Freedom. 24 years ago, I figured that there had to be something different that I could customize. I had experimented with BeOS but then I came across Gentoo, and Linux in general. I crushed and burned many times experimenting with Slackware, SuSE (and later OpenSuSE), as well as Mandrake, but Debian became my thing. I did some time with Solus, but I’m a Debian guy. Netboot, put it together as I want, and what not.

Right. That. Thanks.

Eyeballing here. I’m a learner and have hardly used this.

Would a checkpoint model (right term?) achieve consistency, built from a specific set of pictures?

Give shit, take shit, have a laugh about it.

Legit.

Interest groups. Hobbies. Travel. Volunteers. Book clubs. That sort of thing. Cast your net wide enough and you are sure to get someone.

I had to tell ChatGPT to stop kissing my ass. It was ridiculous. ChatGPT can inflate ones ego if you are not careful.

I run a “self hosting” business. My job is to solve said problems. What I am learning from my developing customer base is this, they would rather I be on the hook than them, they would rather I press the buttons that them, and so on. You get the gist of it. Where I host said services is up to me, provided it does not fail, is secure and they have root access when they need it.

If I get tired of this business, I will find a buyer and sell it and move on. Yes, it is a worthwhile venture. Horror stories though, it seemed easy to get into, till I had to get my first customer.

For many years, yes, but, to see that person reach out, apologize, amends and even support me in difficulty changed that perspective. Forgiveness played a major role in healing.

It took me 6 deploys to finally understand all the mechanisms. What I like about self-hosting and the open source mantra in general is that every failure is a lesson with field experience. So skills development and acquisition is fairly easy if you push for it and once you get it, its wash, rinse, repeat.

Self hosting is not always about hosting at home. A private VPS/VDS, co-located server that you own/lease and operate is essentially that. I take self hosting as not turning to big tech for the very same solutions I can spin up myself on a private server.

That being said, self hosting also involves servers at home that run personal services.

My line of work is mostly in business. Getting people to operate their businesses with open source tools on private servers, local, in the country and abroad, as they wish.

So there is a bit of work you need to do, but if you manage your server well, do DMARC, DKIM, SPF etc and then nip it in the bud when you get warnings, its very easy to manage. Its about responsibility. Bad actors exist, but careful operators prevail.

There are very easy steps you can take here. It seems complicated, but there are tools for this and with a VPS/VDS, you can be up and running in under an hour if you are technically inclined. Moving to my own email, is by far, one of the best things I have done in my life.

I just launched a business to help non technical people identify and selfhost their business tools. I faced such problems when I lived in a fascist country and now that I live in a fascist country again, I figured its a good way to go.

Lol. Yeah. Been through that. I find myself wanting to start new subs, then I am reminded of the horror show, and I move on.

Looks like you found a niche and are about to start a new sub.

I believe short term there is an increase, give that a lot of people are braving stuff they can’t afford to fix. But it stabilizes and reduces in the long term cause as society becomes healthy, and with other health initiatives like healthy eating, exercise and preemptive healthcare, it normalizes with a general reduction in staff numbers.

Ethiopia has a better relationship with Russia than Eritrea and because, weirdly, Eritrea and Israel have a fairly good relationship, so my friends enemy is not necessarily my enemy, in this case, but a good contact to sell weapons to while I look for money to find my special military operation, and take my skim for you know, war effort. Also noted is that Ethiopia and Israel are fairly good friends, but I believe Israel operates some military out of Eritrea.

However, Russia will flip weapons to Ethiopia and Eritrea and watch them shoot it out. That being said, Ethiopia is the bigger monster when it comes to equipment because of its licensed manufacturing deal for old Soviet hardware, up to large field guns, I think, but is battle fatigued. Eritrea has far greater manpower of highly trained but poorly motivated and poorly equipped soldiers. Null sum game.

Also, they aren’t going to fight. Aferwerki has enough problems at home, and his own tenure is at risk. Age has caught up and younger upstarts are sensing blood in the water. So while his avenue is to distract with a ports war, conveniently, it is again, a null sum game.

All hail Somaliland. The new powerbroker and infrastructure operator in the region.

I’m surprises at how SailfishOS has a limited presence. This could be that moment. HarmonyOS is sick. I’ve seen it in action and it is on another league.

This will face legal hurdles, especially in the EU and China. It reminds me of the time Microsoft played shell games with Chrome and Firefox and then lost eventually. That being said, it will kickstart a new mobile OS arms race, not necessarily to beat Android but for choices.