I wonder what would facilitate people to make their own solutions in this way. Like, I have made a few apps or automation things myself, but if I look at my “normie” friends who don’t have the level of tech familiarity that I do, they struggle with whatever out of the box solutions they can find. Poor IT education is a big part of this, and I’ve been wondering a lot about what would need to change for the average “normie” to be empowered to tinker

That’s a really cool idea actually. I knew a guy who used to install viruses for fun on a separate machine that wasn’t networked. I bet a more creative person than I could probably figure out a fun learning activity for kids using a “disposable” system

Comment that I’m adding on a couple of friends’. One lives in Norway, one lived in India. They told me that both of these places have an issue with accessing media and other digital goods legitimately, often finding themselves willing but unable to pay for something (I was surprised to hear this about Norway — my friend speculates that Norway is small enough that it might simply be forgotten about when big media companies negotiate rights). They both said that VPNs and piracy are way more normalised in their home countries, because it was either that, or miss out on loads of stuff.

Feel it’s useful and important to highlight that the degree to which piracy is normalised depends on where you are.

Ah, you must have access to the same internet library that my Dad used whenever I’d give him my iPod and a list of music, and he’d return it to me full of music. I don’t remember when I realised that he was pirating stuff, probably about the time that I started pirating stuff.

I’m not sure. I don’t plan on having kids, so this is a purely theoretical question that I won’t have to answer in practice, but I think I probably would, at least to some degree.

I had a pretty iconically millennial childhood when it comes to tech; I remember my mum being on the phone to the internet people and asked “he’s offering me an unlimited packaged for [money] extra. Is that good, do we need that?”, to which my brother and and I vigorously nodded. We were young enough we didn’t know shit, but unlimited sounded good and we weren’t paying the bills. My mum probably realised we didn’t know what unlimited Vs metered internet meant in practice, and opted for unlimited as the safe option, because if she felt the need to ask her children for advice, she wouldn’t be great at managing a metred connection. That’s the context in which I grew up and is why I’m as techy as I am today.

I learned the hard way, and whilst I don’t think that’s necessarily the best way to learn, I don’t know how one might teach people how to recognise which “download” button to press, and when a dodgy looking site is actually dodgy. It’s like internet street smarts, but what that means has changed since I was a kid, and I don’t necessarily know how I’d teach that beyond the basics, like installing adblockers and other common sense things.

Though I wonder if even besides adding an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) (writing acronym out for anyone else who would’ve had to Google it), this might be a useful exercise recovering from outages in general. This is coming from someone who hasn’t actually done any self hosting of my own, but you saying you’re still finding down services reminds me of when I learned the benefit of testing system backups as part of making them.

I was lucky in that I didn’t have any data loss, but restoring from my backup took a lot more manual work than I’d anticipated, and it came at an awkward time. Since then, my restoring from backup process is way more streamlined.

Never used Trakt, but I’m a big fan of ListenBrainz. It’s a large part of why I felt able to cancel my Spotify subscription

Thanks for linking to the tracker site, I’ve been meaning to find more ways to audit the amount of trackers in my apps for a while now.