This is a pretty good read and explains that it’s not a supply issue.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/24/i-dream-of-gini/

A paradox: in 1970, everyday Americans found it relatively easy to afford a house, and the average American house cost 5.9x the average American income. In 2024, Americans find it nearly impossible to afford a house, and the average American house costs…5.9x the average American income.

I think this is exactly what I’m looking to do. Thanks for such a detailed writeup!

I did some reading last night and think it lines up with what you’re saying. I found docker-mailserver with some configuration. The only thing I need to add is mail filtering to folders and I think that’s included.

I’d like to hide behind the service that I’m paying for without incurring extra fees for retaining it all. I can figure out the pull side by using fetchmail or something to a server that hosts dovecot, but the sending side is confusing since I’d need something that can receive my email and send it via the service. It’s only 1 email address, so I’m not looking for a mail relay, but something like a full caching mail proxy.

I started watching the video. I was not aware that LetsEncrypt supported wildcard certificates. Does this mean that your internal network uses the same domain name as your externally-hosted services?

I tried step-ca to start with, but my primary use case was for certs in the cluster, which cert-manager is more suited for natively. Maybe step-ca has improved, I was using it in the early days. My goal isn’t a short lived cert as much as it is to have an easy configuration and to learn.

I think it may support it, but it’s not well documented. I’ll need to read up a bit. I started with helm charts but like how operators, um operate. They upgrade on their own and are very stable. Honestly, though, it was mostly because I wanted to learn how they work.

I think this is what I’m going to do.

Yes, monthly is too fast. I’m using a K8s operator for cert-manager which defaults to a month. I think I can patch the CSV with an annotation that will bump that out, but when the operator updates the CSV then I need to repatch it.

I was polling the community to see if there’s something that is easy to use but I was not able to find in my searches. It seems like a common problem.

Part of my problem is that I chose to use a K8s operator for cert-manager which isn’t easy to configure. Had I used a helm chart, i’d have bumped the root cert to 10 years and forgotten about it.

This guy Englishes!

I’m using tailscale (which I hear is just a wrapper for wireguard) and love it.

Restic and Borg seem to be the current favorites, but I really like the power and flexibility of Duplicity. I like that I can push to a wide variety of back ends (I’m using the rsync), it can do synchronous or asynchronous encryptions and I like that it can do incremental with timed full backups. I don’t like that it keeps a local cache of index files.

I back up to a Pi 0 with a big local disk and rsync the whole disk to another Pi at a relative’s house over tailscale. I’ve never needed the remote, but it’s there.

I’ve had to do a single directory restore once and it was pretty easy. I was able to restore to a new directory and move only the files that I clobbered.

I used to struggle to get to sleep and hated those who could do it anywhere. They’d say, “just clear your mind”, which wasn’t helpful. It could be other things, but I figured out that my mind was always busy, sometimes from stress, sometimes from excitement. For me, it’s extreme focus. Often, I’ll put my mind to work on a complicated problem I’m having at work or home. If I have nothing, my go to is to see how far I can get calculating the binary digits (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64…) or the Fibonacci sequence in my head. I don’t get very far and I’m out.

I came here to say the thing that you said in better words. I’m on a diet for health reasons that closely resembles the vegan diet, so to keep it simple, I’ll say to people that I’m vegan. Most wait staff don’t care if I ask if a menu item can be made vegan, but family or people I’m dining with will either send hate vibes or go into a long thing about some distant vegan relative who died from malnutrition.

I think you’re.right about tradition. I have a set of recipes from 3 generations ago. It’s been converted over the generations from a list of ingredients to “a fistful of flour” to “a juice glass of broth” to “1/3 cup of butter” as it was passed to me. Maybe my contribution will be to convert it to weight and pass it to my kids for them to finally convert it to metric weights.