Yeah, I’m generally ok if somebody is charging a reasonable rent which covers their reasonable mortgage, so long as they’re still taking care of all the other stuff (repairs, city taxes, etc).

What burns me is people who either a) knowingly buy in a hot, excessively priced market with full intent to charge excessive rents while providing absolutely minimal service or support

b) bought 10+ years ago but have pumped up rents to the same as those who bought at mortgages 2-3x the rate, citing “market rates” and often doing sketchy things to raise rents including renovictions etc, while being shitty - often absentee - slumlords

Maybe I’m showing my age, but there did used to be quite a good number of mom & pop type landlords who weren’t shit, and while the commercial ones cost a bit more there was a decent mix.

Now, the commercial ones are actually mostly a safer bet in small cities. They’ll raise rent every year but consistently, and the decent ones are pretty prompt about repairs and not fucking people over deposits etc. There are bad ones but it’s pretty easy to tell which are which. The problem is of course that availability at the good ones is lower and they do cost more.

Good private landlords are increasingly hard to come by, as the best ones generally end up quitting after either getting too old or after a bad tenant experience, while the slumlords have leveraged their existing properties to finance buying more and more, leading to a market full of increasingly overpriced mould-monsters.

Insurance and ownership papers here generally require a primary owner here, at least on paper

My doctor is a pretty cool guy and some of the banter during my visits has been fun. If there weren’t potential legal implications (for him) I’d totally be down with grabbing a drink after hours and shooting the shit.

Maybe I could invite the dentist that did my root canal too, he was going into the same industry as me before switching to dentistry and was also pretty savvy.

They’re also only “small” when it comes to big corps wanting to do something exploitive, not for citizens rights

They don’t read them for the ads , but if you’re bored and on the shitter for an extended period you may read them anyways

While I am on the shitter might actually the most effective time for an ad. It used to be pretty common to keep magazines by the can and those had ads for sometimes interesting stuff

Yeah, people have said that they thought I’d love the idea of a brain implanted computer so I could do cool hacker shit or VR.

Like, noooooo that’d be like the Matrix run by the upper management suites of Boeing and Microsoft.

“Yeah we’re sorry hackers broke in and stole all your childhood memories but we couldn’t apply any security updates because the QA team had to be fired after the last one left them all barking like dogs and pissing on trees, . Don’t worry, we’ll fix it in BrainOS 9.8. You’ll need to pay for that updated but we’re now offering a choice between our premium $1500/mo subscription model or new ads-in-your-dreams model for $600/mo”

Not too many users, but an ever changing variety of devices and services :-)

Update: Based on some other sources, it sounds like giving another shot at freeIPA might be worth investigating. It’s still got Samba etc and the last time I tried it things weren’t more RedHat exactly friendly to my favored flavor (Debian) but it sounds like it might be better supported now

Update #2

OMFG it’s years after I tried and FreeIPA on Debian is even more of a pain. Docker container issues galore, and it basically won’t start without adding a bunch of options that reduce the container security to a smoldering ruin

I haven’t played with tailscale, and most of my wireguard shenanigans have involved connecting to others’ systems. Wouldn’t those mostly control the network-level access but not the account-level access (centralized account/UID/gid and remote permissions) part?

I do actually have a NextCloud instance, which I primarily use for editing Documents (via Collabora) or syncing backups of folders like Pictures etc from the phone.

SMB/Samba by itself for just sharing folders I’ve had little issue with. Samba as a domain controller with domain-joined clients tied to domain logins is a more complicated beast and - in my experience -prone to breakage in my experience (expired tokens, certificate lifetimes, DNS integration, upgrade issues, etc) BUT it can provide a fairly complete package end-to-end when it works. I just feel that there should be a more Linux-centric/friendly and less bloaty solution that still others decent account-level security.

When you ask “only on LAN” the answer is yes with the caveat that I do also work through VPN, but that’s often functionally the same thing save that the VPN login occurs after the user-login

Yeah that was what I said.

The upside over Snaps is that they’re not so controlled by a central source

I’d say they still share a couple downsides: a) use a lot of them and stuff is gonna get bloaty vs native packages

b) updating a library etc for security on your system can still leave you with vulnerable apps where the packages aren’t updated

RustDesk is pretty simple and has a fairly friendly interface. I’m hoping they bring back the play store installer though since getting relatives to install from an APK wouldn’t be much fun

I tried that one as well recently. It seems decent but the Android client is a tad broken (crashes on screen share).

Yeah, but it’s often in the form of a YouTube video with narration that’s not always so easy to understand. I miss written tutorials, but most of the good ones I find these days tend to come from Central/Eastern European forum posts.

Yup. Literally just set up a VM with that one last night to test out since a bunch here have recommended it

I’ll keep that in mind next time I’ve got relative with a Windows machine they need help on. Thanks

Yup

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/solve-pc-problems-remotely-with-remote-assistance-and-easy-connect-cf384ff4-6269-d86e-bcfe-92d72ed55922

It even works most of the time. No self-hosted server though. AFAIK it connects via an MS host as the intermediary.

Is that the same as Windows Remote Assistance? I’m guessing just a rename