I’ve used a retired desktop for my home server since 1999. It doesn’t have the fancy web-UI management of commercial NAS, but I’m comfortable with command line and config files.

At some point, I realized I could use its wifi card and hostapd to replace my WAP. That was a bit of an adventure initially finding a card that really supports AP mode and setting up hostapd, but has now allowed me to migrate from 802.11g to n to ac much cheaper than buying whole new devices,

Recently converted to an N100 with 4x ethernet ports, which let me unplug my little 5-port switch.

Managing this doesn’t feel like a second job: it’s stable and just works. Automatic updates, with kernel blacklisted; periodically log in, update kernel & reboot. It does give me the opportunity, when I get inspired, for a weekend project, like adding hostapd or a new service, either via docker or bare metal. I like that I have one device doing “NAS,” WAP, and router jobs.

Debt incurred by students divided by their post-graduation salary. For conventional medical school, it’s around 75%. Law school 35-40%. 688% is crazy.

That drive averages 900 hours between power cycles? In Windows?

This is one of my pet peeves with containerized services, like why would I want to run three or four instances of mariadb? I get it, from the perspective of the packagers, who want a ‘just works’ solution to distribute, but if I’m trying to run simple services on a 4 GB RPi or a 2 GB VPS, then replicating dbs makes a difference. It took a while, but I did, eventually, get those dockers configured to use a single db backend, but I feel like that completely negated the ‘easy to set up and maintain’ rationale for containers.

Mid-50s here. Maybe not quite as isolated as you. Stopped working (60 hour weeks) a few years ago; family all 4+ hours away - visit 2ce/year; couple of friends on the other coast I exchange daily-ish emails, but no hang-out-and-watch-the-game people.

Everyone’s different, and I don’t really feel the emptyness you describe. I read, both print and web. I post on lemmy maybe 1/day, sometimes twice, sometimes not for days, but reading threads here, I think, satisfies my need for interaction, even if it’s just voyeuristically watching other people’s conversation. Video games, all single-player. Youtube cooking channels and a bit of my own cooking - can’t really cook that much for one person. Some wood/craft/metal projects.

I thought I’d become lonely when I stopped working. Planned to look around for volunteer opportunities, maybe take up a yoga or other fitness-type class, but that loneliness or emptyness just hasn’t hit. I did spend a couple years sort of tapering off contact with the people I used to work with: get coffee on the weekend or consult on some project, but I haven’t even heard from them in years now.

All that just to say: the people you see flourishing may just have a different experience of social satisfaction than you, and just because you see someone apparently happy in a situation doesn’t mean you can be happy in the same sitch. There’s lots of good advice in this thread, but you can start even smaller. Check in with a neighbor - make up some pretense if you need, like baked too many cookies, harvested too many tomatoes, can’t lift heavy-thing into the right place. If they aren’t complete assholes for that 5 minutes, try something else. If they are, try a different neighbor.

On the ‘in case of emergency’ thing: the last time I needed a ride to a medical thing, because they won’t discharge you to Uber, my neighbor was right there. Lived next door to him for 20 years, but we exchange, maybe, three sentences in a month. I don’t even know his daughter’s name or the grandkids that visit periodically. I don’t know what I’ll do if/when I start to have medical stuff that needs recovery assistance. Maybe a home health worker. Maybe just hope I can hold out until Medicare will pay for inpatient rehab. But I was happy to see the ‘community pulls together to help its own’ phenomenon in person, even a recluse like me.

It’s even simpler than that: “Vote the bum out!” is all you need. It is, after all, much easier to oppose than to govern.

Everyone wants more than they have. Labor wants to be paid more this year than last, producers want to get paid more this year than last. In the money treadmill of the economy, that means everyone raises prices to pay for the rising prices.

It comes from excess production or profits. Labor creates more value than it gets paid; businesses charge more than their products cost; banks loan more money than they hold. There’s just extra money floating around competing to buy finite resources. The extra money accumulates over time, which makes money itself less valuable.

Leather? You want to kill a cow just so you can walk around? A few days barefoot and you’ll grow your own self-replenishing leather. If you really must waste resources on your feet, I recommend cutting up an old, used tire. Same techniques as leather footwear, but re-use rather than murder.

People will accept either intelligence or stupidity. They will pay for a flattering sycophant.

