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I am the Arthur of this blog, and I want to tell you about something I have been exploring recently: how a VPS can become more than just a place to host a website . When people hear the word VPS, they usually think about web hosting, servers, domains, or websites. But a VPS can actually be a useful environment for developers who want to learn Python, automation, AI tools, Linux, APIs, and practical server management . You don't need to start with a huge cloud infrastructure or an expensive dedicated server. Sometimes, a simple VPS with Linux, Python, and a few useful tools is enough to start learning by building real projects. In this article, I will show you how these pieces fit together and how you can create a small practical project on a VPS. What Is a VPS? A VPS (Virtual Private Server) is a virtual server that gives you your own allocated environment inside a physical server. Compared with traditional shared hosting, a VPS gives you much more control. You can usually: Install your own software Run Python applications Configure Linux packages Create databases Run background scripts Host APIs Deploy websites Manage services with SSH Automate repetitive tasks For developers, this control is one of the biggest advantages of VPS hosting. Instead of only uploading website files, you can actually use the server as a small development and deployment environment. Why VPS Is Useful for Learning New Skills One thing I have learned while working with technology is that reading about a skill is very different from actually using it. For example, you can read ten tutorials about Python automation, but running your own Python script on a Linux server teaches you something completely different. You start understanding: Python ↓ Application ↓ Linux Server ↓ VPS ↓ Internet This is where a VPS becomes interesting. You can build a small application locally, move it to the VPS, configure the environment, and make it available online. That single process teaches several skills at o

What a penny from a stranger taught us about how agents actually find things. At 02:59:06 UTC on August 25, a wallet we had never seen paid our verification service one cent over x402. Four and a third seconds later, Coinbase's service catalog refreshed our listing. Nothing else we had ever done moved that listing. Deploys did not move it. Metadata edits did not move it. Validation runs did not move it. Money moved it, in under five seconds, every time. The transaction is public: 0x5e9bd3c9c61d7556b1ffb1a5b936591efccd765af94a81da435432e1f62ff52a on Base. This article is the story of what that penny bought us, which was not revenue. It was a map. Where we were standing ScrapeCheck is an independent verification service for web data. You send a URL and the value you believe is on that page. We re-fetch the page from our own infrastructure and return a signed pass, fail, or unverifiable. Never a guess. Every verdict is ed25519 signed and verifies offline against our published key, so whoever holds it can check it without trusting us. We listed on the x402 Bazaar, Coinbase's machine-readable catalog of paid services, on August 14. The catalog held a little over fifteen thousand rows. Listing is permissionless. Then we noticed something about discovery: the catalog's own API defaults to a curated view. A client that browses the normal way is shown roughly 110 hand-picked rows out of fifteen thousand. The two largest curated providers hold about 44 percent of that shelf between them. Everyone else, us included, is in the warehouse but not in the front window. So we did what we do to web pages: we instrumented our own listing and started reading it back, on a schedule, with timestamps. What moves a row The catalog publishes freshness fields on every row. We recorded ours across every kind of event we could produce. The pattern was absolute. Our row was created one second after our registration payment settled. It was crawled five seconds after a later settlement. It refres

The startup just raised a $26 million Series A to grow its customer base and help reduce red tape for utility and construction work.

Test drivers for Waymo and Zoox sustained more than two dozen injuries in 2024 and 2025 from hard braking or other sudden movements made by the autonomous vehicles, according to a TechCrunch review of data submitted to OSHA.

