If you search around you might find free ones. Oracle has/had a free tier (though it’s Oracle, so…).

Sadly not really. I use the free tier Oracle, which honestly has worked very well, but I’m not going to recommend using Oracle aside to say that it functionally works for me.

If I were to switch I would probably go to racknerd.

Yes, but you can run multiple VPS, from different providers, simultaneously.

What I like is that while it does depend on an external provider, it doesn’t depend on a specific external provider. Any VPS with a public IPv4 would work.

VPS+VPN (WireGuard for me), with Tailscale as an emergency alternative, has worked very well for me. Knock on wood the only outages have been my own fault.

VPS+VPN, this is what I do.

VPS has public IP and runs WireGuard “server”* and a reverse proxy (and fail2ban…). Reverse proxy points to my home computer over the WireGuard link. No open ports on my home router.

For private facing/LAN-only services I just don’t have an entry in the VPS reverse proxy. DNS on the router points everything to my local server, so if at home I access everything directly. To access internal services remotely requires VPN (i.e., WireGuard to the VPS).

Works well; I have a tiny free tier VPS but even so, no complaints.

*Yes I know there are no wg clients or servers, only peers, but it plays a server-likr role.

In a VHCOL area, $100k with one child is extremely tough/you’re likely dipping into savings. Our daycare alone is over $40k/yr per kid, and only $5k ($7500 next year) is fully tax exempt.

Median 2 bedroom in my area is over $50k/yr.

$100k doesn’t cut it. “Just move to a cheaper area” is IMHO not a proper response to this—anyone who works in my city should be able to afford to raise a family here, with a high quality of life/standard of living, but that’s not really the case.

Economically mediated de facto sterilization is an extremely dystopian thing to just accept. I think it’s pretty justified to be more or less outraged in this case.

Americans had “unity” after 9/11

Uh, no we didn’t. Source: am American, lived through that period.

Yes we had a brief period of unity (and solidarity with NYC) following 9/11, but as soon as the American War Machine woke up, my country was intensely divided.

I used Photoprism years ago, so my knowledge is probably pretty outdated.

My experience of Photoprism was that mobile was not tightly integrated. At the time I used Syncthing to sync photos — it worked ok for me, but I wasn’t going to set it up on my partner’s phone, for example.

Immich Just Works on both mobile and desktop. Multi user is great, sharing is great, and the local ML and face detection work remarkably well.

Whatever works for you is the best of course! Immich fits the bill for me, and it was very much worth it for me to “buy” it.

That’s how I start my refried beans. After pressure cooker add oil (lots…), salt, and a little vinegar. Sauteed onions, cumin, chili powder also good.

I think it’s way better than any vegetarian refried beans that you get in a can. Probably because they have more salt and oil…

xscreensaver of course! Note that this is not an option on Windows—jwz hates Microsoft, and any xscreensaver port to Windows is against his wishes.

I use yabai and sketchybar for a tiling WM feel. It’s nowhere as nice as my preferred i3, but it’s ok. Unfortunately it often breaks with major OS updates, so I’m sure to hold back updating my system until yabai is working.

IIRC sshfs will work on macOS but it’s more work to install. Worth it if allowed by your IT policies and your work can benefit from it.

Vim, tmux, and the usual *NIX stuff you might want.

The coreutils are not the GNU coreutils you typically find on a Linux system, so you may find a few differences. I believe sed is slightly different, and the flags for ls must be before the filename arguments, but I’ve found it’s mostly silly stuff like that (I used zsh before using macOS, so no problem there).

Regarding DNS servers, what router do you have? Some routers have simple enough DNS capabilities — I have a MikroTik, and have it set up with DNS entries for internal services (including wildcard). Publicly accessible services just use my registrar’s DNS (namecheap — no complaints).

Matter is also local—provisioning can be a PITA but once done I’ve been pretty happy with even the cheap Matter WiFi smart bulbs. Home Assistant supports them very well.

Cheap bulbs can be a little buggy, which usually means I need to power cycle some of them now and then.

My lights and motion sensors were obviously unaffected (HomeAssistant). My Emporia Vue2 power monitor would possibly have stopped working, except I flashed it with ESPHome firmware, so it’s local only, and of course it was fine. My security cameras (Frigate) were also fine.

If my smart home devices are going to stop working, it will almost certainly be my fault, thank you very much!

I’ve been really impressed with Immich, can’t recommend it enough.

I’d put substitute first, but yours sounds better :)

(I’m a big Immich fan, and I’m taking and sharing photos more than ever before, in part because Immich is awesome, self hosted, and open source [the other part is that I have kids now so I’m taking way more photos that grandparents want to see].)

San Francisco is north of 40¢/kWh.

On low end CPUs you can max out the CPU before maxing out network—if you want to get fancy, you can use rsync over an unencrypted remote shell like rsh, but I would only do this if the computers were directly connected to each other by one Ethernet cable.

Not sure I agree.

First, stocks tend to be highly correlated with “the market” (see financial “β”/“beta coefficient”). For example, look at, say, The Home Depot or Ford Motors. From January 2000 to January 2003 (spanning the dot com bubble) they each lost about a third of their value, yet these are not “dot com”-centric companies.

Second, the promise of AI is that it will help every company that has desk jobs. So every company has this expectation now priced into their stock, and if the bottom falls out, well…

Not an analyst/I don’t pick stocks, but just my 2¢.

If you’re running it via docker compose it’s trivial to upgrade, and there are no breaking changes. Pull, down, up, you’re done.