As a person who has been managing Linux servers for about a decade now, trust me that a few hours or days of learning docker now will save you weeks if not months in the future. Docker makes managing servers and dealing with updates trivial and predictable. Setting everything up in docker compose makes it easy to recover if something fails, it’s it’s self documenting because you can quickly see exactly how your applications are configured and running.

Most people shouldn’t self host. It’s a hobby for people who want to do it, and there are benefits, but spending 3 hours on a weekend fixing stuff is not how most people wish to spend their time. Furthermore, it’s not a good use of most people’s time. We split labor up into specialties, forcing people to do work outside their specialty causes pointless inefficiency. I agree with what other commenters have said in that a better approach would be to have more small businesses hosting federated together, and anyone not inclined to self host should just purchase service through one of those many small providers instead.

As a silver lining, at least it’s terrible at it

As far as I know there is only one SSD model that meets my criteria (Samsung 870 QVO 8TB), and at $520 right now so I’ve decided it’s best to wait. I’d like it to be quieter but not so badly as to spend $1k on it (need two).

How noisy are these? I have a pair of shucked WD drives that should be equivalent to reds, and they’re pretty noisy in my otherwise quiet home office. Given they’re only 8TB, upgrading them to SSDs for full silence is something in considering as soon as the pricing and availability permits.

It really depends on the game. If the game was truly native, usually the Rosetta performance is good. A lot of games though are JIT, and running a JIT inside a JIT is terrible for performance. The good news is that a game already being JIT is probably easier to patch to be native, for example people have had success replacing the mono runtime used by terraria with a native one and seeing good performance improvements, or running Minecraft on a native JVM. The bad news is it doesn’t necessarily mean the developers will actually update the thing, and mods like this are unlikely to appeal to the vast majority of people.

It’s a bit more complicated than that. Your IP can identify you still, if there are few users connecting from that IP. VPNs reduce the efficacy of IP based tracking because they allow you to connect via many different addresses, and every one of those addresses will have hundreds of thousands of users on a given day. It adds a lot of noise that makes any pattern identification useless.

I’ve gotten good mileage out of just an Ubuntu live image. If the network is working you can install packages via apt like normal, but they include a lot of the basics already.

I have some practical annoyances, most surrounding multiple remotes and the clunkiness of it. I have two TVs in my house: a Samsung smart TV from 2019 and a Hisense Google TV I purchased earlier this year. The Google interface is not the most responsive, but it packs in all of the stuff I would want. Android is the most supported platform for apps. Samsung’s OS has good app support, but open source projects and more niche apps aren’t there. I think there is a nebula app now, but for a while there wasn’t, for instance. So, I bought one of the Chromecast with Google TV sticks to bridge the gap. It works well most of the time, but unlike the Hisense, it doesn’t support airplay. So if someone airplays, you get kicked back to the native OS and have to use the native remote. It’s possible to configure the Chromecast to use the native remote, except the home button doesn’t map, it is the home menu for the native OS. So it’s just kinda clunky. I do think newer Google tvs with airplay built in (varies by brand) are going in the right direction here. If you’re concerned about privacy, they’re still gonna be a nightmare though.

They have “classes” which I think are supposed to be going in this direction.

I’m glad nebula exists as a good alternative for educational content. It has successfully replaced much of the time I previously spent on YouTube.

It does depend on the device though. A desktop PC can easily be upgraded with a new drive, but a laptop it may not be as easy, or in some cases, not possible at all. Could always use an external drive, but those are usually more expensive and quite inconvenient if you move the laptop around.

Suppose you buy an Internet plan for $50. On your bill, it’ll be $50, plus usually 5-10 other fees probably totaling around $5-10. Some examples from my cell phone bill are

• Fed universal service charge
• regulatory charge
• admin & telco regulatory charge
• gross receipts surcharge
• state public safety comm surcharge
• local public safety comm surcharge
• state sales tax

That’s 7 additional fees, whose names vary from somewhat comprehensible to uselessly vague. And you won’t find these prices until you get your bill. They’re not advertised directly, instead you’ll see that $50 advertised price, and a little asterisk that points to tiny text “additional fees may apply” that somehow make this all legal.

The FCC is saying if telcoms are going to add all these fees, they need to be part of the ad and not hidden.

I just discovered this game this past weekend and it is sooo good. I wanted a fairly mindless “kill a bunch of guys and keep my hand busy” type of game, and that’s exactly what I got.

Then there are people like me who do use Spotify a lot, but I’m mostly listening to the same stuff most of the time. Unless I’m trying to find new things or listen to a podcast, it’s most likely all cached on my device.

Out of curiosity, what are some use cases that would fit this criteria? VMs and containers are very capable and it’s much easier to debug a failed VM than a failed piece of hardware.