sway. I tried hyprland, but it was unable to switch between different maximized windows (monocle layout). There was a way, but it triggered a resize on every window switch, which was slow and annoying. I don’t know if it’s perhaps been fixed since then.

Find a car. It needn’t be in perfect condition. It’ll let you run away from many a sticky situation, carry your loot, provide light, and you can mod it. Perhaps add a minifridge or such.

Get an old Android phone, possibly with a dead screen (bootloader must be unlocked). Flash PostmarketOS on it, or (if not supported) Termux. Its idle usage (with WiFi on, screen off) may be considerably less than 1w. It’ll have considerable amounts of CPU cores and RAM, more than a cheap VPS.

Maybe not better, but not much worse either. Fuel got more expensive when Americans started their dumb war against Iran (the people of which I feel sorry for), but on the flip side, Russian war efforts seem to be getting weaker.

Besides, none of this matters at all to our discussion of tech getting worse, or not.

Athens were olive toned.

Green or black? Or those huge, red and expensive ones?

The 2GB of RAM are going to hit you harder than the HDD, if you intend to run a modern browser on it…

On the contrary, everything is better than ever!

Internet connections are cheaper and more ubiquitous than ever. Second-hand junk is available for free or very cheap. It is common to keep a computer in your pocket, one which is faster and has more memory than seriously power-hungry and expensive equipment of yesteryear.

Yes, there are more bastards around, but you needn’t listen to them. Use the economy of scale that the thundering herds bring, then ignore them. Self-host private spaces for friends. Contribute to open source.

Use AI to learn. Instead of wasting energy to generate silly junk, use them to debug and fix bugs in open-source software.

Life is good.

I don’t trust my VPS with access to my backup box, so I pull.

You’ll need a public IP. CGNAT won’t do, unless you’ll also add Tailscale (or such) in all your client devices (which might actually be OK).

Grab an old laptop from a junk heap. Ask around for discarded computers. Possibly get an old dead Android (possibly with a broken if barely functional screen) and install Termux. Buying stuff is not green. A laptop with a 5-second battery life, completely broken screen and nonfunctional keyboard will be perfectly good for self-hosting - temporarily plug in an external screen + keyboard, until you get SSH up and running. The rest of access will happen over SSH anyway.

Install your favorite Linux distro (I like NixOS. Debian would be a good basic yet powerful choice).

Set up a webserver (nginx is a solid choice). Serve some static files in LAN.
Make your webserver accessible to the internet. Get a TLS certificate for it, for free, from Letsencrypt. Host a blog. Set up Vaultwarden and import existing passwords into it.

At this moment, your possibilities widen up - many, many services are commonly set up behind a reverse proxy (nginx the webserver is going to decrypt the TLS, then proxy the plaintext connection to your services, so your actual service doesn’t need the hassle of TLS encryption). For example Nextcloud.

Set up a Snikket server and install Snikket app in your smartphone (Dino works well on Linux). Tell your significant other, or family, or the closest friend that this is a fallback communication channel in case your main one ever goes down. Set up a STUN/TURN server and start video calling each other.

Email is a hassle. I self-host it, along with an authoritative DNS server and several other things, but it’s not for the faint of the heart.

Just have your kernel allocate, then ignore these bad regions.
https://www.memtest86.com/blacklist-ram-badram-badmemorylist.html

I bake my own wholegrain rye sourdough. Context: butter or pate or cheese on top, or just eat it with any savory food.

I recently migrated my Synapse to MAS.
The next night, I dreamed that my sleep is now modern, extensible, secure, and uses XML.

set up ULA so you can access your local devices if the internet goes down

your router should retain its address even if the external connection goes down.

DHCPv6 is not well supported

Androids get SLAAC, everybody else can have a nice, readable, stable, firewall-openable suffix.

NoStupidQuestions explicitly disallows stupid questions tho /j

Snot, viscous and copious. Lasted for many years. Fixed by a doc teaching me to wash my nose’s inside with salt water. I hear it’s common in India, they call it “neti”.

Nothing, mostly. Will use point-to-point Wireguard once I get around to setting up Prometheus ingestion.

What do you need a VPN for?

local sysadmin cosblay group

made my day. So apt.

I use https://nixos-mailserver.readthedocs.io/en/latest/setup-guide.html

How exactly are you getting rid of Google with this? The music is still loaded from Google servers, thus subject to blocking or disappearing.

My employer offered to upgrade my many-years-old Thinkpad to a newer one, but it just did not stick (WiFi drivers in Linux were unstable). I returned it and kept using the old one. Why change what works.