640k 780k ought to be enough for anybody…

If you search around you might find free ones. Oracle has/had a free tier (though it’s Oracle, so…).

Yes, but you can run multiple VPS, from different providers, simultaneously.

What I like is that while it does depend on an external provider, it doesn’t depend on a specific external provider. Any VPS with a public IPv4 would work.

VPS+VPN, this is what I do.

VPS has public IP and runs WireGuard “server”* and a reverse proxy (and fail2ban…). Reverse proxy points to my home computer over the WireGuard link. No open ports on my home router.

For private facing/LAN-only services I just don’t have an entry in the VPS reverse proxy. DNS on the router points everything to my local server, so if at home I access everything directly. To access internal services remotely requires VPN (i.e., WireGuard to the VPS).

Works well; I have a tiny free tier VPS but even so, no complaints.

*Yes I know there are no wg clients or servers, only peers, but it plays a server-likr role.

I used Photoprism years ago, so my knowledge is probably pretty outdated.

My experience of Photoprism was that mobile was not tightly integrated. At the time I used Syncthing to sync photos — it worked ok for me, but I wasn’t going to set it up on my partner’s phone, for example.

Immich Just Works on both mobile and desktop. Multi user is great, sharing is great, and the local ML and face detection work remarkably well.

Whatever works for you is the best of course! Immich fits the bill for me, and it was very much worth it for me to “buy” it.

xscreensaver of course! Note that this is not an option on Windows—jwz hates Microsoft, and any xscreensaver port to Windows is against his wishes.

I use yabai and sketchybar for a tiling WM feel. It’s nowhere as nice as my preferred i3, but it’s ok. Unfortunately it often breaks with major OS updates, so I’m sure to hold back updating my system until yabai is working.

IIRC sshfs will work on macOS but it’s more work to install. Worth it if allowed by your IT policies and your work can benefit from it.

Vim, tmux, and the usual *NIX stuff you might want.

The coreutils are not the GNU coreutils you typically find on a Linux system, so you may find a few differences. I believe sed is slightly different, and the flags for ls must be before the filename arguments, but I’ve found it’s mostly silly stuff like that (I used zsh before using macOS, so no problem there).

Regarding DNS servers, what router do you have? Some routers have simple enough DNS capabilities — I have a MikroTik, and have it set up with DNS entries for internal services (including wildcard). Publicly accessible services just use my registrar’s DNS (namecheap — no complaints).

I’ve been really impressed with Immich, can’t recommend it enough.

I’d put substitute first, but yours sounds better :)

(I’m a big Immich fan, and I’m taking and sharing photos more than ever before, in part because Immich is awesome, self hosted, and open source [the other part is that I have kids now so I’m taking way more photos that grandparents want to see].)

On low end CPUs you can max out the CPU before maxing out network—if you want to get fancy, you can use rsync over an unencrypted remote shell like rsh, but I would only do this if the computers were directly connected to each other by one Ethernet cable.

Not sure I agree.

First, stocks tend to be highly correlated with “the market” (see financial “β”/“beta coefficient”). For example, look at, say, The Home Depot or Ford Motors. From January 2000 to January 2003 (spanning the dot com bubble) they each lost about a third of their value, yet these are not “dot com”-centric companies.

Second, the promise of AI is that it will help every company that has desk jobs. So every company has this expectation now priced into their stock, and if the bottom falls out, well…

Not an analyst/I don’t pick stocks, but just my 2¢.

If you’re running it via docker compose it’s trivial to upgrade, and there are no breaking changes. Pull, down, up, you’re done.

Frigate is pretty good, too. I’ve only been running it for a few months but I’m very happy with it.

I do something similar — I have a raspberry pi and a HD, with daily rsync and snapshots (monthly retained indefinitely, weekly retained for a month, daily retained for a week). It’s at family’s house, connected to my home via WireGuard via a VPS. Tailscale (or anything really) would also work here.

It’s a great setup! Just have some watchdog reboot if it can’t talk to home (a simple cronjob with ping -c1 home.lan || reboot or similar).

Even our “slow” 35Mbps upload speed is way more than enough for incremental rsyncs of my Immich library. The initial sync was done in person, though.

I got one from goHardDrive on eBay (link). It was cheap enough, looks flawless, and knock on wood has been working fine.

Googling around, the brand gets…mixed reviews. My use case is such that of this drive fails it’s not a big deal.

I’ve honestly never understood people who feel the need to “replace” Spotify. … Spotify has never made sense for my use-case.

I don’t know how to say this, but…you have extremely uncommon use-cases:

…during those times, my phone is either fully turned off (so I’ll use an MP3 player), or it’s in Airplane Mode.

Many people listen to music on stereos and don’t necessarily want a device plugged in, so

I just download the music I like to my device and listen to it via VLC.

either doesn’t work or is substantially less convenient than e.g. casting from a phone.

Not hating on your setup at all, but it’s very niche, in my experience.

…the San Francisco gold rush in 1949.

Classic CS major, making an off-by-one(hundred years) error ;)

I have some bad new for you about Linux…

Your numbers seem reasonable — more intuitive for me to work in terms of pressure. Atmosphere is (roughly) 1e3 Torr, good UHV can be around 1e-10, so that’s 13 orders of magnitude, which is (roughly) the same difference that you calculated.

Aluminum foil is very common in physics labs. And a main use for it is “baking”! To get ultra high vacuum (UHV)* you generally need to “bake out” your chamber while you pump down. Foil is used same as with baking food — keep the heat in and evenly distributed on the chamber.

Sadly, it’s usually not food grade aluminum foil, as that can contain oils, and oils and vacuum are generally a big no-no.

*Just how good is UHV? Roughly: I live in San Francisco, which is ~7 miles by ~7 miles (~11km). Imagine you raise that by another 7 miles to make a cube. Now, evacuate every last molecule of gas out of it. Now take a family sedan’s trunk, fill it with 1 atmosphere of gas, and release that into the 7 mile cube. That’s roughly UHV pressure.