I’m fortunate enough to not be in a position where money is tight for food, but re: beans and rice, I absolutely love my instant pot!

Mexican-style beans are, IMHO, delicious, easy to make, and dirt cheap. I love them, our toddler loves them, and it’s easy on the wallet. Dry beans are really affordable, and a 25lb bag of rice is great to have in the pantry (note: careful with bulk brown rice as I think it can go rancid). A stove and a pot can do both, but an instant pot and a rice cooker makes it so easy.

I also drink a fair amount of coffee, but again, bulk or even just “make coffee at home” is very affordable. A few cups at Starbucks costs the same as a pound of beans (which yields many cups).

My ex is ATT fiber which, despite having zero love for ATT, was pretty great.

They are trying to get me back…but they don’t offer fiber (or any service!) at my new address.

Prohibitively expensive for many though. Long distance, and especially international, could be super pricey.

Fuck you, man! If you don’t like my fucking music, get your own fucking cab!

I think this is hard to answer because there’s no “one way” to do this.

Do you want it accessible only in your house, and you’re running something like a raspberry pi? That’s one set of instructions.

Do you want it accessible from anywhere in the world, with proper TLS? That’s a little more complicated, and there are a million ways to do this — do you want to self host and expose public IP? Self host using a VPN as the entry point? Host on a VPS?

I would recommend playing around with it first. This is easiest if you can get a well-supported environment, so something like a raspberry pi is best IMHO if you want to play around with minimal frustration.

It really is. I absolutely love the shared link functionality, with the ability to easily set an expiration date and manage existing shared links.

It’s made taking pictures a lot more fun for me.

How many photos? It’s a very good user experience for me, with 123GB library (23k+ photos, 1k+ videos). Fairly entry-level Samsung phone and iPhone 13, both work great.

Running on an Orange Pi 5 Plus.

Absolutely love Immich. Was previously running on an RPi 4 w/4GB RAM, but with the other services I had on there I needed to disable ML. Orange Pi 5 Plus (16GB RAM) and it’s just a dream. Kicked off ML/facial recognition before bed and it was done in the morning. Migration from RPi to OPi was straightforward.

Probably referring to their ~$50B endowment.

I think the 1st-party device support is a little trickier on Linux than on Windows, which IMHO hampers the widespread adoption of Linux on the desktop.

The reason it’s trickier is that the Linux kernel has no stable API or ABI — which is ultimately a good thing ( https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/process/stable-api-nonsense.rst ), but for closed source drivers presents a problem.

Oracle. Philosophical issues aside I’ve been happy, and can’t beat the price. Bandwidth is pretty limited, but that’s not a huge problem for me right now.

+1 for the Oracle solution. I use one for my public IP, and port forward over WireGuard to my home. They claim something like 480Mbps, but it’s nowhere near that, at least for external traffic. But in any event I’ve been using it for a few months with no real complaints.

And yes, I fully appreciate the irony of trying to self-host services to get away from big corporations, but relying on Oracle to do so.

Cool! I just got an Orange Pi 5 Plus, 16GB RAM**, but haven’t set it up yet so can’t give any recommendations. On paper though it looks great — significantly beefier than a RPi 4 (my current server), and supports M.2 NVME as well. Might be worth looking into for your use too, but the emphasis here is kinda on computing with a very low power budget, so I’m sure you could get more horsepower with e.g. an x64 NUC or similar.

Here’s a review, and note that this is without extra heatsink so it was probably thermally throttling (as was the RPi?): https://www.phoronix.com/review/orange-pi-5

**I first ordered the 32GB version but it got seized for counterfeit postage, and then some shenanigans ensued. If buying from Amazon I would suggest only buying units in stock and shipped from Amazon. May only apply to US though…

[Billionaire Taylor] Swift, who has publicly aligned herself with the pro-choice movement and declared her opposition to former President Donald Trump, has become the ire of a vocal group of conservatives hell-bent on the bizarre notion that the singer is a political weapon aimed at the upcoming presidential election.

I mean, I’m no Swiftie, but that seems pretty reasonable to me…

How much do you care about power/energy usage?

Also, how important is having one do-it-all server vs. a few separate servers? Sounds like you’re ok with at least two servers (Pi turns into HA OS, and you get a new one for everything else).

Yeah all the EEE/“Threads will kill us” talk reminds me of how Slack killed IRC by first offering an IRC gateway, and then killing off support. And after that IRC literally died.

/s

I saw a post here about how Threads’ biggest enemy at this point is antitrust, and a federated approach is a clever way around that. I think that makes much more sense than the EEE narrative.

I think I saw this earlier on Lemmy, but without the red text spelling it out. I think I prefer that ever-so-slightly more subtle version.

I did that — free VPS w/public IP, WG to my router. Works great!

Credit cards, for instance, are not required but extremely useful. For instance, my recollection is that when booking hotels or rental cars with a debit card they will put a hold on your account for collateral. This could be a problem if you’re living paycheck to paycheck. If you have a credit card, you may get a hold as well — but this is just reducing the amount of available credit. Functionally this is the same, if you have enough money, but if you’re living on the edge and your rent money is in your checking account, this is pretty unfortunate in the case if a debit card.

Additionally, credit cards offer consumer protections, including chargebacks. My understanding is that debit charges are much more difficult to dispute.

And, in the US, for many people not in urban centers, owning a car is essential for life/work. Quick Google search claims, in relation to savings, “The median balance for American households is $5,300.” So if your car bites the dust, buying a new (used) car may not be possible without a loan.

You’re right though, it’s certainly not literally required.

Given the effect it has on credit score, it will perhaps be more difficult to accumulate debt — it will be harder to take out large credit card, mortgage, or other loans. Probably not applicable to medical and whatnot.

In theory I think it makes sense: loans should be a privilege not a right, or something like that. But in reality, loans are essentially required for modern life, at least in the US. So the people who can least afford it end up with loans with ridiculous interest rates (even if the total loan amount is smaller than it would be pre-bankruptcy).

I am fortunate enough to be able to pay off my credit card every month, so the interest rate doesn’t really matter. It’s a great, but dystopian, example of positive feedback: those who can afford pay less (no interest), and those who can’t afford pay more (interest).

Never used TailScale but I know it’s WireGuard based. Does it do keepalive by default? I was having issues with VPS (WireGuard peer with static IP) not being able to ping my network (router as WireGuard peer with dynamic IP and no port forwards). Sounds like this isn’t what’s going on here but just in case…