One could argue that reduced maintenance costs are a value from the cloud providers. E.g. when my AWS VM dies I can get a new one back in <10m (faster with automation). When my self-hosted server dies I need to have planned for that with a warm spare and someone needs to physically be connecting new hardware

Yes this is absolutely a value proposition that CTOs/CIOs/IT Dept Heads need to be considering. You’re not just paying for the VMs and storage, you’re also paying to outsource all of the hardware and some of the configuration work, however you still need admins to manage all of the VMs and configs. If that labor savings is actually enough to cover the immensely increased cost of cloud resources over local/colocated resources that you own (the infrastructure costs are pretty minimal in comparison) than awesome, more power to you.

I really think the biggest value is putting all of your baseline compute in hardware that you own, whether on-prem or colocated, them if you need bursts of resources place that in the cloud. With hardware you own you can spin up temporary VMs, you can keep legacy VMs around, you can fling data around with impunity. These are all tasks that have real costs in the cloud that they will happily bill you for.

But your owned hardware is a set quantity, so if you are rapidly hiring a thousand people or bringing in a new organization or have publicly facing services seeing immeense growth or anything like that and need more capacity immediately, you can’t. It can easily take weeks to bring more servers online even in a rush job, meanwhile the cloud can hand you capacity immediately. That’s the value of the cloud that’s being missed

At the scale of one of the top websites by daily active users, owning your own infrastructure is absolutely cheaper than just throwing it on AWS. At a more realistic smaller scale where you might exceed the bandwidth available for your own hardware, there’s also the option of a hybrid setup where your content is mainly hosted on hardware that you control and then it automatically scales out to AWS or similar when demand spikes.

There’s really tons of ways to make web apps and server infrastructure cheaper than just renting it from a cloud provider, but many orgs lack the vision and drive to do so and just fork money over to [insert hyperscaler here] and watch their app go down when that hyperscaler goes down. I really question this mentality especially when the same organization has constant discussions about not liking how large their cloud provider bills are

A couple of years ago I got my wife to finally play Portal and Portal 2 for the first time. Its been long enough she was entirely unaware of any of the memes about the game so she immediately fell in love with the companion cube and cried when she realized she had no choice but to incinerate it, even going so far as trying to find a bug to exploit to bring it with her

When they do you can still play 2009scape! Has up to 5x XP modes in case you want a less grindy experience, a single player mode and a brilliant community

Worth noting that OSRS is really just a fork of RuneScape from around the mid RS2 days, (if I remember correctly it’s based on a full backup someone found of their codebase, so it started as “hey look we found this old version of the game in a box in one of our offices, wanna play?”) and now it contains more new content than original content. Heck way back in the day the idea of a sailing skill was always a silly joke that nobody took seriously, and I’m talking back when Hunter and slayer were being added. Yet here we are.

I hate to say it, but I almost appreciate the honesty that comes from multiple different alphabet soup brands selling the exact same item often with the exact same photos. Additionally, unbranded items aren’t always poor quality.

I’ve actually got some unbranded Christmas light strings I bought because I just wanted to put some lights on some columns at my wedding and wanted to spend less than $100 doing so, and those light strings have outlasted every commercial Christmas light string I’ve purchased. Heck I have a couple of those strings which have been on for 3+ years straight.

Most unbranded items are made by factories that do OEM and ODM work for actual brands that we’ve all heard of, so they know how to make quality products and they can get more ongoing orders if they make products that are worth restocking. Sometimes you get burned but far more often than not I end up with something that’s relatively decent quality and fullfills the need I have for the item

Hilariously I thought it was nuns at first glance

Just some good ol Fediverse fun. Don’t forget there was also that period of retro meme templates, and everyone was posting like peak circa 2009 memes

I do genuinely wonder if some amount of vaccine skepticism comes from a place of just not wanting to get a shot.

I’ve never tried the Proxmox over Debian method, I just know it is an officially supported install method. Good on you for getting that far though!

A hale storm earlier this year and the power outage it caused created some bizarre issue with my home server I have yet to diagnose. All of my containers and VMs corrupted in some way, so I had to restore from backup, but my file server container has some sort of permissions issue on top of that.

Honestly the brownout before the outage is almost definitely what did it, but the cost of a UPS that also protects against brownouts is well outside of my usual hobby budget so it’s hard to justify on ewaste hardware that I got a pallet of for less than what the UPS would cost used

Realistically, comfort comes from experience. The more you use it the more you’ll feel comfortable.

If you want to get a lot of exposure without dedicating too much time to it and limit the risk, I would say, spin up a Debian VM and try to configure it into the server you want the old school way. Setup ssh keys, raid pool and samba share all via ssh. Try to do it like you’re actually deploying it. This will give you real world exposure to the command line and the commands you’d run. Next maintain that server like it’s production, ssh in every couple of weeks to run updates and reboot. Just that muscle memory of logging in and reviewing updates will help you feel more comfortable. Do it again with another service (a VPN server would be an easy choice, a Minecraft server is also a fun one but requires a lot more memory. DNS would be good if you’re feeling brave, but that’s really just because DNS architecture is more complex than most realize) and maintain those servers too

Once you’ve setup a couple of servers and spent a couple of months monitoring and updating them your comfort level should be much higher and you might feel ready to setup some actually home production servers on Debian or the like.

