I think Nextcloud with the libreoffice plugins is the main Google docs self hosting alternative at this point.

• OS - - > Linux OpenSuSE with KDE

• YouTube - - > Freetube - opensource, private YouTube client for Linux, MacOS and Windows

• Downloading music/videos --> yt-dlp

• Downloading videos/images --> gallery-dl

• Email - - > Thunderbird (really moved forward in last few years)

• Notes - - > Joplin

Selfhosting (mine is on raspberry pi) :

• Streaming library - Jellyfin

• Photo library - imich

• Downloads - qbittorrent, prowlaar, radaar, sonaar, lazy librarian in a docker stack with VPN

• smart home - Homeassistant

• filesync - - > Syncthing (I don’t have problems with long file names - maybe a Windows issue or Linux FS? I use EXT4 on all my devices and don’t use Windows anymore)

Probably 80% increase from baseline. 0% is that background existential dread we all feel.

The article names the game in the headline, not clear why your post needed to try to be click bait?

It’s about OpenMW, the open source game engine to play Morrowind on.

In terms of KDE dependencies, you’re talking basically about QT. The amount of packages you download shouldnt be too much and likely used for other QT programs which are common.

However there is also GSconnect which is a Gnome extension and uses the KDE connect protocol.

I would say that your concerns regarding the KDE Connect dependencies should be balanced against the good Android and iOS support, and the wide use of KDE connect means it is well maintained, supported and responsive to security updates. These considerations may outweigh the installation of packages that you otherwise won’t be using? It may be better to go mainstream and accept the dependencies than hunt down a lesser supported alternative and deal woth the associated shortcomings.

Interesting question, I’d imagine that one major limit would be the number of cores your CPU has available. Once you got to more VMs than cores, I’d guess things would quickly grind to a halt?

But I wonder if you could even anywhere near to that point as on searching only L2 VM is mentioned on various sites and that is with warnings of severe performance limitations and for development testing only. While L3 might work the problems may get too bad you can’t practically go beyond that level?

I think your auto-correct has gone wrong; patients rather than patents 3 times.

Totally agree with your point though. I’d extend it to include copyright reform as well as patents; intellectual property rights are being abused globally and used as a way to abuse citizens.

And Women wouldn’t trust a man has taken it because, ultimately, they’re the ones who become pregnant not men.

While companies have looked into male drug-based contraceptives, ultimately even if it were 100% effective, it would never beat female drug-based contraceptives. It’d have a market sure - but it wouldn’t stop women taking birth-control because it’d remain the only way for them to be sure.

The key is getting out at the right time, and that is weighed massively against small investors. The big investors and institions control the market and can move quickly while small investors cannot.

Tesla is not doing well - look at its falling sales. It’s a risky stock to hold. The AI companies are also highly risky stocks to hold.

That doesn’t mean don’t hold them - all anyone is saying really is that these are high risk investments, and at some point they are going to probably crash because it’s a bubble.

That doesn’t necessarily mean “don’t invest”. It does certainly mean be prepared to get out fast and also only use money you can afford to lose when investing with such high risk stocks.

It’s about short term vs long term costs, and AWS has priced itself to make it cheaper short term but a bit more expensive long term.

Companies are more focused on the short term - even if something like AWS is more expensive long term, if it saves money in the short term that money can be used for something else.

Also many companies don’t have the money upfront to build out their own infrastructure quickly in the short term, but can afford longer term gradual costs. The hope would be even though it’s more expensive, they reach a scale faster where they make bigger profits and it was worth the extra expense to AWS.

This is how a lot of outsourcing works. And it’s exacerbated by many companies being very short term and stock price focused. Companies could invest in their own infrastructure for long term gain, but they often favour short term profit boosts and cost reduction to boost their share price or pay out to share holders.

Companies frequently so things not in their long term interests for this reason. For example, companies that own their own land and buildings sell them off and rent them back. Short term it gives them a financial boost, long term it’s a permanent cost and loss of assets.

In Signals case it’s less of a choice; it’s funded by donations and just doesn’t have the money to build out it’s own data centre network. Donations will support ongoing gradual and scaling costs, but it’s unlikely they’d ever get a huge tranch of cash to be able to build data centres world wide. They should still be using multiple providers and they should also look to buildup some Infrastructure of their own for resilience and lower long term costs.

It does make sense for Signal as this is a free app that does not make money from advertising. It makes money from donations.

So every single message, every single user, is a cost without any ongoing revenue to pay for it. You’re right about the long run but you’d need the cash up front to build out that infrastructure in the short term.