Linux server running out of memory? Learn how to diagnose and fix high memory usage with real commands — before it takes down your app. Your app starts slowing down, the OOM killer fires, or your monitoring page turns red — and the culprit is memory. High memory usage on a Linux server is one of the most common production crises for small teams, and it's easy to misread. Linux intentionally uses most of your RAM for caching, so a server showing 95% memory used isn't necessarily in trouble. But one that's exhausting real working memory and swapping is. Here's how to tell the difference and actually fix it. Step 1: Get a Clear Picture of What's Using Memory Start with the basics. Run 'free -h' to see total, used, free, and available memory. Focus on the 'available' column — that's the real number. It accounts for reclaimable cache and is far more useful than 'free'. free -h — quick overview of RAM and swap usage vmstat 1 5 — five one-second snapshots; watch the 'si' and 'so' columns for swap-in and swap-out activity cat /proc/meminfo — full breakdown including Slab, PageTables, and AnonPages If swap is actively being used (si/so values above zero consistently), your server is genuinely memory-constrained. That's different from swap space existing but sitting idle. Step 2: Find the Processes Eating Your RAM Once you know memory is tight, you need to know what's consuming it. Run 'ps aux --sort=-%mem | head -20' to list the top 20 processes by memory percentage. For more detail on actual RSS (resident set size) in human-readable form: ps -eo pid,ppid,cmd,%mem,rss --sort=-%mem | head -20 RSS is the memory a process actually holds in RAM — not virtual memory, which is often misleadingly large. Another useful tool is 'smem', which calculates PSS (proportional set size) and gives a fairer view when processes share memory libraries. Install it with 'apt install smem' or 'yum install smem', then run 'smem -r -k | head -20'. Look for processes with unexpectedly high RSS. A Nod

Most LlamaIndex setups end up with two separate backends once you go beyond plain vector search: a vector store for VectorStoreIndex , and a separate graph database for PropertyGraphIndex when you need relationship-aware retrieval (GraphRAG). Two services, two connection strings, two things to keep in sync. This is a walkthrough of backing both index types with SynapCores instead — one engine, one connection, both index types. Setup docker run -d --name synapcores -p 8080:8080 \ -e AIDB_ACCEPT_LICENSE = 1 \ -v synapcores-data:/var/lib/synapcores \ ghcr.io/synapcores/community:latest pip install llama-index llama-index-vector-stores-synapcores llama-index-graph-stores-synapcores Both integration packages are independently published on PyPI: llama-index-vector-stores-synapcores llama-index-graph-stores-synapcores Vector store — standard RAG from llama_index.core import VectorStoreIndex , StorageContext , Document from llama_index.vector_stores.synapcores import SynapCoresVectorStore vector_store = SynapCoresVectorStore ( uri = " http://localhost:8080 " , embedding_dim = 1536 ) storage_context = StorageContext . from_defaults ( vector_store = vector_store ) docs = [ Document ( text = " SynapCores runs vector search, graph traversal, and SQL in one engine. " )] index = VectorStoreIndex . from_documents ( docs , storage_context = storage_context ) query_engine = index . as_query_engine () response = query_engine . query ( " What does SynapCores combine into one engine? " ) print ( response ) The vector store implements the full BasePydanticVectorStore ABC — add , delete , query , delete_nodes , clear , plus the async surface. Metadata filtering supports the full MetadataFilters grammar: all 12 operators ( EQ , NE , GT / GTE / LT / LTE , IN , NIN , TEXT_MATCH , TEXT_MATCH_INSENSITIVE , CONTAINS , IS_EMPTY ) with AND / OR / NOT and nested groups — so you're not giving up filtering power by moving off a dedicated vector DB. If you already have data in SynapCores from a prev

Disclosure up front: I'm Vitalii, founder of PDFik , a hosted URL/HTML-to-PDF API. It shows up once near the end, clearly marked. The rest of this is the debugging guide I wish existed the last three times someone hit these errors. If you run wkhtmltopdf in containers, you have probably met at least one of these three errors: sh: /usr/local/bin/wkhtmltopdf: not found # Alpine wkhtmltox : Depends: libssl1.1 but it is not installable E: Unable to locate package wkhtmltopdf # Ubuntu 24.04 / Debian 13 All three have the same root cause: the project is archived (January 2023, repository read-only ) and the last official packages were built in May 2023 — release 0.12.6.1-3 , whose newest targets are Debian 12 (bookworm) and Ubuntu 22.04 (jammy). The distros kept moving; the binaries stopped. Here is what each error actually means, the recipe that still works in 2026, and the honest exits. Error 1: not found on Alpine — it's not about PATH The confusing part: the file is there, ls sees it, and the shell still says not found . That message comes from the kernel failing to load the binary's interpreter: official wkhtmltopdf builds link against glibc , Alpine ships musl , and the referenced dynamic loader ( /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 ) does not exist on Alpine. ldd /usr/local/bin/wkhtmltopdf shows it immediately. There is no supported way around it on Alpine today: the distro dropped its wkhtmltopdf package years ago (nothing in current stable), and gcompat shims are a lottery with a binary this large. If the container must run wkhtmltopdf, don't build it on Alpine — that fight is not worth the ~50 MB you save. Error 2: Depends: libssl1.1 — you're installing a 2020 build on a 2023+ distro The widely-copied Dockerfiles fetch wkhtmltox_0.12.6-1.*.deb , which links OpenSSL 1.1. Debian 12, Ubuntu 22.04+ and everything after ship OpenSSL 3 and removed libssl1.1 from the archives, so the dependency is unresolvable. (Pinning an EOL base image or hand-installing an EOL libssl to wor

Climate change is causing glaciers to retreat and become less stable, upping the odds of catastrophic collapses.

