Sounds reasonable approach to me. Also I’d include VPS and other cloud services too. “Is this VPS enough to run NextCloud” is a perfectly reasonable question for this community just like “is my old thinkpad good for…”. I don’t think there should (nor can) be a hard rule about what hardware to use. Questions obviously outside of self hosting (e.g. “what GPU I should by to play minecraft”) should go elsewhere but otherwise I don’t think there’s even a real need to limit activity.

And also there’s a half a dozen of posts here daily (unless mods remove posts really efficiently). My opinion is that even if the post could go to some other community but leans to self-hosting side of things it can stay. Maybe if there was tens or hundreds of posts daily it would make more sense to limit what goes, but as things are now I don’t think any kind of (in a lack of a better word) gatekeeping is beneficial to this community nor anyone else.

You can do this with IMAP as well, you just need to delete and expunge the emails

Yes, as I mentioned, but it’s still extra step you need to manage. Not a big one, but extra step anyways.

For automated systems, if you don’t want to store the emails, you can configure the email server to pipe the emails directly to a script.

Which is not always an option. You could have the script running on your laptop which isn’t always connected, for example.

I’m well aware of the differences. I’m just saying that there’s still use cases where pop3 has it’s benefits over imap and discarding it as an ‘old technology’ isn’t always the best route. I’m running my own email server for friends and family and I still have pop3 enabled just in case someone has one of those scenarios where it makes sense to use it.

I’ve used that on automated systems. No need to worry about email quota and everything incoming is single-use input for other systems so there’s no need to store messages on the mail server. Sure, you could do that with imap too, but pop3 clients usually don’t leave messages on the server by default, so there’s no need to delete them separately.

Other case might be to pull the emails from email provider servers so that provider can’t use your emails later. For example if you’re an journalist you might not want to have your emails stored with a 3rd party. Or maybe you’re using some free tier email provider with a very limited quota, which was generally the use case for pop3 before everyone got practically unlimited quota.

On my personal account I of course use imap since I’ve got multiple devices but pop3 isn’t quite dead yet.

At least for me it is. Cheapest even remotely sensible (not immediate batter replacement coming up or anything like that) is around 8-9k€. I could pretty easily get 3-phase charger at home and around our normal commutes there’s decent enough infrastructure already in place and specially the 2nd car of the house rarely sees more than 100km per day. So that would be pretty much a perfect use case for EV.

However current Tiida we have for 2nd car was 2k. I can repair it myself and it’s relatively easy/cheap to keep running too. With EVs there’s potentially expensive faults, high voltage means that home repairs are either very difficult or straight impossible at least without pretty expensive tools. Also in here we have annual inspections and there’s news almost weekly how a small dent on battery shielding or something other seemingly minor fault can mean that the whole car is pretty much scrap as replacements are expensive.

And I’m not saying anyone should be careless of HV battery damages or other potentially very dangerous problems. They just are way more expensive to repair than with ICE cars.

So, used EV should last at least two times longer than cheap ICE cars I’ve used to get in order to make sense financially. Likely more than two, since old conventional cars are pretty simple to keep running. And I’m not quite yet convinced that they can actually keep on going 10 years.

Quick search and napkin math mixed with some LLM says that at least 100m should be fine. Launch would be a bit uncomfortable at around 3g, but nothing a normal body couldn’t manage. Not that long of a flight, but a flight anyways.

Editing original post and including steps which helped would be great. I don’t expect anyone to reply to each an every comment separately, but a summary on what caused the problem and what fixed it would be nice. Specially when someone later finds the post with similar issue.

Absolutely. Even things you have to do, like laundry or cooking, are hobbies if you decide so. I’d say I repair cars for a hobby. Often they’re our daily drivers which often need to be back on wheels pretty quickly, so it can be stressful and annoying at times, but it’s still my hobby, even if I don’t enjoy doing it all the time.

It doesn’t need to be black & white either. For absolute privacy, sure, it is a PITA to get everything running, but you don’t need to go all in to reduce your footprint on the internet. Moving email out of gmail is a start. Signal on the side of whatsapp is a step forward. Bazzite instead of Windows on your old gaming rig is a pretty decent leap. And so on.

And self hosting is getting more and more feasible. Home Assistant is something you can just buy and plug in to start moving from Alexa to FOSS variant. Immich is fairly easy to get running to move from Google Photos / iCloud to your own devices (just remember backups).

And even if you want to just consume services, there’s other options than just Google/Microsoft/Apple around. Every small step counts and affects on what data “they” have on you to sell.

I would go with separate devices. You can add a button with two set of terminals to trigger both the traditional chime and IOT thingy on the same time. Personally I don’t see the appeal on video/audio with a doorbell, but I’d guess there’s some raspberry pi project around to achieve what you want. SIP just for a single house doorbell at a first glance sounds like a massive overkill, camera with a two-way audio, possibly integrated to home assistant, works equally well without the overhead of running a whole IP telephone system with it.

And moving borders isn’t that hard.