AWS is cheap in the sense that instead of an initial outlay for hardware, you largely only pay for actual use and can scale up and down easily as a result. The cost per user is probably going to be higher than if you were to completely self host long term, but that does then mean finding many millions to build and maintain data centres all around the world. Not attractive for an organisation living hand to mouth.

However what does not make sense is being so reliant on AWS. Using other providers to add more resilience to the network would make sense.

Unfortunately this comes back to the real issue - AWS is an example of a big tech company trying to dominate a market with cheap services now for a potential benefits of a long term monopoly and raised prices in the future. They have 30% market share and already an outage by Amazon is highly disruptive. Even at 30% we’re at the point of end users feeling locked in.

Rust or mold, it doesn’t really matter. As other have said it’s on the outer part of the circle - the bit contacting the outer glass thread. The inner circle is the plug that contacts the contents and is clear.

If it feels scratch with a finger nail its rust, if it’s soft and scrapes off its mold. But as I said it’s not in contact with the contents so it doesn’t matter.

Also the contents of the jar are pickled. That means brine or vinegar, which is highly acidic and is what keeps the food fresh/prevents mould and bacteria. So if the pickles themselves look fine then they’ll be fine to eat. If the pickling had failed the contents would be mouldy.

Rust would make sense as the content of the jar is acidic and acids accelerate rust. There could be small pockets of air left at that location when you seal the jar and some fluid inevitably gets forced out as it is sealed; air plus acid is perfect for rust. But the jars internally themselves were otherwise well sealed as there is no rust in the inner bit of the circle, suggesting it plugged the jar contacting the fluid directly and no gas was left.

This likely reflects the jar lids are not quite perfect for the jar or possibly not screwed on to their perfect max tightness leaving air behind at those locations. But they were screwed on well enough to seal the content.

So in terms of hardware, I use a Raspberry Pi 5 to host my server stack, including Jellyfin with 4k content. I have a nvme module with a 500gb stick and an external HDD with 4tb of space via USB. The pi5 is headless and accessed directly via SSH or RDC.

The Raspberry Pi 5 has H.265 hardware decoding and if you’re serving 1 video at a time to any 1 client you shouldn’t have any issues, including up to 4k. It will of course use resources to transcode if the client can’t support that content directly but the experience should be smooth for 1 user.

For more clients it will depend on how much heavy lifting the clients do. I my case I have a mini PC plugged into my TV, I stream content from my pi5 to the mini PC and the mini PC is doing the heavy lifting in terms of decoding. The hardware on the pi5 is not; it just transfer the video and the client does the hard work. If all your clients are capable then such a set up would work with the pi5.

An issue would come if you wanted to stream your content to multiple devices at the same time and the clients don’t directly support H.265 content. In that case, the pi5 would have to transcode the content to another format bit by but as it streams it to the client. It’d cope with 1 user for sure but I don’t know how many simultanous clients it could support at 1440p.

The other consideration is what other tools are being use on the sever at the same time. Again for me I live alone so I’m generally the only user of my pi5 servers services. Many services are low powered but I do find things like importing a stack of PDFs into Paperless NGX is surprisingly CPU intense and in that case the device could struggle if also expected to transcode content.

I think from what you describe the pi5 could work but you may also want to look at higher powered mini PC as your budget would allow that.

For reference I use dietpi as the distro on my server, and I use a mix of dietpi packages (which are very well made for easy install and configuration) and docker. I am using quite a few docker stacks now due to the convenience of deploying. Dietpi is debian based, and has a focus on providing pre configured packages to make set up easy, but it is still a full debian system and anything can be deployed on it.

Obviously the other consideration in the pi5 is an ARM device and a mini PC would be X86_64. But so far I’ve not found any tools or software I’ve wanted that aren’t compiled and available for the Pi5 either via dietpi or docker; ARM devices are popular in this realm. I have come across a bug in docker on ARM devices which broke my VPN set up - that was very frustrating and I had to downgrade docker a few months ago while awaiting the fix. That may be worth noting given docker is very important in this realm and most servers globally are still x86.

If I were in your position and I had $200 I’d buy the maximum CPU and GPU capability I could in 1 device, so I’d actually lean to a mini PC. If you want to save money then the Pi5 is reasonabkr value but you’d need to include a case and may want to consider a nvme or ssd companion board. Those costs add up and the value of the mini PC may compare better as an all in one device; particularly if you can get a good one second hand. There are also other SBC that may offer even better value or more power than a pi5.

Also bear in mind for me I have a mini PC and pi5; they do different things with the pi5 is the server but the mini PC is a versatile device and I play games on it for example. If you will only have 1 server device and pre exisiting smart tvs etc you’ll be more reliant on the servers capabilities so again may want to opt for the most powerful device you can afford at your price point.

