True open source products are your best bet. TruNAS and Proxmox are popular options, but you can absolutely set up a vanilla Debian server with Samba and call it a NAS. Back in the old days we just called those “file servers”.

Most importantly, just keep good backups. If you have to choose between investing in a raid or a primary + backup drive, choose the latter every time. Raid will save you time to recover, but it’s not a backup.

This is a qualified truth. In theory what you’re saying is true but for example with Synology they use their own raid format and while they ostensibly use btrfs they overlay their own metadata system on top.

Gotcha. I face similar issues with Synology. Their hyper backup format doesn’t seem to be standard. I’m considering setting up Borg Backup for offsite so I can restore it onto non Synology devices later.

Was this Synology by chance?

Remote, because my commute would be 140 miles round-trip again. Otherwise I mostly enjoy working in an office with people and I don’t mind going in every few months or so.

Remote is also nice because it actually makes it easier to collaborate with other developers when we can both be at our own keyboards and share screens.

I work well alone, but I spend a lot in time in calls, either work meetings or collaborating on code. I do enjoy the social aspect of that as well.

I use AI pretty much every day, but mostly as a search engine/SO replacement. I rarely let it write my code for me, since I’ve had overall poor results with that. Besides, I have to verify the code anyway. I do use it for simple refactoring or code generation like “create a c# class mapped to this table with entity framework”.

I don’t understand your response. They’re talking about SQL the language. To my knowledge, sqlite implements its own dialect of SQL. What am I missing?

Does that include services like health care, insurance, etc?

Would it count if they used one of these?

This is one of the reasons I prefer using ctrl-insert/shift-insert when it’s available. Unfortunately the Insert key seems to have disappeared from a lot of keyboards. Scroll lock sometimes works instead of ctrl-s and ctrl-q. I would be ok remapping ctrl-c to ctrl-break, but I still use ctrl-z to background a job. Would be great if terminals had a quick easy way to select your preference of Microsoft, unix, or CUA shortcuts.

I don’t mind that fishing exists and I understand many people enjoy it as a kind of zen. I personally would enjoy it more if it were more engaging.

You’re right, I could just choose to ignore it if it has nothing of value to me.

However, at least in ESO, tons of achievements and rewards are locked behind fishing activities. I could ignore their as well, but I would prefer if I could enjoy a more engaging fishing mini game (like their scrying is tedious but at least you’re actively doing something).

Good point! I suggest fishing spears if only to grief the players who are begging for spears as a melee weapon in ESO.

But more seriously: a spear mechanic at least would have an element of skill to aim at the fish and account for refraction - or something. Not just pure chance.

Anything that is 100% chance and just wasting time, with no meaningful way for the player to influence the odds. For example, how fishing is implemented in some MMOs like ESO: you can eat a buff food and use the correct bait for the water, but beyond that you’re just waiting in agony until the random timer dings. Then you do that 12 times before moving to the next hole, etc. “Waiting” isn’t an enjoyable mechanic.

Thank you for the advice. I did try to change the runtime a couple of times before, but I don’t know for sure if GE-Proton was one. I tried using Lutris again like I did before so I could select GE-proton, but this the installer would not even finish. Since I use GOG also, I decided to try the Heroic Launcher flatpak, and that installed Battle.net just fine. I’m now downloading WoW and I’ll keep you posted how that goes.

Edit: that worked! No noticeable issues so far.

That is exactly where I had to give up as well. It’s the bad file descriptor error.

I was just trying to get this working yesterday on Fedora 42. I have had it working before, with Lutris. All I did was use the configuration downloaded from the Lutris website. Basically it downloads and installs the Battle.net installer with Wine, so you will be running a custom Wine configuration for Battle.net. From there I was able to install and run World of Warcraft. That was about a year ago.

However, when I last tried it this week, I can install the Battle.net launcher fine, and I can log in, but it will keep giving me errors when I try to actually run it and I can never get to where I can actually install any games. The error is something about it going to sleep, but that’s about as far as I got.

Hopefully someone else can help.

• see if there’s literally anything else you can do to improve or polish what you just worked on
• set if there’s anyone else that might need help with their work or who you can mentor
• learn new things you can put on your resume it that will help you in your job
• learn stuff in general that isn’t directly work related, but maybe related to your next job/what you would like to work with

It’s not a matter of software choice, in my opinion. It’s the network effect. Everybody is on Facebook.

Despite its falling out of favor of the younger generation, it still has massive inertia. There’s also the issue of (I think) the overall weariness of being on social media. The halcyon days of that is over; it has become a utility at best.

I think part of the reason I enjoy the fediverse is that it reminds me of the old Internet: loosely connected, federated but independent. We had irc for chat, usenet, and mailing lists. We had like half a dozen IM platforms and tons of bulletin boards.

With that in mind, the solution may be to just let the fediverse evolve: let people find the media that works for them, whether they are into photography, music, politics, whatever. Use the software that makes sense. You don’t have to declare a victor.

The real threat isn’t Facebook: it’s centralization and censorship. The more distributed and heterogenous your ecosystem is, the safer you will be.

I have a DS923+ with four Seagate 8TB drives in it that I really like. It’s easy to use and offers a lot of services.

However, like others have said, I do not recommend it for new purchases. If I were to do it again I would most likely set up an old PC as a server (though I went with the Synology mainly for power use reasons).

Synology is getting increasingly customer hostile, and from what I’ve read online their Linux version is so full of bespoke patches that they have painted themselves in a corner it will be hard to get out of. So, they’re likely to fall behind on keeping up with third party software. Their software is usually pretty slick and easy to use, but they discontinue things every few cycles.

The main thing I still use of theirs is Synology Drive, which was a pretty seamless move from Google Drive. On the flipside, their stuff is proprietary, so getting off of their platform can be challenging.

For my self-hosting needs I try not to tie anything to the Synology and just use it as a plain NAS. I use my Raspberry Pi or a VM instead.

They’re not as common. I think most people either use a coffee maker (for coffee), or their microwaves to heat water. However, I have an electric kettle in my office for tea. One thing you may notice in the US vs Europe in that regard is that the standard outlet is 120V, so most small appliances can’t pull as much power as their 240V counterparts in Europe. So my electric kettle is probably a little slower than yours.

I mostly threw these out of the top of my head. You’re mostly correct:

• most people use cards, not checks, but they’re still widely in use. For example if you’re paying a handyman, piano teacher, or just dealing with someone older, or someone who just doesn’t have other ways to receive payment
• I’m in rural Ohio so I see Amish on the roads all the time. They’re not where it is expressly forbidden, like a divided highway, but you can find them on roads with speed limits around 50 or 55 at times
• For the windows, the sliding style is what is weird to Europeans. We mostly use the kind that swings out in one direction it the other. American windows make more sense when you take into account that they have screens on them. (I forgot to list screens.)