The option to run one cable to the monitor, or reversely charge your laptop with one docking cable.

USB-C docks can already do this. Obviously with less power and it’s not perfect by any means, but we don’t need another technology for this. And sure, it’s two cables, one from wall outlet to integrated dock/monitor and usb-c from dock to laptop, but no matter the technology you still need something to plug in to wall outlet.

Hetzner provides managed web hosting too. For emails I think you need to look for some other provider.

I’ve seen some shit. But I’m also old enough to not care. I’m a freaking system administrator, not a surgeon. No one has died if their email is unreacable for an hour or two. Shit happens, then you deal with it and that’s all. Difference between a junior and a seasoned veteran is that old guys with battle scars is that the seasoned guy knows that something will break, shit will hit the fan and everything might turn up into a chaos and plan accordingly. Juniors will either endure and learn along the way or crumble.

When you’ve been in the business for few decades it’s not that big of a deal to cause an outage. You know how to fix your shit, you know how to work with a severely crippled environment and you know how to build the whole circus from the ground up. And you also know that no matter how disappointed or loud the C** suits are, they’ll calm down once you get them out of the hole.

Just today I had a meeting with discussion on what to do if some obscure edge-case ruins our ~5k users and few continents wide AD tree. Sure, if that would happen, it would most definetly suck balls to get back up and it would hurt the company bottom line and it would mean few nights with very little sleep, but no one would still die and our team is up to the task to build the whole crap out of nothing if needed. So, it’s just business as usual. But all of us have been in the business long enough that we know how to avoid the common pitfalls and we trust eachother enough that should the shit hit the fan in the big way we could still recover the whole situation.

And still, even if the whole thing burns up in the flames, I’ve got the experience and skillset under my belt which will be valuable to some other business entity. I just don’t care if the main office building is on literal fire. It’s not my problem to fix immediately and when it is it’s still just work. I put in the hours they pay for me and do whatever I can but when I’m off the clock the employer doesn’t really exist in my world.

Without any expertise, I’m going to say that minuscule amounts of radioactive nickel from your CR2032 replacements compared to wasted lithium on pretty much every battery your all current devices have plus single use LiIon-cells on e-cigs, single use toys and whatever is a pretty good improvement. In 100 years or so all that nickel is converted to copper with small amounts of radiation and heat as byproducts, in today’s technology, is pretty good.

And the radiation is beta-negative. I’m not an nuclear physicist, but if I’m not mistaken your common 3032 cell has enough metal to shield pretty much all of the radiation. Just don’t eat them and maybe stick with li-ion on your wrist watch.

Fair point, but basic physics has been a part of our education program for at least 60 years. Also for few years the ‘exchange priced’ or ‘market valued’ electricity has been somewhat popular and on the news, which adds up to the general understanding as if you know your stuff it means quite literal money as your bills are smaller. So, maybe ‘absolutely everyone’ is a bit of a stretch, but in general the majority of adult people understand the concept.

And also a ton of common folk understand it at least a bit on a deeper level as basic physics is included to studies beyond elementary school regardless on what you study. Sure, not everyone understands (or cares) how 3 phase AC in here adds up to 400V or why you need to have 2,5mm² wires for 16A fuse, but it’s still pretty common that people, specially in a separate house, understand how you can only pull 2300W out of a 10A circuit or 3600W from a 16A one (10 and 16A being the most common fuses in a household in here).

I’ve been a happy customer with joker.com (Germany) for at least 10 years.

I think it was some XMPP related server I ran quite a few years ago which had ‘i_have_read_the_manual = 0’ or something similar buried into default configuration file. And it would just silently exit if that variable was not set properly.

Maybe we need more things like that.

Don’t know what Elmos minions are doing, but I’ve written code at least equally unefficient. It was quite a few years ago (the code was in written in perl) and I at least want to think that I’m better now (but I’m not paid to code anymore). The task was to pull in data from a CSV (or something like that, as I mentioned, it’s been a while) and it needed conversion to XML (or something similar).

The idea behind my code was that you could just configure which fields you want from arbitary source data and on where to place them on the whatever supported destination format. I still think that the basic idea behind that project is pretty neat, just throw in whatever you happen to have and have something completely else out of the other end. And it worked as it should. It was just stupidly hungry for memory. 20k entries would eat up several gigabytes of memory from a workstation (and back then it was premium to have even 16G around) and it was also freaking slow to run (like 0.2 - 0.5 seconds per entry).

