This is great, thanks for sharing! You’ve got a few useful feedback points, let me add one more: does a provider have an onion address. This allows decoupling of payment from usage. Not a big thing, but good to know.

I vaguely remember some issues with extensions in ungoogled chromium. Maybe I should give it another shot.

Depends on what you mean by “private”. I would not trust it much, but it’s not a bad Chromium based browser when you need one. Use something like LibreWolf for much more privacy out of the box.

An outdoor WiFi access point would help with garden coverage

Not sure how many services can be hosted in that way and remain useful. But it’s an interesting idea overall! For myself, I could run a Git forge on local PC. Since I’m the only user, and I just keep my scripts there, it is fine not to run 24/7.

I’d love to have that, but such a service has to comply with government regulations and payment systems requirements in order to issue virtual cards that are generally accepted. I can imagine a company that would open source their code, but what benefit would it be for you? You can’t self-host it and you cannot audit their infrastructure to confirm they run exactly the same code they publish… You want trustless finances - go crypto and say goodbye to convenience and wide acceptance.

Otherwise, you have to trust a middleman. And if we are talking about trust, privacy.com looks trustworthy. They have paid plans, so it doesn’t look like selling clients data is their business model. They clearly say they don’t sell users data in their privacy policy, which makes them a potential target for lawsuit if they caught lying. They haven’t been caught on anything nasty. Good enough for me. You do you.

Privacy costs money. There are companies that retrofit gas cars into electric ones without making them into trackers on wheels. You can also buy EV kits and do it on your own.

I know nothing about animation jobs. I have about 18 years in sys admin jobs, mostly enterprise. Let me add to what others have said.

1. The routine part is there, but goes smaller with seniority. When you are junior, you’re being bossed around and you’re doing the most tedious things
2. You can help #1 with automation. I’ve heard about people automating themselves out of the job, but never saw it with my own eyes. It may help you with your career in a right company, though.
3. Responsibility also comes with seniority. Unless you sign up with a really shitty company, junior admin will not do risky things unsupervised and will not be made a scapegoat if manages to screw things up.
4. Weekend and night work :( I know, somebody already said that, but I think it’s the only thing that I really dislike about the job.

You have taken a lot of useful steps. May I suggest email aliases? Using same email address on many services is too easy to track

I believe most people who care about privacy don’t trust Gemini or Google in general. So it’s not an issue if you already not using Gemini app. It can be uninstalled (at least for now) even without going alternative ROM way

2.5G with SFP+ port might be tricky. You want to be sure that the SFP+ module you buy does support 2.5G explicitly - don’t assume that any 10G module can negotiate that speed. This might work.