But like - use Linux?

This is spam and should be deleted. It’s custom spam code running on perchance.org (a genuine coding and AI site). The site itself warns users about the custom code on reaching it.

Open Office? It hasn’t been touched in a decade. LibreOffice is the true continuation of Open Office, which was forked off after Oracle bought Sun and OO had been left with poor governance and slow updates.

Open Office finally ended up under the Apache foundation but hasn’t been maintained since 2014.

LibreOffice has had continual development with both bug fixes and new features, and the Open Document Foundation gives it good governance and independence as an open source project…

Honestly, switch to Libre Office.

I’ve always loved the Denver Airport conspiracy theory - that it is actually the secret headquarters of the illuminati or other organisations. It was $2bn over budget and has tunnels under it, which have led people to claim there are also secret bunkers under the airport. It also has a few bizarre pieces of art within it.

I think it’s just an airport with ugly aesthetic choices but I love that people think of all the places a global secret society would base itself, they’d pick Denver Airport.

Apparently there are 6 underground levels at the airport - but they’re used to run an airport. And the tunnels were for a failed automated baggage transport system. The art is just art.

https://allthatsinteresting.com/denver-airport-conspiracy

For me it sort of stimulated my brain and got it going again.

I had a bad bout of depression in my early 20s, and the first time I took antidepressants I remember noticing how vibrant all the colours were, how much sound there was. It was like everything had been dulled and a veil had been lifted.

However it was not an instant cure - the first effects just showed how bad my depression was. It took weeks and months for things to gradually improve.

The next thing I actually noticed changing was my motivation to do things started lifting. For me it was a positive, if slow process. But it can be a negative thing ironically - people can be motivated to commit suicide and it’s why it’s one of the ironic risks of antidepressants at first. Take antidepressants under close medical supervision.

But eventually my mood did lift. It was very gradual. And I didn’t really notice it until moments of laughter came back or I found joy in my hobbies and interests again.

I would say antidepressants don’t just lift mood in one go. I’d think it move of mood swinging up and down around a centre. When you’re depressed your mood is centred at very low, and swings around very low and a bit less low. What antidepressants do is gradually move that centre up back toward normal. So at first you swing between very low and a bit less low, then between quite low and low, then a low and a little low, then a little low and normal and eventually you’re centre hits normal. Then you swing between a little low and a little high.

The antidepressants keep you at that level - they don’t make you endlessly happy, they just return your centre to where it should be. (For.some people they can tip into mania and over but that’s uncommon).

I stayed on antidepressant for nearly 2 years and finally came off. That’s when things got better - the antidepressants did the lifting but I also learnt the warning signs of depression and could be vigilant in the future. Coming off antidepressant when I was ready, the centre of my mood was in a good place but swings up and down were bigger/back to normal so I could have really good times again, but also some bad times. The difference with the bad times was they didn’t last, plus they were “appropriate” to life’s events and struggles. I didn’t need the antidepressants to.maintian that. But that is just for me - I know some people stay on antidepressants for life to achieve the same outcome.

I also knew when to ask to go back on antidepressants. I needed short courses of 3 months or so a couple of times. I actually had a terrible episode of depression again for over a year after a traumatic life event and the doctor denied me the medication saying I was just “grieving”. I had a terrible bout of depression lasting nearly 2 years and nearly killed myself. That depression thankfully finally lifted itself but it really damaged my trust in the medical profession (and I’m a doctor myself)

For me antidepressants work. They’re not a magic wand and they’re not the whole solution however. Sadly people don’t get access to other useful parts of the solution like CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy) - I didn’t for example. But you can learn strategies to cope, prevent your mood dropping so low, and recognising when your mood drops. For me a the antidepressanrs were a tool to get me back to a normal centre ground/baseline while I learnt how to manage things. And they were and are a tool I’m prepared to go back to should things ever go bad again.

Looks like it was an Amazon AWS outage. Just geos to how how vulnerable the Internet is as it becomes ever more concentrated into the hands of the tech giants.

I think they were just pointing out that this is the problem with subscription services. You own nothing and you’re screwed when the service goes down.

It really doesn’t take “ludicrous amounts of time and money” to build a private library. It’s interesting how the subscription giants have managed to change people’s perceptions - when you buy content to keep, you keep some of the value, but when you subscribe you’re just getting a time pass to use someone else’s library and won’t see that money again.

They sold the proposition on convenience when everything was in one place, but now it’s all fragmented it’s a waste of money.

And of course plenty of people are building media libraries for free by sailing the seas.