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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • For what it’s worth, I ended up choosing the obsidian sync service. While it goes against my “self host everything” mantra, I do also want to support software makers who make great products that respect peoples privacy. As such, I decided the $8/m investment was warranted.

    My son in highschool uses Obsidian for all his school note taking, so he actually is able to use the same sync subscription… As each vault has separate keys, there’s no privacy issues between us…

    My favourite part of this solution is it supports live update from multiple devices at once, so I have the vault open on phone, tablet, home laptop and work laptop simultaneously, and it just works…

    Just thought it was worth sharing.





  • Please do keep voting with your wallet - its one of the few remaining ways to express our discontent!) That being said, I feel like both of those examples are where the service provided by adobe and then Netflix are terrible.

    Adobe is making you buy a whole year and Netflix is hassling you for “letting your pensioner mum watch your account”… To me, both of those are examples of bad service (coupled with cost).

    For me, a counter example for me is amazon.com: I hate what they’re doing to the retail landscape but find it hard to resist, as I find them SOOO convenient, and their customer service (for now) is absolutely stunning!!! Now if their prices were too high, I’d personally probably pay for that convenience a bit. (Where there model breaks for me completely is warranty major purchases: I’ve had warranty denied by manufacturers for items purchased through non approved amazon resellers. So now, for me, anything over $100 and I’m looking for direct purchase from the manufacturer as a preference. )



  • I’ve used the 3x multiplier for staff planning at services companies since the early 2000s.

    Perhaps there are regional differences, but they’ve rung true for planning billable rates of return at every services company I’ve worked at in the last 20 years here in AU.

    I realise that the services aspect isn’t relevant, but having the sum of indirect staff costs equivalent to staff salary cost when office space is involved isn’t a massive stretch in my experience. (Indirect costs would include office rent, utilities, infrastructure and a share of shared functions such as IT, HR, facilities etc…)


  • When running a business, you need to budget 3x salary for actual TCO of a staff member:

    1x covers their direct salary 2x covers retirement fund, electricity, office space, and infrastructure items unlike server and laptops for corporate use etc.

    The 3x multiplier is for when you’re a services company, and that represents a possibly profit margin.

    So for signal, your $380k becomes $190k which in my experience is average for a US tech sw dev at a mid to early senior level.

    I donate to signal monthly and I have no problems with the costs they’re posting. I work in SV tech and I’ve seen 20x worse numbers.






  • I aplaud the write up and recognise that the OP has developed a solution that suits their use case.

    Personally I started running my own mail around the same time, but host for several family members at the same time.

    I went a slightly different route and pay for a mail filtering service for inbound filtering and outbound relay. All up costs me $90USD per year for inbound and $4 a month for outbound

    This has solved most blacklist and outbound mail server reputation issues.

    I used to run zarafa till they went commercial. I’ve since migrated to Mailinabox as a platform. Its pretty resilient. (I’ve just disabled greylisying and spam detection as I’ve got upstream MX filtering already) I’ve also recently been through a MiaB major upgrade - it was pretty simple once I actually read the instructions properly!



  • First macbook air was ethereal, nas was bitbucket, first macbook pros deathstar then dreadnaught, second bigger nas was abyss…

    More recently I’ve been using Neal Stevenson characters and themes.

    Mobile wass “primer”, high spec laptop was “reason”, workhorse laptop was “chevaline”…

    Work servers I’ve always liked two themes:

    Chaos or medications:

    Anarchy, bedlam, disturbed, chaos, mayhem, futility, entropy, maelstrom,

    Sudafed, NyQuil, Tylenol, advil, codeine, morphine, panadol, Valium,