But even then I didn’t need to tweet that my hard drive is overheating. I well understood that my code is just bad and I even improved it a bit here and there, but it was still so very slow and used ridiculous amounts of RAM. The project was pretty neat and when you had few hundred items to process at a time it was even pretty good, there was companies who relied on that code and paid for support. It just totally broke down with even a slightly bigger datasets.

But, as I already mentioned, my hard drive didn’t overheat on that load.

I meant that the technology itself is reliable. And you can do self hosting just fine too, I’ve been doing it since 2010 or so, but running a local smarthost which sends messages via reputable SMTP provider works just fine too. Or even directly interacting with the SMTP provider from all the applications you’re running.

Advertising spam.

Commodore 64 is a home computer released at 1982. Modern expansions for it allows the thing to actually have tcp/ip stack and it can run things like telnet, but your single mastodon server, in comparison of what was available in 1980s, is pretty much equal of the whole bandwidth and storage of the internet (or arpanet, depending on how you want to time things).

Mastodon server requires (roughly) at least 2 gigabytes of memory and 20 gigabytes of storage. And with that it needs at least dual core 2GHz CPU to run it.

Commodore 64 had 1Mhz. A million hertz sounds like a big number, but we’re talking (at minimum) of two processor cores running with 2000 million hertz. Also, C=64 had 64 000 bytes of memory while the absolute minimum to run mastodon instance is 2 000 000 000 bytes.

And then there’s the storage. Your minimum mastodon instance should have at least 20GB of storage. 1541 used 5,25" floppy disks which could store up to 170 kilobytes. So you’d need someone to change disks as needed on a over 400 meter tall tower of floppy disks.

So, please tell me again where to get disk images to run mastodon server on a C=64 and how you just know that plain old email is garbage and old people just don’t know what they’re talking about.

you very much can not run mastodon server on a Commodore 64.

You absolutely can.

Ok. Send me the link of disk image of that. I have C64 laying around with 1541 disk drive. I’ll set up a public mastodon instance running on a C64 with a webcam stream of the setup.

I have no idea what any of that means…

That checks out. You conveniently skipped the part where I requested a single messaging solution which works with either modern android/ios devices or with anything you’ll find in your dad’s(or grandads I guess) drawer, can manage multiple recipients, escalations to sms/home automation bells, works reliably even if the uplink goes down for few hours and so on.

And no, you very much can not run mastodon server on a Commodore 64.

But you seem like a young and enthustiatic individual. I was one “a few” years ago. Keep it going, but that arrogant attitude won’t get you anywhere. Email has been a thing since the 1970s and there’s a reason why it’s still going strong. Things like XMPP has been around for a good while and there’s a reason why they’re not even close of overtaking email as a primary communication technology around.

You’ll live and learn. My guess is that when you reach my age, email is still working just fine and majority of the hot stuff which is around right now has faded to the history.

aren’t reliant on any particular company or service, and are easier to run and manage without requiring approval from your ISP

What other than email provides that? Browser notifications generally don’t work on mobile. Most of the common instant messengers rely on a single instance running the thing if you’re not suggesting sending messages via IRC or XMPP (or matrix or…) which have their own problems. App notifications require that you have the thing which app is running to be available and online and they more often that not require some spesific device. Also even if you had linux desktop “app” it requires that the software is running.

Also I have not met an ISP which would block sending email via gmail/amazon/protonmail/whoever. Sure, my current ISP blocks tcp/25 to the world by default, but you can request to open that too if you really want to and ports 587 and 465 are open, so you can work around that if you don’t want a smarthost for some reason.

With other options you wouldn’t need to because they already provide the features you’re looking for in those apps.

Which other protocol allows notifications at the same time on all the mobile devices, all the workstations and allow easy way to send the very same message to arbitary amount of recipients to all of their devices? I had email on a palm pilot device at 2001 or so, over mobile data with IRDA and you can read email even with Commodore 64 if you really want to (well, to be more spesific, use C=64 as an terminal for *nix server to access email, I think there’s no actual IMAP/POP client for it). There’s just no way for any other modern service to even try to compete with versatility with email.

And then there’s the more sopisthicated approaches like pushing email trough however complex procmail/perl/python/whatever scripting you like where you can develop quite literally whatever you can imagine. Set up a old fire alarm bell, hook it up to your home automation, process incoming emails and if it’s severe enough turn the bell on. Sure, at least a some of that is possible via instant messengers too, but with email I can be pretty sure that if I write a script today for it it’ll still run quite happily for the next 10-15 years.

Please do tell me which of the modern messaging alternatives offer all of that.

It just boggles my mind that we haven’t moved away from this archaic technology.

