That sounds like true freedom, and also like something I wish deeply that I had time and energy to make my daily driver - I’m a purist, but I’m also a pragmatist and i can feel the burnout already.
Respect for using it as a daily driver - even for a personal only machine, that’s a pretty high bar, especially long term.
I went into a smidge more detail over on my Mastodon last night, but my response is summed up as “WTAF? No! Freeware is an explicit license, as anyone from the BBS days will recall.”
American here - our FEC takes a very dim view of satirical and otherwise non-existent candidates who file the paperwork to run, which makes me curious... If the Count were to win, who would actually take the seat? Have we any idea who is behind the (highly effective) satire, and would they be able to seamlessly serve?
Yes I can. Deleted my last Google account yesterday. Got what I needed, and honestly once I liberated a couple phone numbers (too damn memorable to ever just give up), there wasn’t much left.
Been slowly migrating for awhile piece by piece, the timing just happened to work out well for the last piece, and the metaphoric peering in cabinets to make sure nothing got overlooked in the process.
I still have to deal with Win 11 for work, and having AI forced down my throat, but Google-free feels GOOD!
Update: South Korea says it will send actual, meaningful numbers of troops into Pyongyang within thirty-one days, bringing a formal end to conflict on the Korean Peninsula.
/s but you know they’re thinking about it.
As long as the reports that the C-suite gets look pretty, that’s all that matters. Have seen that one from both sides.
“I need five developer hours to implement a UI for this manual process that is time sensitive and exposes us to significant risk if we screw it up. Oh, and I’m the only one who knows how to do it in prod, so we have a bus problem.”
“Nah, I want reports…. Wait, why did we write an HO4 policy in Corpus Christie, AFTER the hurricane warning was issued?”
“See above, and prioritise things that matter.”
If your needs are fairly low on the processing side, you can snag a cloud VPS on LowEndBox for five or six dollars a month. Quality is highly variable ofc, but I’m reasonably my happy with mine.
No AWS, etc (though I don’t know offhand where the actual box lives), SSH access defaults to a key, and the rest (firewall, reverse proxy if you like, and all the other best practices) are but an apt-get away and a quick searxng to find and dissect working configs.
Incidentally, searxng is a good place to start- dead easy to get rolling,and a big step towards degoogling your life. Stand it up, throw a pretty standard config at nginx, and do a certbot —nginx -d search.mydomain.com - that all there is to it.
YMMV with more complex apps,but there is plenty of help to be had.
Oh…. Decide early on if anonymity is a goal,or you’re ok tying real life identity to your server if someone cares to look. Register domains and make public facing choices accordingly.
Either choice is acceptable if it’s the right one for you, but it’s hard to change once you pick a path.
I’m a big fan of not hosting on prem simply because it’s one more set of cables to trip over, etc. But for a latte a month in hosting costs, it’s worth it to me.
Visible is wholly owned by VZW, and runs a whole $30/mo inclusive of tax and such.
Best compromise I’ve found between network and not getting screwed or being surprised with outages.
To wit, WorkDay is universally regarded as trash. But companies keep writing checks, so employees on both sides of the time clock have to keep tolerating it
I’m just now unravelling the last of the truly important bits of my life that are in their clutches, for that and other reasons.
Two phone numbers, a handful of documents I’ve shared over the years that probably don’t matter anyway, and a couple email addresses that I’ve been actively monitoring for months for anything important, and searches my password mgr for….
I should be free by 1 July at the outside, possibly a few days early if I don’t delay the actual deletion process. Feels fuckin great.
I’ve used TimeTrex in the past. For my needs “, it was overly complex.
This is one of those areas where I’d think long and hard about self hosting, if you’re doing more than tracking your own hours.
Lots of compliance risk here, and transferring some of that risk to the payroll company is part of what one pays for with those services.
In my case, I just needed to substantiate invoices for a couple of clients I contracted for, and I was strictly paying myself and once in a blue moon my wife.
Underrepresented at best, at worst it’s arguably too easy to forget that Alpine is more than just container images.
Not sure how to solve that problem, it’s my go to for rolling an image but wouldn’t normally make the shortlist for standalone machines. In a prod env, that’s basically Deb, RHEL derivatives, etc. In a personal env for me, Arch derivs tend to win out on non-critical services if only because I invariably learn something useful that I wouldn’t want to learn in prod.