Q The Misanthrope

I like to call it a significant career change.

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  • 19 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: November 18th, 2023

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  • As a child, the house we grew up in had a very large tree in our back yard. I had a memory of burying some skeleton keys near it but couldn’t remember where. The house was old enough that we’d find skeleton keys occasionally and also as a kid they are special.

    I searched for days, weeks, months… Digging holes all over the yard and under the tree. I recruited neighborhood kids and friends.

    For two summers we searched for buried treasure. Never found them. Might have been a dream I had of burying the keys. I still think about it occasionally and wonder. The tree is long gone and the truth is I’ll never know for sure.






  • I purchased a case, SilverStone Technology CS382 8-Bay. Around $200-225.

    Bought used parts off eBay:

    Asus P8Z77-M LGA 1155 DDR3 SDRAM Desktop Motherboard $75

    32GB DDR3 1333 $35

    LSI 6Gbps SAS HBA 9200-81 IT Mode P20 $35

    Nvidia Quadro P620 2GB GDDR5 4x mini DisplayPort $70

    I have six 12tb drives (seagate exos), purchased refurb from serverpartdeals.com and had great luck with them and their support. I found that on Reddit data hoarder sub.

    I run Truenas. 4 drives for primary. 2 drives for backup of the first 4. And I have a qnap 4 bay dumb raid box for a third backup with old drives I had. My paranoia but not related really to the nas.

    Anyway it’s possible and I enjoy what I built. Also that case is loud, get a fan controller too.


  • I had an Intel s2600 with dual Xeon and 120 gigs of RAM. It seems like such a good idea to run that as a home server. However, the amount of power that it used because it was older was way too much.

    I ended up hunting on eBay and found an old Asus motherboard, Intel chip, ram, and a pny Nvidia card.

    I bought refurb hard drives from serverpartdeals and a new case from Amazon.

    I recommend starting with a chassis you want and working backwards to help narrow your scope.

    I know you wanted smaller but heres what I bought. SilverStone Technology CS382… https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CKTYSZV9?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_share

    Also, I run truenas scale with a bunch of apps. Ssd z1 for os. Ssd z1 for transcode and caches. And then 4 drive set for main storage and another 4 drive set for backup of the first set.




  • I use Android, so Fedilab was the app I’m using.

    I didn’t want my feed to be an endless stream of news or other languages. So first I joined a smaller server, with a topic I care about.

    Then I followed a few journalists, and followed tags I care about like cycling, my hometown, tech news relevant to me, and TV shows.

    Lastly after I had that base of content… I went looking for people. When someone posts something I like, I check their other posts… do I like those too? If he’s then I look at who they follow. Big accounts usually don’t follow a lot of others. This is endless but really gave me a consistent group of people who I care what they think and say.

    Not easy but worth the time over the course of a week or two.

    Also I watched the #followfriday tag where people lost accounts they follow and why.

    Also, look at the top accounts lists that exist. Threads accounts have millions of followers so it’s a good bet it’ll be good.


  • I agree and started putting effort into Mastodon. It took a week or two of filtering and browsing to find users and content but I’ve definitely found a more engaging base of content to interact with that is nice.

    I was an engaged redditor who switched 100% to Lemmy and I do not feel quite satisfied with the comments and content.

    I’ll stick around, but I find myself on Mastodon and using Ground News more often.

    Btw I have comments in my history of how frustrated I was about finding content on Mastodon, but suddenly it clicked after I spent a bunch of time on it. Not a raving endorsement but ultimately I do enjoy it.

    Another side note, I was looking for some top users to follow and some have 10k followers, cool. Then I find some federated threads accounts with millions and realize how small we are in comparison. I know why, and I understand it, but it’s truth that small user bases have less ideas.





  • I’ve had good luck. Reliable and fast as any other service.

    I’m a 3rd year subscriber of the Unlimited plan, $158 for 2 years at a time. I utilize the drive, aliases, mail and VPN.

    No real complaints. I still use Google calendar because it integrated more with Android phone. I still consider going back to Gmail occasionally for simplicity. I really hate Gmail though but email is garbage. Does it really matter?

    I basically priced out good vpn’s, and the two year price of proton was pretty similar to most other quality VPN plans. So why not stick with it and get the rest of the ecosystem too.

    I don’t think about it too much, it’s email and it works.

    I do not care about secure email because I don’t communicate with anyone else using it, but I do like how it automatically blocks trackers and cleans email links for me.


  • I want to like mastodon but I don’t want to do the leg work of finding accounts. I like the algorithm to some extent, I want help to find things.

    I also have trouble deciding how to support the post. Liking doesn’t do anything and tooting or whatever puts it on my page. I don’t feel part of the community boosting topics I like.

    I like voting things up and down.

    Maybe I’m doing it wrong but I try and get instantly bored because I have to hunt for everything. I really tried.


  • Couldn’t forward emails until about a month ago.

    Their drive app backs up only the computer it’s on and other computers cant access that backup. It’s like a sectioned off part. Or I can upload files that any of my devices can access.

    Their calendar has some problems with compatibility of run into and it’s things that the person on either side can’t change. Not world ending but it’s really annoying.

    They literally just added the ability to automatically add holidays to the calendar. And of course I had set it up about a month prior so I manually entered everything.

    The proton drive app for your phone doesn’t automatically back up anything.

    I’m not shitting on proton because I’m an active proton unlimited subscriber and I use a bunch of their services, but I also recognize the flaws and how it’s not as seamless as Google yet, which I don’t expect it to be.

    I also wish they had some better Linux support in preaching to the choir with that.

    Love their vpn and the netshield features. Email works great and I love knowing I can read an email and automatically have trackers blocked. Aliases are great but I use their simple login site free with my proton subscription too. So my point is I like them lots, but it’s not a complete Google replacement yet.