• authoritative DNS for my domain
• email (Postfix, Dovecot, rspamd)
• endlessh
• Matrix chat and video conferencing (nginx, Synapse, MAS, Livekit, coturn, Postgres)
• Prosody elsewhere for failover if international links go down
• Nextcloud
• offsite backups for important data, not the whole OS (rsync)
• QR scanner on a webpage, for transferring complex passwords locally
• Syncthing
• Offsite monitoring (Prometheus, Grafana, AlertManager) - amusingly, on an old ex-Android phone running PostmarketOS (a variant of Alpine). Eats less than a watt of power.
• Wireguard to hook up the monitoring with minimum fuss

What’s your personal media diet?

Books (mostly sci-fi - Permutation City by Greg Egan) are easy to fit into short slices of time.

Video games (Cataclysm: DDA, Dwarf Fortress) are nice when you have a hour or more to concentrate.

Music (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6rCu2Daeyo) is always nice. Doesn’t demand much attention, if you can’t spare much, but can absorb any amount of it (more complex stuff like Maurice Ravel).

Movies? I tried movies, but they require dedication (if I’m going to sit for 2 hours in front of my PC, I’d rather do something fun - and movie theaters are a whole new level of hassle), the content is either boring or nerve-wrackingly stressful.

IIRC, the last movie I watched was some Star Wars something - it had spaceships just sitting just above a planet (instead of orbiting - why wasn’t it falling down like a stone?), and when one spaceship flew near another, there was audible sound (rumble) in the other one. I suppose they must have played this rumble over speakers, or something. I can suspend my disbelief and imagine the “laser” weapons that shoot slow-moving pink plastic-looking cylindrical things are mislabeled as “laser”, and are actually firing some particle beams or something, but I can’t forgive sound transmitted through space.

Sorry, my bad. Initially I meant it as a “not everyone is an American” group with sample size = 1.

Where I vote, you plop your government-issued smartcard in your PC and cryptographically sign your vote. Of course, this raises a privacy concern.

It should ideally be impossible to determine who you voted for, or if you did, while still allowing you to verify your vote got counted. Last I checked, this was an active (and super interesting) area of research in cryptography.

Good point, thanks, I learned something.

Thou confusest my personal perspective with bovine excretions. I’ve heard the name “Batman”, none of the rest rings any bells. I am hereby offering my opinion on American pop culture - we have no contact. Don’t know, don’t care.

Easy! We don’t view, or watch, American superhero movies. Never saw them or their appeal.

I’d use nginx and https://git-scm.com/docs/git-http-backend

Just type stuff. Take a frequeent word you use, then repeat it until fluent.

If you start tracking performance (of whichever system) via a graph, then people will start pushing the graph up, at the cost of anything else.

Human happiness is multifaceted and not easy to represent in a simple chart.

Here’s a tip: it’s one less firewall to manage, if you make your server be the router, and have your Cudy do only WiFi in dumb AP mode. Or, if the server is in a good enough location, install ´haveged´ and have it serve WiFi too.

Is there a particular reason you’re not selfhosting Wireguard, instead relying on a commercial provider? I’m running this thing on my phone, via F-Droid: https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/com.zaneschepke.wireguardautotunnel (it eats battery if you enable keepalive, but you normally don’t need keepalive, so leave it unset).

Yep, I’m running this setup. Honestly, I haven’t measured how much better it is than a plain HDD, tho.

Kiwix has the whole Gutenberg as a downloadable dataset. Search is basic, tho.

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.

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

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