None of the alternatives are as standardized as plain old email. You can use whatever you like to read them, you don’t have to rely on a single company like Meta with WhatsApp for communication, it’s easy to use, pretty damn reliable and fault resistant and just ticks all the boxes you’ll ever need for a simple message delivery.

Personally I would absolutely hate if software started to offer notifications only on slack or signal or whatever. Just let me have my email and I can then read it with a browser in library, on my cellphone, on my desktop and laptop and on pretty much every other internet connected device on the planet. And if I want, I can pass that trough to teams, sms, all the messaging platforms and even straight to my printer should I need to. With other message delivery options that’s often either pretty difficult or straight up impossible.

You only need SMTP server, so the inbox size doesn’t matter (assuming you have another email where you want to receive those notifications). And even if you have separate inbox for alerts it’s quite unlikely that you get hundreds of megabytes worth of alerts every day and they’re pretty much useless after a day or two so there’s no need to keep them around.

In here ISPs commonly have SMTP service included on their service, so that’s worth checking. Beyond than that, any at least somewhat reputable provider will do as long as they provide traditional SMTP service. One option is to use a relay host on local network which sends mail trough a smart host so you can just use local unauthenticated SMTP server for all the things you run and that one service will then push the messages to the internet.

Yep. Even if the data I’m backing up doesn’t really change that often. Perhapas I should start to back up files from my laptop and workstation too. Nothing too important is stored only on those devices, but reinstalling and reconfiguring everything back is a bit of a chore.

Does your storage include any kind of RAID? If not then that’s something I’d personally add in to the mix to avoid interruptions for the service. Also 32 gig of RAM is not much, so don’t use ZFS on proxmox, it eats up your memory and if you run out everything is stupidly slow (personal experience speaking here, my proxmox server has 32gig as well).

Also, that’s quite a lot of stuff to maintain, but you do you. Personally I would not like that big stack to maintain for my everyday needs, but I have wife, kids, kids hobbies and a ton of other stuff going on so I have barely enough personal capacity to run my own proxmox, pihole, immich and HomeAssistant and none of those are in perfect condition. Specially the HA setup badly needs some TLC.

And then there’s the obvious. Personal mail server on a home grade uplink is a beast of it’s own to manage and if you really don’t know what you’re getting into I’d recommend against it. And I’m advocating every mail server which is not owned by alphabet/microsoft/apple/etc. It’s just a complicated thing to do right and email is quite essential thing for everyday life today, so be aware. If you know what’s coming up (or are willing to eat up the mistakes and learn from them) then by all means, go for it. If not, then I’d suggest paying for someone to make it happen.

And then the backups. I’ve made the mistake few times where I thought it’d be fine to set up backups at some point in the future. And that has bit me in the rear. You either have backups on the pipeline coming Very Soon™ or you lose your data. And even if it’s coming Very Soon, you’ll still risk losing your data.

Plus with backups, if you don’t test recovery from them then you don’t have backups. Altough for a home gamer it’s often a bit much to ask for a blank slate recovery, so at least I’ve settled on the scenario where I know for sure I can recover from any disaster happening in the home lab without testing as I don’t have enough spare hardware to run that test fully.

Beyond that, just have fun. Recently I ran into an issue where my proxmox server needed some hardware maintenance/changes and that took my pihole-server down, so whole LAN was out of DNS services. No tthe end of the world for me, but a problem anyways and I’ve been planning for a remedy against that, but haven’t yet done anyting concrete for it.

I changed my proxmox server from zfs raid pool to software raid with mdadm. Saved me a ton of ram and cheap ssd’s don’t really like zfs, so it’s a win win. And while messing around with drive setups I also changed the system around a bit. Previously it had only single ssd with LVM and 7x4TB drives with zfs but as I don’t really need that much storage it’s now running 3x1TB SSD + 4x4TB HDD, both with software raid5 so 2TB of fast(ish, they’re still sata drives) storage and 12TB (or 10,6 in the real wold, TB vs TiB) of spinning rust storage.

Well enough for my needs and I finally have enough fast storage for my immich server to maintain all the photos and videos over 20+ years. Took “a while” to copy ~5TB over 1gig lan to other system and back, but it’s now done and the copying didn’t need babysitting in the first place, so not too big of a deal. Biggest unexpected issue was that my 3,5" hdd hotswap cradles didn’t have option to mount 2,5" drives so I had to shut down the server and open the case to mount the drives.

And while doing that my piHole was down, so the whole network didn’t have DNS server around. I’d need to either set up another pihole server or just set up some scripts to the router to change DNS offerings to dhcp clients while pihole is down and shorten the lease time to few minutes.

You can also set your profile picture to ‘missing/broken image’ icon.