There really is a dearth of choices. I’ve little love for Google’s version of android, mostly for privacy reasons.

If I could get a decent phone that ran at reasonable speed for a tolerable price, without the tracking, I’d be willing to give it a go - and endure more than a few pain points.

I’ve never heard them be interchangeable. Grew up in the NE US, PA, NY, FL, and MA.

I’ve spent most of the last twenty years in the Midwest, and can’t think of a single example.

The outlier would be very, very careful instructions - likely written - organized in an if/then fashion which is a totally different use case:

• Where the coffee machine is empty and the old filter abd grounds have been removed…
• Where the coffee machine is empty but the used filter and grounds are still present… (add step to deal with that case)
• Where the moron before you forgot to turn off the burner after emptying the carafe…

“Since” wouldn’t fit, at least without changing the instructions after the ellipsis.

And of course the classic example: “since you are up, get me a beer…” also doesn’t really work. (Apologies to some long irrelevant redneck comedian for ripping that off to make a point).

I’m trying in my head to make it fit in both casual and formal conversation, and it just won’t as far as I can tell.

Would love a counterfactual where both work!

Had some very similar questions, TY. Hoping to get another 2ish years out of my Lenovo P70, and then I’ll be on the hunt for something smaller and lighter, preferably Linux native.

I liked the form factor of the older ThinkPads, but not much with current hardware that’s Linux friendly.

Insanity. I spend $5.00 or so on $eCommerceSite and am perfectly happy with the result.

I make that expenditure maybe every four or five years. I don’t need a ‘forever mouse,’ they already last practically that long.

I distinctly remember that, and the associated horror. Not to mention the risk of fatigue, health issues, and a thousand other scenarios.

Understanding the limits of the tech is key - I don’t equate the sleep tracking to the quality of the same I’d receive in a sleep lab, but I do value understanding my perception of sleep quality (i.e., totally subjective and rarely valid) vs the partially objective tracking I get from the watch.

I definitively walk differently in e.g., Birks, generic sandals, and generic slip-on closed-toe shoes.

Each one is quite consistent and recognizable, unfortunately, which puts me in a position of few options for working around this sort of technology. If you see me in Birks a decade ago, you’ll know me in Birks today without having to see anything above my hip.

Knew this was coming at scale sooner or later. Something of a concern to me personally, because my own gait is particularly identifiable to those who know me.

Aside from footwear, and possibly using various inserts to change the way one’s foot falls on the ground, I don’t have any obvious thoughts for defeating this unfortunately. The problem with any sort of inserts is that they’re likely to cause other problems over time for the same reason they could theoretically mask one’s gait - unnatural walking tends to be bad for the body on the whole, and to cause more widespread problems over time.

I like that a great deal, and now I wish I had set things up that way from the start - anything to ‘family.domain.com’ should always audio alert, 100% of the time, regardless of hour of day or silent mode.

The idea of going back and updating 20+ years of accounts and communications and other folks’ address books feels insurmountable, but that’s neither here nor there. No real reason I couldn’t start fresh with a nice, short, simple domain and subdomains for the purpose.

Right there with you on “just works,” as well as the simple fact that the config snippets you need are readily available - either in the repo of whatever you’re putting behind the proxy, or elsewhere on the internet.

I consistently keep in mind that it’s ultimately an RU product, of course. But since it’s open source and changes relatively infrequently, that’s mitigated to a large degree from where I sit.

Nothing against Caddy, though Apache gets heavy quickly from a maintenance standpoint, IMHO. But nginx has been my go to for many, many years per the above. It drops into oddball environments without having to rip and tear existing systems out by the roots, and it doesn’t care what’s behind it.

Ages ago, I had a Tomcat app that happened to be supported indirectly by an embedded Jetty (?) app that didn’t properly support SSL certs in a sane way on its own.

That was just fine to nginx and certbot, the little-but-important Jetty app just lived off to the side and functionally didn’t matter because with nginx and certbot, nothing else gave a crap - including the browser clients and the arcane build system that depended on that random Jetty app.

I do not know why these two concepts are so frequently conflated and misunderstood, but they absolutely are.

Thanks for the solid clarification. At-will and RTW are two very different concepts, and off the top of my head, forty-nine of the fifty states are at-will. The 50th state isn’t all that different (MT), just a bit nuanced: “Montana defaults to a probationary period, after which termination is only lawful if for good cause”

I’m not sure I fully agree with your suggestion of CloudFlare, though your point is well-taken - ten year renewals with nine to fix billing issues is a best practice. Last thing I want is to lose my primary email because I missed a billing email after replacing a card six months ago.

