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Neither my wife nor I are very tidy people so our house is usually pretty messy. I (a guy) clean and tidy more than she does but neither of us are great for it.

I had the exact same experience with that model. The screen eventually cracked (I think I had it in a backpack that I was a bit too rough with). It was easy enough to replace the screen with one I found on AliExpress, but unfortunately the replacement then cracked a few weeks later. I don't know whether it was because the replacement screen was poor quality or because once I had taken the device apart the screen was less protected, but I figured I wasn't going to throw good money after bad. I ended up getting a second hand Kobo Aura on eBay which has served me well.

eReaders have gotten some new features like backlights but I don't think the technology has fundamentally moved on all that much.

Many do, and many want something else. Personally the uncertainty around banking apps working is what keeps me away from GrapheneOS.

I run OpenMediaVault as it brings plenty of nice features together like SMART disk monitoring, resource usage monitoring, easy RAID creation, FTP/SSH/browser access, etc. You don't strictly need it (or TrueNAS, UnRAID, etc) but it's nice. Unlike TrueNAS and others, OMV seems easier to install on an existing Linux distribution (I run it on Debian).

For important stuff that you really don't want to lose, you probably want to set up a RAID array of some description. The various NAS solutions like OMV or TrueNAS will make that easier but you can do it without them. It does mean you'll want a lot of storage (disks will probably be the most expensive part of your setup) and you'll want your PC to be able to accommodate multiple hard drives (I would think at least 4) particularly if you want to run a RAID.

Jellyfin is good for streaming. Beyond that I don't know much about sailing the seas at scale.

Nextcloud is decent for file storage and has a few good addons that allow you to use it to selfhost calendars, contact, Joplin notes, etc.

Paperless-ngx is a good solution for digitising documents.

Yes there are plenty of different solutions out there but after a while you come to see that as a feature rather than a bug. Selfhosting definitely carries a lot more friction than outsourcing it all to Google, so it's something you need to get used to. It helps if you can view the process itself as a hobby rather than a chore and embrace the fact that you will need to learn a lot to make it work.

I haven't used it but the Bangle.js 2 looks almost perfect for a cheap, open/hackable GPS smartwatch. I'm always surprised I don't hear more about it. Leads me to believe it's not as good as it seems, but very interested to hear if anyone has real life experience of it.

Currently I just stick with my Garmin. I'd prefer something more open but it's good at what it does and pretty durable.

European here. Germans just think their beer is the best in the world and if you're not doing it like them, you're not doing it right.

Don't get me wrong, the standards Germans apply to their beer production means that it's rare to get a terrible beer there, but IMO it's also not that innovative and the range of styles is fairly limited. There is a ton of choice in the US both in terms of breweries and styles. The variation means you get more duds but also more excellent beers.

I suspect the large majority of people who use the Fediverse don't want to be publicly trackable in this way. It would be fine for me if the people who did stayed on Facebook. To me, it's not a goal that 100% (or any %) of Facebook users move to the Fediverse. What is important is just that the Fediverse has a critical mass of activity that it doesn't completely die.

Also, maybe it's just me (I'd be interested to hear what others think) but I think trying to track down old school or college friends is really something people only want to do for a few years. By the time I hit my mid 20s I didn't really care anymore. There are people from school I sometimes think about and wonder where they are now, but ultimately, if I never tracked them down and they never tracked me down in the years since, the connection was clearly not that important.

Shouldn’t that be a “oh well, sucks. but a sale is a sale” problem?

"A sale is a sale" works fine when both sides to the transaction are well-informed and acting for themselves. When you are selling assets for someone else's benefit, you generally have extra obligations to them, because otherwise you don't really have an incentive to achieve a good price. So courts do generally have some oversight over sale of the assets of a bankrupt estate, to ensure that the trustee is not short-changing creditors just to get the job done quickly.

A complicating factor here is that the Sandy Hook families (who as far as I know are the large majority of the creditors) also supported the sale.

I tend to use floating or fullscreen for general browsing but often you have to type something while frequently referring back to something else - for example when programming I will be looking at the documentation. Or maybe debugging something on the command line while looking at your code to see what's going on. In those circumstances tilling is perfect.

It's possible there's a regional or generational gap there. If you're pushing 110 you probably haven't worked in 40 years. You could even argue that the ones literally working themselves to death are the very ones paying for the older generation's happy carefree lifestyle.

It helps if you can treat it as a hobby. My partner's hobby is music, which is a perfectly sensible thing to do in one's spare time. I always feel a bit weird when people ask me what I do in my own spare time and my answer is basically fixing my shit, then pushing it just hard enough that it breaks again.

To your question, the unfortunate reality is that those of us who care about privacy and software freedom are a small minority. Why overhaul your business model to suit us when they can continue to milk every other consumer out there who frankly doesn't give a shit?

Phones are, of course, the worst of all for this. People do great work developing FOSS solutions but it is an uphill struggle and I worry that the hill is getting steeper.

Most of my data is backed up to (or just stored on) a VPS in the first instance, and then I backup the VPS to a local NAS daily using rsnapshot (the NAS is just a few old hard drives attached to a Raspberry Pi until I can get something more robust). Very occasionally I'll back the NAS up to a separate drive. I also occasionally backup my laptop directly to a separate hard drive.

Not a particularly robust solution but it gives me some piece of mind. I would like to build a better NAS that can support RAID as I was never able to get it working with the Pi.