What Google password?

I don’t intend to browse RMS-style, but I have zero need of a Google account, nor of the major search engines directly.

I just add layers between myself and that particular company. I still can get their data, but without the creep factor.

Mostly.

It’s an imperfect solution, but I’m more comfortable with access by proxy than direct access.

At one time, Reddit (or at least the core server) was open source. Statistically, it’s relatively likely that someone, somewhere forked and is maintaining that code for their own purposes to this day, but I’m not actively aware of any examples.

If someone has been maintaining a fork, I’d love to see the old comment database imported into it and made available, though I don’t know offhand what license either the code or the comments were released under.

A FOSS Reddit, without the chaos that took over America during the presidential administration installed in 2016, and branching from there, would be an interesting point of diversion to say the least.

Edit: quickie DDG search found me one fork archived in 2023 and a further form updated a year or so ago. That’s recent enough the damn thing just might build with a little work.

2023 fork of open source reddit

~2024 fork

I’m sure there are others…

Sell them to someone who will test and resell them to the airline or medical industry… Manufacturing is a likely customer as well, plenty of legacy equipment there that’s airgapped and still running decades-old hw/sw.

Youtube warning, some Boeing 747s

Recent BBC article

(This is a wrong answer since you only have a single pack. If you had several cases, you might actually be able to make a buck)

Saw a post on mastodon in the last day or so that someone dug up a network card for the old 486 they had been working on getting back to life. Might be a use case there, as well as in aviation and medicine - fields that move exceptionally slowly and tend to have expensive equipment with long lifetimes.

I use Arch, btw…

Kidding, of course - but there are some of those folks out there. TBF, they’re the vocal minority, but they are vocal nonetheless.

The value of my labor, daily.

The nominal “cost” of my healthcare, at every encounter.

Etc.

Dead on, and applicable to nearly everyone.

• If you need medical care, get fucking medical care. Seriously. It will get worse if you ignore it, whatever “it” happens to be.
• Following the above, have at least one trusted advocate (partner, family member, friend, doesn’t matter) who can explain any chronic issues, typical medications, etc., and who can and will advocate on your behalf with medical professionals in e.g., a hospital setting as and when necessary.

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.

Particularly since most Lemmy instances have (IIRC) built-in image hosting (unless disabled), and there are a wide variety of alternatives as well.

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.)

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.

Haven’t seen RTFM casually dropped in conversation online in… um… a while…

You’ve been hanging out on the intartoobz at least as long as I have. Circa the paleolithic era, or so…