You mentioned running Trunas and wanting to learn Debian and other FLOSS software, the easy button answer is to run Proxmox. Its free and open source with paid enterprise support plans available and has been rapidly improving just in the handful of years I’ve been running it. Proxmox is really just a modified version of Debian. They have some tweaks and custom kernels over stock Debian but impressively actually have a supported install method of installing overtop of an existing Debian install and apparently some Proxmox employees actually run it as their workstation operating system

With an uptime of greater than 5 years I’m going to be concerned about the system potentially not coming back up after a reboot/power outage, especially for physical hardware

At a bank I worked at, we had an old IBM Power server which was at that point purely used for historical data. It had multiple years of uptime and was of course a good 10+ years old. When we went to take it offline, we actually just disabled the nic on the switch so we could reduce the number of powercycles it would see in fear that it would not power on anymore. Theoretically the data on it is purely historical, backed up and not needed, but there was enough question marks on each of those fronts we just played it safe

I see lots of people suggesting non-work things, but that gets old fast and depending on your work environment can be stressful as you might get caught “not working”

I’d be trying to take on new projects. Start by getting to know your coworkers. If you have other people in your department, talk to them about what they’re working on, things they’d like to see done. If you’re the lone person in your area of work you could alternatively walk the floor and start talking to anyone who could be the stakeholder for a future project. Learn what their pain points are, where the current practices have blindspots.

You mentioned being a safety admin, I’m guessing that’s industrial safety right? Start looking into whatever the current buzzwords are in the industrial safety field and make it a project you take to your boss and try to get funding. Find ways to improve the current processes and data tracking. If you don’t already use a fancy incident tracking system outside of Excel, start doing some research and getting some numbers from vendors and have a chat with your boss about how using an actual purpose built database can improve compliance (that’s about 70% of my duties right now is managing and configuring my organization’s SAAS risk management database, but we also have ~10k workers in the field so it’s highlighting useful data points in the data we’ve already collected primarily)

Unless your position is stuck below a manager with zero flexibility for process improvement, there’s always new projects to be discovered and started to improve existing processes

I know there’s already too much content on the Web

No such thing!

I’ve had good luck sharing my own interests instead. A few years ago I got super into watching SpaceX’s rocket launches because it’s honestly spectacular and they know how to do a really good livestream, plus watching the booster come back from orbit and softly touchdown is pretty incredible (I’ve had a hard time enjoying the live streams since Musk’s involvement with Trump of course)

But popping over to a coworker and going “hey there’s a rocket launch in 2 minutes, wanna take 8 minutes and watch it with me?” is a brilliant ice breaker

Banning advertisements to kids is the correct approach. I’ve observed with my own kids, they genuinely don’t yet have the mental faculties to be critical of advertisements. They see something advertised, they want it, simple as that. Their brains aren’t developed enough for content with advertising nor product placement.

Maybe there’s a sweet spot in limiting it to toy ads and ads for other content on the same platform that they’re watching. I’m not sure, I’m not a child psychologist, but kids should not be presented ads for energy drinks/drink supplements (I wish I was kidding but I’ve specifically had to have a conversation with my daughter about why we’re not buying the drink band owned by a certain YouTube celebrity who got himself banned from returning to Japan) nor for restaurants (especially not fast food!) nor for sketchy paid mod launchers for games (fuck you to the like only YouTuber who focuses entirely on Wobbly Life and is constantly advertising that!), nor most of the other things I’ve seen advertised to the kids recently

The way I see it, if my kids start finding ways to circumvent parental controls we should be able to have some frank discussions about what the parental controls would be setup for

I setup my wife’s old Android phone to be super locked down via parental controls. Only approved apps, no installing apps, time limited etc. set it up so my kids can use it on days when we need them to zombify for a bit in the afternoons

Its kinda mind blowing how YouTube Kids is their go to and they don’t move to any other apps until they’ve run out of time on it (family had already let the cat out of the bag about the existence of YouTube so I had to limit rather than block) and we still have had to block a number of concerning channels they kept watching. Its crazy how they’ll just zombify staring at YouTube but then for the age appropriate games they’re so much more engaged and actually seem to have a healthier interaction. Its also sad how some of the content I see the kids watching on YouTube Kids has writing and direction about on par with Disney’s current crop of age appropriate shoes for 3-6 year olds (and from what I’ve seen Nickelodeon isn’t much better right now). My kids primarily watch PBS Kids and a handful of shows we carefully selected on DVD because we want to minimize the brain rot (as well as minimize annoyance for us)

When my wife and I first moved in together she was an avid Markiplier watcher, and we watched all of his first? 24 hour stream. At like 3am he opened up probably way more than he wanted to and talked about how he struggles with interpersonal relationships, and how he always ends up pushing people away, as well as his incredibly unhealthy work ethic and I honestly can’t remember the rest but he basically described how he always tries to portray himself very differently from how he is in reality, even in private with friends. Ever since then I can see it where he really does seem to always be playing a character of some sort (and the character definitely does change at times), plus people he’s collabed with and referred to as friends seem to eventually disappear (except for Ethan, he seems to be the one who’s always stuck through it all)

Basically he’s got some demons that I really hope he’s been able to find healthier ways to cope with

Big Clive might fill that gap for you. He does teardowns of dodgey electronics, and remains extremely down to earth, making good commentary about cost effectiveness and energy efficiency. For a while recently he was on a kick of trying to reverse engineer every single LED light bulb design and show how to modify them to run the LEDs less hard making them last much longer and run more efficiently (with reduced light output of course)

He also uploaded a video without warning describing his experience caring for his mother as she passed from Alzheimers. That video with his down to earth way of describing things really helped me to better understand dementia not long before I had family members start declining from dementia