The pandemic was great for my city (San Francisco) in this regard—they shut/heavily discouraged a bunch of streets to through traffic for a number of “slow streets.” Kids and adults alike run, bike, scooter, etc. in the middle of these streets. Obviously people love them, so they remained after the pandemic (at least, the one’s I’m familiar with remain).

It’s not a full-on car ban, but it’s a start!

640k 780k ought to be enough for anybody…

I know right? What a poser!

/s

Daniel Radcliffe used this to his advantage—same outfit, and the paparazzi stopped bothering him:

It was three or four months. Because I was doing a play in London and every night there was paparazzi outside. And I suddenly realized after like after I just had just been lazy and not changed my clothes for a few days, that they were not there. And I realized it’s probably because I’m wearing the same thing so it all looks like photos from the same day. So I was like ‘I’ll just continue wearing this.’ And they never came back because it all looks like the same picture in front of the same door.

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.

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).

Oracle Free tier, amd64. Only use it because it’s free—limited bandwidth, but given I have slow upload at home it’s never really been a bottleneck. Hate to admit it given it’s Oracle, but I’ve been completely happy with it.

If I switch to a paid VPS I will probably go with racknerd (suggestions welcome though if you have thoughts).

filtered coffee has had much more time to steep in all the caffeine

True, but I think it’s more complicated than that. Filtered coffee is typically a coarse grind, espresso is fine—and fine grind has a larger surface area to volume ratio, which helps with extraction.

I have also heard that caffeine leaches out fairly quickly, so it gets to be diminishing returns pretty quickly.

Especially after adding in all the power draw of the automation requires…

What exactly is the incremental power draw for automation? My network gear and server (a little nuc) are sunk power costs as I self host other services.

Idling, my home uses around 100W with the fridge off. One 10W light is an additional 10% of my power budget, and I have a lot more than one light in my house. I also pay about $0.40/kWh.

I can be a bit neurotic about turning off lights when I leave a room, so Home Assistant was a nice way to free up brain space for me. A few motion sensors here and there + some simple automations, and the lights mostly handle themselves. Zigbee sensors and Zigbee or Matter-over-WiFi bulbs, so everything is local. A free VPS+WireGuard setup means I can access them remotely should I need to, with TailScale as a backup.

Cloud failures mean I can’t access remotely, but local control is unaffected—if my smart devices stop working it’s almost certainly my fault :)

Googling around and one oz (=1 shot as far as I can tell) of espresso seems more like 60mg caffeine.

I’m a little skeptical of the number in the graphic, especially since I don’t see a source.