The bishops' snub comes as the state continues to attack vaccines.

From Termux to a Freestyle VM: My Osintgram and HikerAPI Experiment After experimenting with Osintgram directly in Termux, I wanted to see how the same project behaved inside a Linux environment running through a Freestyle VM. The idea was not simply to reproduce the installation. I wanted to understand whether moving the project into the VM would make the HikerAPI troubleshooting any clearer. Why use a VM? Termux is capable of running many command-line tools directly on Android, but a VM provides a more conventional Linux environment. I connected to the Freestyle VM from Termux and worked with Osintgram from there. The project could start, but the API side still required investigation. The dependency confusion One of the first things I noticed was that there were multiple API-related components involved. I initially looked at the installed "hikerapi" package and its "Client" class. That alone wasn't enough to explain what Osintgram was doing. So I switched from inspecting only the Python environment to inspecting the project's source code. The HikerAPI-related code pointed me toward: src/hikercli.py This was much more informative because it showed where the client was being configured and how the access token entered the application. Checking the installed library I also checked the installed HikerAPI package rather than assuming I had the expected version. For example: python3 -m pip show hikerapi This let me verify the package that was actually installed in the VM. The important point here is that checking a package version and understanding how the application uses that package are two different troubleshooting steps. Separating authentication from Osintgram I found it useful to test the API independently instead of using Osintgram as the only diagnostic tool. For example: import requests headers = { "x-access-key": "YOUR_KEY" } r = requests.get( " https://api.hikerapi.com/v2/user/by/username?username=natgeo ", headers=headers ) print(r.json()) Again, "YOUR_KEY"

Thousands of Xbox One and Series X titles will support the new disc-to-digital feature.

The Xbox 25th anniversary bundle includes a translucent green Series X, a similarly-colored controller and a digital download of Halo: Campaign Evolved.

Who hasn't dreamt of sitting on a green stool modeled like a thumbstick?

Microsoft is officially announcing a new Xbox feature that will allow Xbox owners to digitize their existing physical game collections. The disc-to-digital feature, which The Verge exclusively revealed last month, is part of work that Microsoft is doing for game preservation and in preparation for the next generation of Xbox consoles. "Most Xbox One and […]

Robot bodies are waiting for their AI brains to catch up.

The startup came out of stealth with $6 million in seed funding and a plan to use LLMs and cybersecurity know-how to make AI queries coherent.

Runable says 60%–70% of its 1 trillion-plus token usage in the last 90 days came from paying customers.

MBMC IdeaX 2026 is a national technology hackathon organized by Madan Bhandari Memorial College in Kathmandu, Nepal. Registration opened on 28th Shrawan 2083 (13th Aug) and closes on 16th Bhadra (1st Sept). The Online Round runs from 21st–28th Bhadra (6th–13th Sept), followed by the Final On-Site Hackathon Event from 16th–18th Ashoj (2nd–4th Oct). Participants will develop innovative technology solutions across five problem tracks: Climate Change, Resilience & Sustainability; Tourism; E-Governance & Smart Public Services; Smart Urban Transport & Road Safety; and FinTech & Digital Financial Innovation. Visit: https://ideax.mbmc.edu.np/ for more details and registration.

Xbox and Ikea collab alert! This unique nine-piece collection for gamers arrives this fall and has a slew of Easter eggs.

Ikea has teamed up with Microsoft to launch a new assortment of gaming-inspired furniture and home accessories, coinciding with the 25th anniversary of the first Xbox console. The nine-piece Yxstaby collection (good luck pronouncing that) includes a TV stand, laptop stand, side table, lounge chair, and multi-functional toolbox, with standout products like a stool, cushion, […]