Back in these days you’d install your distribution and stay there until the next major release. There were no online software repositiories for updates.

And exploits were plentiful. It was an easier time if you were up for mischief.

Well… last time I bought a commodore I got the full schematic of the computer in the box. And the user manual taught me programming.

I didn’t know how to operate it when I bought it, but I learned fast.

What’s next? Soon you won’t be allowed to call it baby oil unless it’s made from real babies.

On a more serious note, I did order a “flexi” burger at Max by mistake. I thought it was a gateway burger with one patty replaced by halloumi. All I got was veg.

I flipped in 1997, so any software I might have missed since those days are probably not around anymore.

Windows 95 was pretty shitty in comparison to Linux, and a lot of software broke with NT 4.0

It was an easy choice at the time. Linux was the operating system for this new fancy thing called the internet. Software development turned into a career, and Linux is just a very nice stack for building backends and infrastructure.

I do have an old ThinkPad around running windows 10. I’ve only used it three times in the past five years: To unbrick an Android phone, to set the MMSI on a marine radio, and to update the maps on my car’s satnav.

Choices are getting fewer and fewer. I went with OpenSUSE a couple of years back.

ubports have continued maintaining it. It was based on 16.04 for the longest tie, but they’ve made good leaps in the last two years.

They do scan and try all ports.

I have a tiny VPS as reverse proxy with SSL termination for my fiddling. That one has a wireguard network to my hardware at home to which it forwards some hosts.

The tiny VPS is definitely the bottleneck in the equation, and if I were to have loads of traffic I’d probably go with cloudflare or -front in front of it.

Memory Management Unit was the first thing that came to my mind when I read that title.

I don’t know what that says about me.

I’m a software engineer. I also do programming as a hobby.

Programming as a job can be draining, but I find that autonomy makes it enjoyable. If I’m just checking off tickets that I don’t care about, I’d have very little motivation to so so. If I can plan the road map and start at the end where my work makes the most impact, then I’m a lot more passionate about doing so.

It’s been a while since I meddled with FreeBSD. It shouldn’t be hard - it’s just a web stack with some command line ffmpeg. I think the only thing that might be a challenge is hardware encoding.

There are sweet docker images, but I guess they might require virtualization on FreeBSD.

Plex bad. Jellyfin good.

A bit of a buffer battery is good.

I’ve got the opposite problem of lithium batteries freezing. But three NiMH batteries in series is close enoigh to drop-in. They’re ok with cold, maybe also heat?

Or, capacitor to even out the load. Or a super-capacitor if you want to last all night long. They’ll consume everything to charge up from empty, though.

I had a 4G modem with a web interface many years ago. It was flaky and would often hang. I just had a raspberry pi on my network pinging some known address, if it failed for long enough it’d replay the commands to restart the web interface.

If I’d have the same problem today I’d probably have home assistant power cycle the router with a smart plug.

13 years. Married for 6.

First two years were mostly long-distance.

I set it up during the outage last week.

Easy enough to just pull in the synapse docker container and run it on my home server. I wireguard it to my VPS that acts as a reverse proxy.

Both federation and push notifications work.

Ahh. 2000.

When Alpha and Transmeta was the future. No more of this Intel and AMD crap.

OP didn’t say anything about their financial situation, so we can only speculate.

Maybe they’re a landlord. Maybe they have a hedge fund. Maybe they’ve made good financial decisions in the past and have a big buffer saved up. Maybe they just sold their yacht and have a lot of cash burning in their pocket.

OP never said anything about being light on money.

It’s actually easier when you don’t have to plan your travel around your work schedule.

Only if you want a visit from the thought police.