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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • I’ve been using my own cloud-hosted SMTP relay and Zimbra server for over a decade now, and I love it.

    There can be a bit of a learning curve, and in some cases sites won’t accept mail from cloud-hosted domains. I add those domains to a rule in sendmail that sends those domains through Amazon SES, and then they get accepted.

    If you do go this route, just make sure that your recovery emails or 2FA for things like your registrar go somewhere else. If your cloud provider pulls the plug on you or something you don’t want to be stuck waiting for an email that can’t arrive.

    I love the level of control that I have over my email and wouldn’t have it any other way.

    tl;dr: steep learning curve, but worth it in the long run. Keep gmail as a recovery/2FA account or something, though.



  • So many things!

    We moved to a new house a couple of years ago and I mapped out the whole property, put it into LibreCAD, designed the space, and have been planting/building it since then. I now have thousands of plants, over 1000 unique types, and a vegetable garden in our 1/3 acre lot. I’m very proud of it, but don’t really know how to best share it with the world (or if anyone cares).

    I also have a web site that I’ve been building forever, lots of little programs, things like my irrigation system built from a Raspberry Pi, my homelab, all of the plants that I start from seed in the spring for the garden (thousands under grow lights with heated mats), the hydroponic system… I’m sure there’s more.



  • I started a created a company in 1995 to do web stuff for a very niche market – I guess now it would be called SaaS. It never really completed or became a money-maker, but it’s out there and I still work on it.

    First I had problems with IP theft – I had lots of original photos that people took. Then datasets and articles I had written were copied, so I focused on trying to stop that. Then I found myself spending too much time trying to deal with SEO, then x, then y… It was always a game of wackamole, trying to figure out how to keep ahead.

    Throw in the ebb and flow of life’s challenges and it always seems like time, money, health, or some combination thereof seemed to come up at just the wrong time (is there ever a good time?)

    I’m still plugging away. It’s thirty years later and I’ve retired from my 9-5, so hopefully I can make some real progress.







  • When I went to college I had saved every penny that I made. I went to a community college for two years under an earned scholarship and worked during that time; then I transferred into a four-year institution that required three years of classes. I paid for the first two years with my savings and part of the third year with a loan. I continued on to grad school and took research/teaching assistantships to provide a salary that covered housing, but received free tuition as part of the deal.

    My first semester at the four-year school was way harder than anything I was used to. At community college I had coasted along, but this required effort. Paying for it myself out my bank account made it so much more real, and I decided then that I was going to do better because I sure as heck didn’t work so hard all those years just to throw it away.

    We paid for most of our millenial child’s college. He ended up dropping out of college a couple of times and always spent too much money. He’s now married with a wife and child, and together they make more money than my wife and I did combined up until a few years ago. They’re still living paycheck-to-paycheck but have to buy every new gadget.

    Our two Gen-Z daughters just went off to college. They will probably graduate, but they also don’t understand the value of money. They didn’t want to work, didn’t want to save… They get a scholarship that pays a monthly stipend, and they burn through that as it comes in. Their college decisions were based on things like “is that campus pretty?” “is their cafeteria food really good?” regardless of the cost. They refused to do community college.

    What’s my take? These three kids have a sense of entitlement and a need for immediate gratification that I didn’t really see in my generation. I’m pretty sure this isn’t the result of bad parenting (we adopted the two younger ones as teens), and I see it with co-workers’ children as well.

    Does that mean that every Millenial or Gen-Z is like this? No. It just means these three definitely are. But they don’t get much pity from me when they complain and it was the result of bad choices. I chose my college path based on value: scholastic and economic. They chose their path based on social and sensory reasons.


  • I had this too, but mine went further. Eventually became burning, terrible pain down my arm – worst pain I’ve ever experienced. I spent six weeks on steroids, oxycodone, and gabapentin until I could finally get steroid injections directly into my spine.

    Be careful, and get checked out for cervical spinal stenosis. You might be able to do some proactive stuff at this point.

    Now my neck always hurts, I can’t feel my fingertips (especially on the right hand), and my right forearm sometimes feels like it’s on fire.





  • I loved Reddit until I realized they were just going to do whatever they wanted and the community, apart from creating free content and work, didn’t matter. But the lying about discussions with the app creator was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

    Suddenly they weren’t just a bully, but they were a proven lying, dishonest bully. Everything that they say going forward will be suspect, so I decided to walk away. Who knows what they’re doing with my data/content. I know what they’re telling me. I don’t know what’s true.

    I deleted most of my posts from my nearly 14-year history except for a handful that I think need to stay up and a couple of others that I’m testing something on. I log in every once in a while to leave any groups that might have unlocked since I was last there and delete those posts too.

    I don’t hate them. But they’ve lost my trust, and I don’t see any way to regain it.

    There could have been other, better solutions. The biggest problem right now is that the only tool in Steve Huffman’s toolbox is a hammer.