It actually kind of is. Depending on the laws on both countries. There was a petition that Norway would’ve gifted a top of one mountain to Finland when Finland celebrated 100 years of independence. Border would’ve moved something like 20 meters in the middle of nowhere, without any resources or pretty much anything else of any value. It would’ve just made the officially highest spot in Finland a bit higher.

It just wasn’t legally possible. Constitution in Norway says that the only way to lose land is to lose it in a war and changing their constitution isn’t really practical just for that kind of feat. Also there was more or less serious discussion that what if Finland claims a “war” against Norway and conquers that hilltop, but that would’ve meant that Finland (not a NATO member at a time) would be in a war with a NATO country, which is not trivial either.

There was also legal issues on Finland side of things too, but those would’ve been far simpler to resolve.

I don’t know about legal situation in Russia nor in China, so that might not apply, but in general countries tend to have legal limits on how they can lose or gain land. China has not annexed areas from Africa, they’ve just bought the rights for resources and use them as they see fit, but internationally agreed borders stay where they are. If they actually took land from Russia that would cause other kinds of legal issues, like having to build stuff in there to meet their legal minimum standards, set up administration and whatever their legal system requires. So, in many ways it’s just far easier to buy what they want and leave the border and land ownership politics out of the equation.

If they don’t actually take over land by the end of this, they will effectively control all the resources in large parts of modern day Russia.

China has plenty of land already. Why would they officially want something with piss poor infrastructure and corrupt officials. It’s a lot easier just to buy what they want, specially now when Russia doesn’t really have an option but to sell. It’s also politically much, much more easier than actually moving borders. Also, that’s what China has been doing already for quite a while in Africa (and likely in other places too).

And yet I still know people who are just so chuffed about “never having to drive again.”

Personally I’d be happy to use fully automatic car and never drive again unless I really want to. The coffin on wheels with T in front just isn’t one of those. And none of the other brands aren’t there either.

It also gives some boundaries what can be done. Single lunatic voted in can’t do unlimited damage before next election. But it’s not a “hard rule”, even big changes can be made somewhat quickly if there’s sufficient majority behind the change, there just very rarely is. Also, small changes are easier to sell to their peers, so slow and steady changes are kind of built in to the system from the ground up.

And place a post-it note with ‘This is a server. Do not close the lid’ at the screen. I wish I was joking, but I’ve seen that in real life in a decently sized company. They had pretty serious issues with shadow-it…

News agencies brought everyone and their dogs to give their opinions on why using foregin (and USA specifically) provider for voting systems was a bad idea. Then there was plenty of articles what the decision is being reconsidered and eventually a handful of items noting that we are actually staying in domestic datacenters. Rational decisions apparently don’t get as many clicks.

But there’s still plenty of our data (banks, insurance companies, etc) using AWS/Azure which should be considered as a national security issue, but those are private companies, so government can’t (or won’t) interfere as strongly.

The rule is “No change Fridays”

Absolutely. Just yesterday I had a call with cow-orkers, we have an problem on the environment which is actually quite a big deal and we tried to find a solution. Turns out we need to do a major version upgrade on one of our systems in the pile. But as nothing was literally on fire it’s a problem which can wait until monday. There’s not many cases in our environment which says it’s mandatory to do any changes at friday/over the weekend.

Same here. I got installation media for Potato from a friend of a friend and I’ve been a happy user ever since. There’s been other stuff on my hardware too, and even now there’s (at least) LMDE and Bazzite around, but when I need a system which just works it’s Debian.

I agree with division/multiplication issue. Or maybe just simply an assumption that VAT is always there and sanity checks on the systems just won’t allow 0 (or negative number) as a tax percentage.

I meant that in general even ‘official’ systems have stupid bugs or practices just because things have been in a certain way for long time. Years ago I wrote a small invoicing program which had obviously manage VAT and it would’ve been a simple mistake to assume that VAT (or any tax percentage) is just a whole number since that’s what I’ve ever seen before. That particular piece of software is well obsolete now, but that would’ve managed the decimals since it handled all the numbers in the same way just to keep things simple and monetary values obviously need decimals. However, without any verification it wouldn’t been a crazy assumption to store tax percentages as a two digit integer everywhere.

I’ve used local supplier for years who has spesifically selection for UPS batteries. Even APC ones tend to be pretty standard, just rip the APC stickers off and get the actual battery model number and ask from your local shop for replacement. I got a pair for new-for-me UPS a few weeks ago. Official APC kit would’ve been several hundred euros, the ones I got were ~50 with postage. They might not last quite as long as ‘brand name’ ones and power output is a slightly lower even on spec sheet, but that unit is running at around 15% load anyways, so in my case it doesn’t really matter.

How could you possibly build something this stupid?

Out gereric VAT rate changed to 25,5% about a year go. It’s been a whole number since current implementation was introduced in 1994. There was quite a few big systems running on accounting, cash registers, payment processors and whatever which couldn’t store decimals on VAT value. And obviously all the official information never stated that VAT couldn’t have decimals at some point, it just never had them before and thus vendors have just stored it as an plain integer and quite a lot of systems needed upgrade or on some cases full replacement.

So, apparently it’s pretty easy to build something that stupid.