If you did get a seriously large lump of cash… after a settling in period a lot of changes will happen, and you will be happy they did (IMHO).

The reason is that one of the biggest gifts that wealth gives you is TIME. A lot of the day to day crap that the rest of us need to deal with just evaporates. No need to shop (there are people for that). Want to travel… people will organise everything. There will be no waiting in lines at airports, at restaurants, at government offices… there are people for that. Someone to clean, someone to pick up the kids (unless you want to of course), someone to cook, holidays on a fuck-off huge yacht with crew to manage everything, or just to zip to Paris for the weekend.

You will probably really appreciate not having to deal with most of that crap. Also, while you probably don’t want a stupid large house, you do want privacy and so will want to get a house on 1000 acres in a gorgeous landscape (plus perhaps apartments in various cities that you like).

Imagine moving from a food insecure lifestyle to a secure lifestyle where food, safety, housing is always there. Would you want to keep your old food-insecure lifestyle? No. Same with going from a food secure lifestyle to a time-and-resource abundant lifestyle.

I always plug in. I don’t know if it works with calibre server.

My unmodified kobo syncs with calibre.

I wish you both the best.

Damn… I feel for you. It sounds like you are in a tough spot. There’s lots of good advice on this page, and the one thing I will add is to protect and keep working on your relationship. Money is the core component of many (or was it most?) relationship problems.

You can get through it, but (IMHO) you need your wife right there with you (or at least, I did). We were doing ok until I tried to start a business and dropped my 9-5 job. Revenue was slim, and then at one point I earned nothing for 6 months. We were on the bones of our arse - living off a meagre kindergarten teacher’s wage paying rent and food. Without my wife, we would have drowned. She did amazing things in budgeting down to the last penny, no luxuries, riding everywhere, spending time together. It was hard and there was no end in sight for a long time. We were very lucky and things turned around. But I would have not managed it without her (and her incredible budgets).

It sound like you have been deep in it for longer than we were, and I wish you all the best in working your way out.

I have one, and they are great. But wasn’t there just a scandal about a recent firmware update that applied DRM to ink?

While there is a slow, but steady, stream of interesting topics, the number of responses is typically in the 10s (at most) rather than hundreds or thousands. Often its just 0. And the quality of the responses is still lacking mostly, although some of the tech channels I follow usually have one or two people with good knowledge.

Plus… waaaay too many old memes. (Yeah… I know I can block them, but I do like living dangerously and browsing all sometimes to look for interesting channels)

You probably did the right thing for headphones.

I’ve been looking for real data on the effectiveness of Sony’s MX5 vs Max vs others - specifically I want to see how well they do passive and ANC across the frequencies we are exposed to. And Verge have come through with this video: https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/31/23852241/we-took-six-pairs-of-headphones-and-a-dummy-head-on-the-subway

Its a good video, but its also got real data from some experts. If you are TLDW - then skip to the end for a table from the experts.

The Sony MX5 are head and shoulders above the rest (with the max second in most categories).

I know it was a sorta joke… but I had to find out if it was true.

This link: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/AirPods+Max+Teardown/139369 provides an awesome breakdown on the contents and lots of X-rays.

It turns out the answer is no, although both batteries are in the right ear cup, and ifixit never do figure if there is a counterweight in the other ear. There’s just a gap.

And yeah… adding that weight was a crappy move and very un-apple IMHO. Their products should stand on their own and not require gimmicks like that. Having said that, this is Beats. Analysis showed that their products cost as little as $18 to make (including parts and assembly) - talk about cheap overpriced crap. The other few hundred dollars per set is marketing, distribution and profit. Shows what celebrity endorsements can get you.

And heavy. The Max’s are quite a bit heavier than competitors.

My 5 year old brother color laser is awesome. Cheap to run and toner doesn’t dry out, and it doesn’t wake up in the middle of the night and clean (i.e. use up) the ink.

However having seem comments like this, I think I will hold off on any firmware updates.

While technically that is true, if you have any other users they will be annoyed. And anyone running iOS will almost immediately get regular popups about the mail server being down (because iOS checks for new mail frequently - and yes I know this can be adjusted) and so they will be telling you straight away.

