon: https://www.linuxmint.com/ as far as desktop OSes go it's familiar (Ubuntu without snaps by default), whereas the UI feels both snappy, doesn't use too much resources and is actually pretty to look at.

MobaXTerm: https://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/ this one is a bit more Windows centric but I ended up paying for it and replaced mRemoteNg and PuTTY with it, it's even better than Remmina or whatever Linux has to offer - you can manage SSH/RDP/VNC/... sessions, input across multiple sessions side by side and it just simplifies things a lot (jump host support, a port forwarding too and so much more).

GitKraken: https://www.gitkraken.com/ also a piece of software that I paid for, this one actually makes using Git pleasant, feels better to use than SourceTree and Git Cola (even though that latter is wonderfully lightweight, too) and honestly I prefer that to the CLI nowadays.

Kanboard: https://kanboard.org/ is a lightweight Kanban project management tool, it might not have every feature under the sun but it's the most snappy project management tool I've ever used, looks simple and runs well. I honestly love it, what a nice thing to have.

Most modern text editors and IDEs: I personally pay for JetBrains IDEs but also like Visual Studio Code as a text editor and both have helped me immensely, they're reasonably performant when you have the RAM, look nice, often give you suggestions about how to improve your code and also have a plethora of plugins in their ecosystems. Nowadays I unapologetically use LLMs as well and overall it feels like I have these great tools and cool autocomplete (that is sometimes a bit silly and wrong) at my disposal, that makes me happy.

Kdenlive: https://kdenlive.org/ imagine if there was a successor to Windows Movie Maker, though something that gets most of the important stuff out of Sony Vegas, except is also completely free and works on most platforms. Kdenlive is all of that and also somehow quite pleasant to use, I actually prefer it to DaVinci resolve. There is a bit of a learning curve to any piece of software like this, but everything mostly makes sense in this one.

Gitea: https://about.gitea.com/ I still use this for my personal Git repositories and integrating with CI systems and it's lightweight, looks good and just feels pleasant to use. Previously I self-hosted GitLab and constantly ran into resource exhaustion as well as doubts about the next update is going to corrupt all of my data and break (it did), so now I use Gitea instead.

Drone CI: https://www.drone.io/ a container native CI solution that I can also self host. It's container oriented, integrates with Gitea nicely, is similarly nice to GitLab CI and doesn't cause me headaches like Jenkins would.

Docker: https://www.docker.com/ yes, even Docker desktop. It just makes working with containers really pleasant and predictable, even when something like Podman also exists (and also is great). I don't know, I feel like Docker really saved me from having brittle legacy environments, even self-contained containers with health checks and resource limits with still the same brittle code inside of those make me feel way more safe.

For someone that's not a web developer, I found Kanboard to be the easiest to set up, and it has all the basic features you'd expect. It's a traditional PHP app where you copy the files to your web server and set a few configuration options and you're good. If you want to use it locally, you download it, run php -S localhost:8080, and start using it.

https://kanboard.org/

Note: The project is in maintenance mode, it hasn't shut down or been abandoned.

I kicked off 2024 with an attempt to get more organized and continue my quest to rely less on big tech. To start things off, I’m trying out an open-source taskboard called Kanboard. It’s like Trello but without all the integrations or surprises. I’ve been using it for personal tasks and side projects. I like these boards for dumping out the things I want to do and then visually sorting them into their status and priority. Doing the things is still hard, but at least I know what I’ve got on my plate.

https://kanboard.org has a kanban board.

For the Kanban experience, I was using Kanboard. It is perfect for Project management and it allows for relations between the cards as well. It is also solid in terms of stability. It is also very lightweight and can easily run on Raspberry Pi. The only downside is that the UI feels a little outdated and it is not Mobile friendly.

Kanboard is a possible solution if you want something self-hosted and open-source - https://kanboard.org/

Checkout kanboard. It's free and open source.

Contrast with https://github.com/kanboard/kanboard/blob/main/app/Schema/Postgres.php - a very similar set up with projects, tasks and columns.