I’ve been planning out a proxmox server for when I eventually have money. (Shut up. It can happen. Shut up!) but I saw something today that got me thinking. Minisforums makes some pretty nice shit at a reasonable price. The entire minis market has actually become pretty great while I wasn’t looking.

I need proxmox hosting opnsense, frigate, jellyfin, homeassistant, BitTorrent, immich, sunshine, steam, and i2pd.

So there are obvious advantages to building my own shit with a trip to microcenter. But maybe these micro machines could actually handle this shit anymore. Opinions?

Marketing is supposed to increase demand for a product or service but it doesn’t always work that way. What do you use less or even stopped using because of the company’s marketing?

I'm trying to migrate off gmail and apple services and ended up getting a domain and going to proton and using simplelogin for making aliases. But now I'm looking at proton pass, which comes free with my plan and lets me create aliases and wondering why I did that.

Ideally, I want nobody to have my main email address. everything gets an alias and dumps into the main. if the main address is found out, I just kill it and get another and point all the aliases to that. if an alias gets spammy or sold off to obnoxious marketing boobs, I kill the alias and create a new one.

I got started with migrating a few things over today into the aliases I had on my domain with simplelogin. I started to wonder what would happen if I replied to any of these and unlike apple hide-my-mail, it looks like these expose my actual address, unless I go through the trouble of going to simplelogin and getting an reverse alias link through them, which is an annoying pain in the ass. looking to see if there was any integration like apple's icloud had, I find proton pass is included in my mail plus plan and lets me do what simplelogin already was doing, complete with my domain being in the alias address!

So my question is why did I set up two seperate services for this? can I reply to incoming emails from the aliases created in proton pass without them revealing my address?

I have needed to get away from google for a while and am finally getting off my ass to do it, but apple hide my email was so simple to use whereas proton seems to have these weird oversights.

It never made sense to me to put password managers in the cloud. Regards to what you intend it to do, you’re making it accessible to a wider audience than necessary. And yet, I’m using iCloud. It’s time for a change.

I’m thinking of just running a locally hosted password manager on my home server and letting my devices sync with it somehow when I’m at home. I have a VPN into my home network when I’m away that automatically triggers when I leave the house, so even that’s not that big an issue, but I’m really not familiar with what’s gonna cleanly integrate with all my stuff and be easy to use. All I know is I wanna kill the cloud functionality of my setup.

I already have a jellyfish server so I figured I would just throw this onto that. Any suggestions?

I got a new phone number last year. The last person who owned this number just left all her accounts tied to this number and one by one I've been reaching out to the places tied to it telling them they have the wrong number and to stop using this one. Simple enough.

But there is one company that refuses to stop using this number. Wynhdam hotels absolutely refuses to do anything about this. They keep sending me notifications and check in confirmations for her hotel visits. Using just the texts they send me, I know her full name, email address, home address, her reservations at the hotel, which hotel she's going to and what days. Using past conversations with the other hotels she's been to (called in to tell them to stop this months ago), I know she's been kicked out for making a scene in the lobby or something. Looking online, I see she has a criminal record, and a history of child custody losses, drug abuse, and is apparently an "experienced college girl" on an escort site.

In my most recent calls with wyndham, they told me that they can't change the number out. I will need to contact this charming person and have her do it. I am absolutely not getting involved in that mess in any capacity. I'm still telling her johns and dealers this is the wrong number.

Once I explained to the call center supervisor I was escalated to this has gone on long enough and I'm willing to let an attorney deal with it, they put me on hold and supposedly took my number off the account. But the next day, I get another notification. It seems she is providing her services again and it's still making that my problem. So I call and get routed to a promotional department that said they have no idea why they got this call, but I should probably just sue.

I tried calling the number listed on the confirmation texts but it goes to a dead end line that just asks for a remote access code and then hangs up, so I can't ask the hotel she is actually at flag her down and say "hey, you need to update your number."

I emailed their privacy department yesterday but the notifications are still coming in. I can't change my phone number at the moment as I'm dealing with some delicate matters that are tied to this number so I can't risk changing the number at this time.

How can I get wyndham to take this seriously? This is a dangerous amount of information I was able to get off a recurring text they know is going to the wrong place.

I'm considering finally jumping off gmail. I'm not going to host my own email since I just don't have the skill to secure that thing well enough myself. Any mail server I set up would become a botnest within hours. So that has me looking at third party stuff.

Proton has a mostly good reputation, though their CEO's twitter post a while back praising the Trump regime makes me question if I should trust them with anything. I don't know enough about the entire situation to know if its just internet drama or a real concern, but anything involving Trump is a huge red flag for me.

Tuta looks pretty nice but I've read there are concerns about it being in a country that's part of the 14 eyes collaboration, so it might not matter what the organization wants if the government of the region they are in says fuck off and do what we tell you.

On the lower end of concerns, I am in the Apple ecosystem. (boo hiss I know). I like the clean and simple built in apps like email and calendar and how the notifications all work across my watch, phone, mac and homepods. I like how safari can just jump in and throw an email alias at things for me. I like how all my stuff is managed. But I also know Apple could piss me off at any moment and make wild sweeping changes I might not like, so relying on them too much could screw me over someday. I dont know, right now I really like their setup but portability does seem to matter more ultimately so this switch does seem like a better idea in the long run, even if I'm giving up features I may enjoy.

What are your opinions on the privacy email and calendar services in 2025? Should I even both with a cloud based calendar in the first place?