The lie was that “worst of the worst” is 11 million people. Fox News ginned all these people up to believe in a massive immigrant crime network, where anyone living in reality recognized that 11 million people is literally the entire undocumented population. Most people’s brains - certainly Trump’s - seem to shut down when numbers get introduced, though, so none of them ever got around to that point. Or to the implication that 3% of the country are actually drug-running, daughter-raping, mass-murdering gang bangers - you would probably know 5 of them.

I mean, I think we can all understand wanting to deport multiple-murderers and serial rapists, but in practice, that’s an incredibly small number that wouldn’t even be noise in routine deportation numbers. Deporting the 10-20 million people Trump promised (and seems to be aiming for) means whole neighborhoods gotta go. People who don’t even have parking tickets.

The services you’ve mentioned are all pretty low compute impact, just bandwidth, so I’d expect your MBP to be fine. Transcoding for jellyfin is the only real wildcard, and that depends on your media and client setups. I run pihole, homeassistant, immich, and kodi on a raspberry pi 4 with plenty of overhead for more services. NAS is nice if your library outgrows a single disk and your storage bandwidth gets choked by USB multiplexing.

My suggestion is to consider a cheap VPS and vanity domain for external access. Domains cheap as $5/year; fair VPSs cheap as $30/year. Use SSH to forward localhost ports on the VPS to container ports on the MBP, then nginx on thee VPS to reverse-proxy to those forwarded ports. You get unique names for every service, LetsEncrypt certificates, and an offsite location for critical backups. Make sure you are the one paying for VPS & DNS so they don’t get surprise-cancelled.

Falafel: dried chickpeas with garlic & parsley fried in oil. Very high calorie/cost, because the chickpeas are basically oil sponges, and it’s hard to beat vegetable oil on calories/cost. $1.50 for 1000 calories.

Kimchi fried rice: Kimchi, rice, couple of fried eggs for protein. $2.10 for 1000 calories. Make your own kimchi even cheaper.

Chili noodles: cheap, store-brand spaghetti with chili oil-soy sauce dressing. Don’t sub ramen for pasta - that stuff’s expensive. $2.50/1000 cal. Make your own chili oil for extra savings.

Second not using local.com If OP doesn’t want a real domain, use an unresolvable TLD, like “private” (so, pihole.private, audiobookshelf.private), but a real domain will just work better, will let them use real TLS certs, and prevent problems from apps bypassing system DNS. Even if it’s not as pretty or memorable as the hijacked domain name.

My experience is that a lot of people are completely closed to factual argument. It’s like their brains shut down as soon as you introduce a number. They’re not necessarily stupid people, just intimidated or untrained in information, and I find it very difficult to communicate with someone who puts equal weight in some pundit saying, “US healthcare is the best in the world” and an OECD chart that shows US life expectancy is 5 years shorter than “peer” nations.

Even 50W, 24/7, is 36 kWh/month. $3 where I live; $12 in CA.

What I expect is that those people will either a) receive a form letter saying that their Medicaid has not been renewed, b) simply not receive new Medicaid card after applying and being silently rejected, or c) have a hospital administrator explain that they owe $10,000 because Medicaid will not cover their charges. Obviously, the hospital is greedy and mean.

Unless those communications include the explicit phrase “because of Donald Trump’s Medicaid cuts,” few people will draw any connection between the mysterious, bureaucratic determination of Medicaid coverage and their ‘tells is like it is’ hero, bankrupt casino owner, Donald J Trump.

My Pi spends all of its time around 55°C in a 20-25°C room. Main server idles at 47°C. Those aren’t worrying temps.

I’ve watched enough Lock Picking Lawyer never to want a consumer ‘smart lock.’ Half of them can be opened with a magnet. Maybe commercial grade is better, but I’ve been locked out of my job after every power failure for the last 10 years, until someone comes along with a physical key.

Re homeassistant on a Pi: homeassistant does a lot of database transactions, so you may want to have db storage on something other than an SD card.

If she hadn’t personally suffered for Trump’s policies, she’d still have the same nasty values.

What’s difficult for me is - now that she’s learned the Leopards-eating-peoples-faces party will happily eat her face - can she extend that lesson to the Leopards-eating-peoples-legs party or the Bears-eating-peoples-faces party. Because if these people have to personally experience each of the obvious and horrible consequences to realize that the next charismatic ghoul is a charismatic ghoul, then we are no closer to a better world.

At the time, it was part of the whole poisonous structure of the 2017 tax bill, where everything would expire after Trump’s presumed 2nd term to sabotage his Democratic successor, confident that no one has long enough memory to realize where it came from.