Also - I’m not convinced that all email servers obey the SMTP standard.

I forgot to mention - spam isn’t too bad with a well trained SpamAssassin.

Plus you will need to learn your virtualisation tool really well because of all the networking routes required and operating it on the command line. VBoxManage is your friend, but its just not friendly.

From a security perspective - I did everything in Linux, and only opened the required ports (plus ssh, which I moved to a random high port number). I have auto-update on for security patches, but NOT for regular patches (because Zimbra tends break things, so you need to snapshot first).

I’ve been running my own mail server for about 15 years now… Let me offer some insights.

• Its used by me and the family, so I do have other users who expect things to work.
• I used commodity hardware, with a Linux host (and guest).
• the mail server runs in a VM, so it is trivial to: stop, copying the VM to USB, restart.
• Maintaining uptime isn’t too bad, but when the mail server goes down, you need to get onto it quickly. I’ve had power supplies fail, HDD’s fail, memory fail.
• If you should happen to be out of town when a failure occurs (I’ve had this twice), then the server stays dead until you are back. That does not make your users happy. If its more than 4 days, then the SMTP standard says email is lost.
• There have also been a few software issues with Zimbra (my current tool) - the stats daemon filled the disk, the upgrader broke permissions all over the place multiple times. Each of these requires time to investigate, research online etc. Snapshotting is awesome! Right now I have a problem where the VM disk file is growing, but the space used inside the VM is not. I have zero’d out free space and compacted the VM but don’t know why it is happening yet. More research needed.
• You will learn to hate blocklists. There are many, and there are meta blocklists. You have to watch them because at any time, you will be added and your email will silently get dropped. Sometimes the blocklist trashes whole subnets because of a single actor, sometimes even more, and so you will get included due to other bad actors. Getting off a blocklist is hard… you send emails, you fill in web forms, you look for a contact details, you wait… Then some number of days/weeks later, you are off again.
• You have to learn DKIM, SPF, DMARK, managing DNS etc.
• I used to use self-signed certs and live with the warnings. Now I used Lets Encrypt, which is awesome!.
• You can try to get reverse DNS working, but that’s up to your ISP (who usually don’t care, so good luck). No rDNS can be viewed as bad by email recipients so your spam score starts at >0.
• If you run it at home, you will be part of a block of IPs that are known to be home users, so your spam score starts at >0.
• I’m lucky in that I run it on a spare public IP address on my server housed at work. But that will need to change soon.

I started using native Linux mailboxes, later added roundcube (web UI), investigated Mailinabox, but now use zimbra. That gives me calendar/contact sharing, email/calendar/contacts to iOS devices (which is the main way my family get email), and lots more. Moving data from one to the other took a couple of days of effort. (Yeah… I know its supposed to be trivial, but its not when you include tool research, testing, execution one at a time etc).

Bottom line - you will learn lots, you will lose many weekends and sometimes a weekday here or there as you try to handle emergencies, it will never be set-and-forget.

My original rational was learning, privacy and my own domain and nicer looking email addresses than john1234@gmail.com. I’m looking for an online alternative as its time to lighten the load, but I have a lot of services that we use in Zimbra.

Good luck with it!

The thing to remember with these examples is that those companies would have royally fucked up their purchases. Big companies always impose a culture and a mindset.

AT&T would definately have crushed the internet with a monopoly - we would have had to use AT&T approved internet devices, and they would have brought long distance type charges to it. Oh so your email is going overseas? That’s an extra 10c.

Same with Google and Netflix. They were all able to continue with the founders vision and create something special.

Its getting there, and there is some entertaining content on here (comments and posts). But I think we are still missing the super high end responses. No matter what the topic, one or two people would jump on and have deep specialised knowledge of the field - be it naming an insect from a blurry image or commenting on a geopolitical situation. I still see lots of posts that generate nothing more than “huh” or “wow” type comments.

When that starts appearing more broadly, I think the quality here is going to take another leap.

Closed. Otherwise dog sneaks in, climbs up on the bed and falls asleep. The he slowly but surely takes over the whole bed.