Create a household account book. Either use existing solutions like apps, go the excel / sheets route (I did) or use pen&paper with a calculator to help you out.

Learn how budgeting works in the first place. This step is REALLY important! I recreated my household account book two more times because I was an idiot who ignored learning the bare basics on money and accounting. There’s a reason it’s a profession with proper wordings and not some obsure hobby. Use youtube tutorials for that, as you will need several examples to understand budgeting in general.

Once you’ve got that down, measure your income and expenses over a year. Estimate your last year by category and type of expense, write reoccuring yearly and monthly expenses down. Create a saving expense to build up a budget buffer. You WILL need a buffer for all the variations you inevitably will encounter throughout a year. Once you understand how much you spent monthly to stay alive, calculate how much you can spent freely (pocket money). Ideally, put that pocket money on a separate account with a separate card as access to it and “pay yourself” that pocket money. Your main account should be the houshold expenses account with strict rules on spendings. It’s also where all your income enters to finance it.

If you’Ve reached this point, you will need to let it run for a couple of months to work out a lot of kinks in it. Food budget, mobility budgets, health budgets, etc. all need to be tuned to fit your needs. Whatever’s left goes to saving or pocket money. That’s up to you. Set yourself a minimal safety savings point that will keep you alive for half or a full year without (relevant) income. That’s enough buffer for most expenses you will encounter.

So after all of this you should have a good understanding how much you spend on what. That’s when you dive deeper and look into each spending category, including food and rent (often the two major expenses). Cutting out or replacing certain type of foods or drinks with cheaper alternatives have huge impacts on your available money.

The rest should slowly become obvious if you’ve educated yourself enough to reach this point. It’s all about learning and understanding, really.

Frugal challenges, forcing myself to use my bicycle instead of my car where possible, declutter my belongings (why do I even have all this crap I never touched for the last year?!) and trying out weird things in general at least once (like throwing things at the wall and see what sticks).

Can confirm. That’s also why most appliances are surprisingly repairable today. You can just buy used appliances that aren’t working as long as it’s something minor like leaking or squeaking of a washer, no heating of a dryer, rumbling like crazy, etc. Inside you usually find many parts from Whirlpool and a few other components like Bosch Motors (which often enough do not actually fail). Those parts have numbers you can find for cheap online. Just get a proper(!) bitset with some generic tools and go watch Youtube repair videos. It’s too easy these days.

Heck I even bought a completely dead machine where the description clearly matched a note online that a resistor and a single easy-to-solder chip for 2$ total need to be replaced. That repair worked for 5 years until I sold it for a better machine.

This. Go ahead and tell everyone that you are worried about your mother and would like to see her anytime and check on her for your own peace of mind. Post a clear, preferably large, sign up front that there’s an active camera in the room. But do not insist on it. That’ll tell you all you need to know about the staff very quickly.

For the camera, use a regular old wifi-enabled baby monitor (App-controlled for best results) and connect it to a mobile Internet router. These routers have internal logs - learn how to access them, then check them (remotely, after setting up security in them) at intervals for suspicious reboot events.

Can confirm. Watching 50 Shades of Greek told me way too many aspects of the Greek mythology. The Intro alone sums it up perfectly.

If you carry a sharp screwdriver or stable hard knife around to puncture the battery rapidly, you may have something sort of resembling explosives, just very, VERY inefficient and unpredictably to set off. You’d be a lot better off using that screwdriver or knife instead to do whatever you’d wanna do with an exploding phone.

Not sure if trolling. Was talking about this specific kind of spam being visible there.

Eh. “The Internet is getting worse!” sounds alot like “New cars suck!”, “Politicans keep lying!” and “Everything was better back then!” - some sayings like “The young behave awful!” go back to long before the beginnings of civilisation (probably).

So I wouldn’t worry much. Once humans lose interest in something, they move on and the old huts, devices and whatnot slowly erode away. Guess why we are now talking on a federated network - because those big companies started rotting away and the smell slowly starts driving people away.

Just my opinion though. It’s still fun to see things crumble.

Perspective: My SO didn’t really care at first why I didn’t want to use the built-in TV speakers, but rather install some higher-end speakers and a DAC to drive them. After a while, she went to visit a friend and came back to celebrate our setup.

Value: Do you need a super-big, expensive TV or a smaller, higher PPI TV that you can sit closer to? What you really want is clarity, brightness, color, and smooth video. If people could never afford such a display and only had crappy TVs with bad video sources and only some smartphones as an alternative, the smartphone beats everything they know, of course. But if they could never afford high quality video sources and displays, how could they appreciate those things?

IMHO better than average is enough for everyday life. There’s more to life than spending money and not experiencing life to the fullest. That means I focused on a nicer Bluetooth headset, some better than average speakers for both TV and PC, … so I simply approach the point of diminishing returns on the quality scale, knowing full well I could do much better. But it’s not worth the effort to me if it slowly turns into either a game of high spending or a full-blown refurbishing hobby. Same with my car: I buy them used at about 4~6 years old and sell them at 8~10 years old, spending the least amount of money while driving mostly luxury cars with lots and lots of extras.

You craft and finish a plan before you walk up the mountain and then stop thinking about the mountain. You don’t look up the mountain, just at your steps and the way right before you. The mountain wants you to worry, but if you worry, you loose. So don’t look up the mountain and just walk, step by step.

Know that worrying about things like this is like trying to solve an algebra equasion by chewing bubble gum.

Leatherman with matching bitset. Bought it on a whim 10 years ago and I use it constantly for lots of things. It wasn’t my cheapest purchase, but damn has it gotten me out of a lot of difficult project situations where no proper toolbox was available. I’ve literally filled and repaired entire server racks with this thing.

That was the worst part. You have this super-optimized build that you somehow managed to make work with an ungodly amount of personal time, effort, blood and tears. It will only work so long as the hardware survives and on this machine only, nowhere else. Any update can knock your build down, making you work on debugging anywhere from a few minutes to full-on weeks.

So you have a system that works at best as well as any other system which you could get flying within an hour with only a few clicks in the installer.

That’s it. That’s what you’ve worked for and need to continue working for.

I did Gentoo Stage 1 (which was very similiar to what you plan to do) in 2005 with a shitty laptop. 24 hours until I had a working shell compiled. A whole week until I had a graphical desktop working properly. Stupid me didn’t have enough and did it again in 2013 with better hardware within just 36 hours to the desktop.

If you seek a challenge that leaves you with angelic patience once you’ve overcome the never ending rages you’ll encounter to push through to the end against all odds, lots of errors, bad documentation, dependencies from hell AND keeping it running, which will inevitably raise your patience muscles strength again and again, then yes, do it. Just accept that at some point, something will break inside you.

There is this IMHO very interesting solution from India that uses edible cutlery products. It’s basically a form of hard baked bread in the shape of knives, forks, spoons, plates, bowls, … . They keep hot and liquid food very well for quite some time, and the forks, knives and spoons remain solid enough to eat perfectly well with. Eventually, they will disintegrate on their own within a few weeks or so if you don’t eat them first. All this without the need to cover the surfaces with anything at all, and also made so cheaply that they come very close to most current disposable solutions.

Ukraine alone won’t be the cause for a dystopian scenario with Russia as the world government, but I don’t like where it would be going if Ukraine fell. Russia surely wouldn’t stop afterwards. I’d rather see a world where trade connects people than a world where governments forcefully connect people via ideologies. The latter never worked out for anyone.