There’s a joke about whitespace here somewhere, I just know it.

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).

Regarding DNS servers, what router do you have? Some routers have simple enough DNS capabilities — I have a MikroTik, and have it set up with DNS entries for internal services (including wildcard). Publicly accessible services just use my registrar’s DNS (namecheap — no complaints).

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 :)

https://health.osu.edu/health/dental-health/metallic-taste-workout

In an otherwise healthy person with no other symptoms, there is no significant medical concern.

You’re thinking of an “educated bed.”

Adjusted for inflation, or better yet something like median salary, would probably be more meaningful.

Seems this will preferentially screw folks in low cost of living areas. If you’re in a HCOL/VHCOL area and making ends meet, then a new car is probably affordable. If you’re making ends meet in a LCOL area, then this is likely a huge expense.

Matter is also local—provisioning can be a PITA but once done I’ve been pretty happy with even the cheap Matter WiFi smart bulbs. Home Assistant supports them very well.

Cheap bulbs can be a little buggy, which usually means I need to power cycle some of them now and then.

My lights and motion sensors were obviously unaffected (HomeAssistant). My Emporia Vue2 power monitor would possibly have stopped working, except I flashed it with ESPHome firmware, so it’s local only, and of course it was fine. My security cameras (Frigate) were also fine.

If my smart home devices are going to stop working, it will almost certainly be my fault, thank you very much!

There’s an interesting discussion in the comments about the architecture: https://www.cnx-software.com/2025/10/20/banana-pi-bpi-r4-pro-board-offers-2x-10gbe-sfp-cages-6x-10gbe-2-5gbe-gbe-ports-wifi-7-support/

Sounds like there are bottlenecks, and you can’t run all ports at line speed. User TLS says:

Is it just me, or is the MaxLinear MxL86252C switch connected to one of the 10 Gbps PHYs? The MT7988 only has a single 2.5 Gbps MAC and it’s shared with the second 10 Gbps MAC. It seems like they’re routing a 10 Gbps signal to the MxL86252C, which has two 10 Gbps SerDes interfaces, making the second set of 10 Gbps connected via the switch. This suggests that if the 10 Gbps port is running at full speed, you won’t be able to use the 2.5 Gbps ports.

You’re right, for new drives it looks like a little more with this 20GB retailing for $230, or $11.50/TB.

For refurbished, I recently got a factory renewed 12TB Seagate for $112 ($9.33/TB), but that price is now up to $199 for the same drive (!).

D minor…the saddest of all keys.

Official numbers here https://www.debian.org/mirror/size

About 4.4TB, but that’s all architectures and (I believe?) all distributions (stable, testing…).

If you only want source+all+amd64+arm64, and only want stable, it will be smaller of course.

Not nothing, but at $10/TB or so, it’s not much.

And if you’re following 3-2-1, I’m pretty sure the “1” is already handled for you :)

I’ve been really impressed with Immich, can’t recommend it enough.

I’d put substitute first, but yours sounds better :)

(I’m a big Immich fan, and I’m taking and sharing photos more than ever before, in part because Immich is awesome, self hosted, and open source [the other part is that I have kids now so I’m taking way more photos that grandparents want to see].)

That only appears to apply to hard drives though.

If you want to use M.2 SSDs for your storage pool and cache, then you still need to use a Synology-certified SSD (which doesn’t necessarily mean that it needs to be Synology branded, just tested and certified).

From https://liliputing.com/synology-backtracks-and-adds-3rd-party-hard-drive-support-to-its-2025-nas-lineup-network-attached-storage/

On low end CPUs you can max out the CPU before maxing out network—if you want to get fancy, you can use rsync over an unencrypted remote shell like rsh, but I would only do this if the computers were directly connected to each other by one Ethernet cable.

Not sure I agree.

First, stocks tend to be highly correlated with “the market” (see financial “β”/“beta coefficient”). For example, look at, say, The Home Depot or Ford Motors. From January 2000 to January 2003 (spanning the dot com bubble) they each lost about a third of their value, yet these are not “dot com”-centric companies.

Second, the promise of AI is that it will help every company that has desk jobs. So every company has this expectation now priced into their stock, and if the bottom falls out, well…

Not an analyst/I don’t pick stocks, but just my 2¢.