If you don’t mind some low specs, and are focused on lowest price, a potato pi runs for about $30 IIRC, and is plenty to do small stuff like an openvpn server.

Gonna second the dell optiplex. Been using one for my home server for a while now, and it’s been perfect.

Absolute assholes

A refurbished Dell optiplex has been my move. Hasn’t failed me yet.

I ended up adding a healthcheck cronjob using healthchecks.io

Works flawlessly, and I’m sure it’ll help out in the future.

My linux mint installation is frequently timing out on some part of the start up process. I’m half guessing it’s because the windows partition is fucking with things, because every time it happens and I switch to windows and back again, the problem resolves itself.

But I also don’t care to diagnose the issue any further, because I’m going to be doing a fresh install of everything soon.

/u/Buddahriffic put it better than I could.

I agree, it shouldn’t be reddit’s intellectual property. But the law binds the poor and protects the rich.

Might be easiest to set up an instance in a country that doesn’t give a fuck about western IP law, then others can federate to it.

So yeah, fanatic levels of effort.

I’ve been fighting off the urge to make games like these. Maybe one day if I ever get more free time back.

I’m not super familiar with those, so I haven’t.

Though I know I definitely don’t want to go for a cloud fare tunnel, as that’s very similar to what I’m trying to get rid of. I have like 3 game servers running through playit, which is essentially the same thing.

https://wiki.futo.org/index.php/Introduction_to_a_Self_Managed_Life:_a_13_hour_%26_28_minute_presentation_by_FUTO_software

It was posted here a while back. But yeah I should have linked to it in the main post.

Objectively a good reason to store ISOs

Whenever I set something up I usually make a markdown file listing the commands and steps to take. I do this as I am setting things up and familiarizing myself, so once I’m done, I have a start to finish guide.

Raw text/markdown files will be readable until the end of time.

Agreed. It’s time my occasional minecraft/PZomboid server got a nextcloud upgrade.

Oof

Definitely going to be trying for some kind of linux phone for my next one.

Debating biting the bullet on the ~$800 cost of a fairphone.

https://actualbudget.org/

https://github.com/actualbudget/actual

It’s software for budgeting. You can run it entirely local, or set it up as a server. It stores everything in an SQLite dB, let’s you import and export CSV files, and it gives you great options for querying and seeing reports on your financial records.

I’ve got a handful of accounts, so I set up a small python utility to parse the CSVs my banks give me to something actually sensible and readable for Actual. I do that once a month, add a reconciliation entry here and there, and it’s all kept on sync very well.

I have one morbid report titled “money pissed down the landlord drain”, and it’s far higher than I’d like to be. But it’s got close to every penny I’ve ever spent on that bullshit in one place.

That just means they become 100% efficient in winter!

Can’t sell my data if I’ve never given them any

Pretty neat, but probably not something I’d buy