Not the parent you’re responding to, but I think it’s that my “mediocre” comment was a reference to the movie, and yours was a literal response to my joke. A bit of a whoosh situation.

So you’re saying it was…mediocre?

640k 780k ought to be enough for anybody…

I know right? What a poser!

/s

If you search around you might find free ones. Oracle has/had a free tier (though it’s Oracle, so…).

Sadly not really. I use the free tier Oracle, which honestly has worked very well, but I’m not going to recommend using Oracle aside to say that it functionally works for me.

If I were to switch I would probably go to racknerd.

Yes, but you can run multiple VPS, from different providers, simultaneously.

What I like is that while it does depend on an external provider, it doesn’t depend on a specific external provider. Any VPS with a public IPv4 would work.

VPS+VPN (WireGuard for me), with Tailscale as an emergency alternative, has worked very well for me. Knock on wood the only outages have been my own fault.

VPS+VPN, this is what I do.

VPS has public IP and runs WireGuard “server”* and a reverse proxy (and fail2ban…). Reverse proxy points to my home computer over the WireGuard link. No open ports on my home router.

For private facing/LAN-only services I just don’t have an entry in the VPS reverse proxy. DNS on the router points everything to my local server, so if at home I access everything directly. To access internal services remotely requires VPN (i.e., WireGuard to the VPS).

Works well; I have a tiny free tier VPS but even so, no complaints.

*Yes I know there are no wg clients or servers, only peers, but it plays a server-likr role.

xscreensaver of course! Note that this is not an option on Windows—jwz hates Microsoft, and any xscreensaver port to Windows is against his wishes.

I use yabai and sketchybar for a tiling WM feel. It’s nowhere as nice as my preferred i3, but it’s ok. Unfortunately it often breaks with major OS updates, so I’m sure to hold back updating my system until yabai is working.

IIRC sshfs will work on macOS but it’s more work to install. Worth it if allowed by your IT policies and your work can benefit from it.

Vim, tmux, and the usual *NIX stuff you might want.

The coreutils are not the GNU coreutils you typically find on a Linux system, so you may find a few differences. I believe sed is slightly different, and the flags for ls must be before the filename arguments, but I’ve found it’s mostly silly stuff like that (I used zsh before using macOS, so no problem there).

Oracle Free tier, amd64. Only use it because it’s free—limited bandwidth, but given I have slow upload at home it’s never really been a bottleneck. Hate to admit it given it’s Oracle, but I’ve been completely happy with it.

If I switch to a paid VPS I will probably go with racknerd (suggestions welcome though if you have thoughts).

Especially after adding in all the power draw of the automation requires…

What exactly is the incremental power draw for automation? My network gear and server (a little nuc) are sunk power costs as I self host other services.

Idling, my home uses around 100W with the fridge off. One 10W light is an additional 10% of my power budget, and I have a lot more than one light in my house. I also pay about $0.40/kWh.

I can be a bit neurotic about turning off lights when I leave a room, so Home Assistant was a nice way to free up brain space for me. A few motion sensors here and there + some simple automations, and the lights mostly handle themselves. Zigbee sensors and Zigbee or Matter-over-WiFi bulbs, so everything is local. A free VPS+WireGuard setup means I can access them remotely should I need to, with TailScale as a backup.

Cloud failures mean I can’t access remotely, but local control is unaffected—if my smart devices stop working it’s almost certainly my fault :)

In grad school I bought a blue (405nm) laser pointer. It was supposed to be <5mW, but I measured it at over 70mW.

Early Bulletin Said Ammunition in Kirk Shooting Engraved With Transgender, Antifascist Ideology; Some Sources Urge Caution

https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/charlie-kirk-shot/card/pdymd1sXXMSlVRhpvR4b

It sounds like a bulletin was indeed circulated, and it sounds like the WSJ is being pretty candid about the law enforcement response:

Law-Enforcement Officials Sow Confusion on Manhunt for Kirk Shooter / Contradictory public statements risk undermining confidence in investigation, law enforcement veterans say

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/charlie-kirk-shooting-manhunt-e7f3eae4

The WSJ is not going to have first hand access to the evidence, so they have to report (transparently!) what they’re told by credible sources. In this case, it sounds like law enforcement — supposed to be credible — is not. It’s a pretty tricky thing to report on.

Early Bulletin Said Ammunition in Kirk Shooting Engraved With Transgender, Antifascist Ideology; Some Sources Urge Caution

https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/charlie-kirk-shot/card/pdymd1sXXMSlVRhpvR4b

It sounds like a bulletin was indeed circulated, and it sounds like the WSJ is being pretty candid about the law enforcement response:

Law-Enforcement Officials Sow Confusion on Manhunt for Kirk Shooter / Contradictory public statements risk undermining confidence in investigation, law enforcement veterans say

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/charlie-kirk-shooting-manhunt-e7f3eae4

Bezos is Washington Post, not WSJ…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACID

Atomicity (something happens in its entirety or not at all), consistency (database is always in a valid state — if the database has constraints, they will always be honored), isolation (transactions don’t step on each other), durability (complete transaction is complete even if there’s a power failure).

Not a database expert, my parenthetical explanations may need work.

Did they really take artistic liberties to make the Bay Bridge coloration look like the Golden Gate?

Did the developer use any version control though? SCCS has been around since the early 70s, RCS and CVS since the 80s. The tools definitely existed.

Also, it was a single dev, which makes SCM significantly simpler!