Catch-alls are definitely a win, especially for people who sometimes forget to write down every single ephermeral email address they’ve ever used to sign up for anything with… I like subdomains for email, but only when planned/executed in an intentional way. Has the potential to get out of hand quickly.

I’ve elsewhere mentioned my preferred provider, but it seems to be fairly common that most email providers also offer DNS as part of the package, which makes the whole process much simpler.

Migadu is relatively private, dirt cheap, and dead easy to set up. Supports both web and desktop email clients of choice.

IMHO, TLD matters and always will - the problem is that it matters to varying degrees depending on the destination host, the remainder of your setup, etc. If you’re fastidious about configuring all of the requisite DNS records, etc., it will be less of a problem.

I mostly avoid the newer non-CC TLDs for that reason, and general personal preference. Deliverability is enough of a challenge without adding more work to it, which is why ‘actually’ hosting one’s own email is mostly a toy project, and not something generally done as a serious endeavor. Useful for learning and understanding, of course, but not particularly practical to literally host one’s own email server for ongoing usage in any critical use case.

You’ll find certain providers easier to get your emails through to than others - Hotmail and variants are notoriously difficult, and tend to drop inbound mail at the gate without sending a bounce message, as if the inbound mail just disappeared.

No reason it has to literally live ‘at home’ - you could just as easily use a VPS via LowEndBox for five or six bucks a month, though of course trust in providers varies widely.

Visible has worked well for me recently - it’s wholly owned by VZW as I recall, and exclusively uses their network. In most areas, VZW is objectively the best coverage of any carrier.

$30/mo and I have yet to see throttling, even with heavy use. It “just works”.

Yes, I’m effectively handing that data to VZW, but I have no illusions that any MVNO I chose would behave any differently. One way or another, they’re all reselling the same 3 carriers, who by definition must have some base level of access to your data.

VPNs go a long way towards mitigating that, but using a carrier is likely to leak some level of data. While I have a great deal of respect for RMS, my own life doesn’t really fit within his internet usage model and I’m forced to make choices. (Sacrifices, really, but informed ones.)

As far as function, they’ve got a nice little package all wrapped up and easy to use. Aside from the group text thing I mentioned elsewhere, it’s a pretty slick implementation. But for a user base of one, with privacy concerns, I’d rather use something that’s a bit rougher around the edges yet more configurable, and more private.

From where I sit, it’s a pretty decent email service from both user-side and admin-side, including for biz use in nearly any size org.

It’s all about the data, and not wanting to be the product for me - I have no direct beef with their implementation or abstractions of admin-side details. I just would rather pay a relatively small amount of money than pay with my data.

In years of using GV, group texts never worked correctly for me, and generally broke in unpredictable ways - some recipients would get some msgs, others would get other msgs, and others might just get dropped entirely. It was both weird and completely untenable for anything even remotely important.

Yes, remotely important business does get conducted via group text once in a while - is it ideal, probably not, but I meet companies/individuals I work with where they are in the mutually easiest format. That only works if I can rely on the SMS solution in the first place, though.

See voip.ms for voice. I can’t speak for specific non-European languages, but I’ve been quite happy with LibreTranslate for my on the fly needs. Setup was dead easy too. (And if you see a lack of coverage for particular languages, obviously your contributions to improve that would be welcome)

Seconding @Tazerface@sh.itjust.works 's suggestion of voip.ms.

I throw them a lil cash maybe once per quarter or so, they maintain a bunch of numbers that I may or may not utilize at any moment, but are just too good to give up, and anything I’m not actively using is set up to send inbound SMS to my email - that way I don’t lose access to multi-factor codes and such, but I’m not trying to juggle a bunch of numbers in some app or other either.

Dirt cheap, ‘just works,’ and they even made porting from GV easy.

Also, by the same token, to de-google your email, I’m a big fan of Migadu. Same sort of scenario - I prepay a lil bit once a quarter or so, have catch-alls set up so I don’t miss random crap from emails I’ve forgotten I created/used a decade ago, etc. A nice, simple solution that also plays well with on-the-fly outbound email addressing, Thunderbird for day to day needs, and webmail.