I, Steve Wozniak, did not participate in the theft of the BASIC. It was funny to me to see others enjoying doing this. I had never used BASIC myself, at that time, only the more-scientific languages like Fortran, Algol, and PL-1, and several assembly languages. I sniffed the air and sensed that you needed BASIC to sell computers into homes, because of the book 101 Games in BASIC. I loved games and saw games as the key. It was the [MS] BASIC that inspired me to write a BASIC interpreter for my 6502 processor, in order to have a more useful computer.

It's hard to find people with Tim Berners-Lee's integrity. We should 'own' our own lives. It's a lot deeper than just being watched.

Telescreen monitoring would have required a crazy amount of manpower.

Probably the closest real-world analog was the East German Stasi, which may have accounted for nearly 1 in 6:

The ratio for the Stasi was one secret policeman per 166 East Germans. When the regular informers are added, these ratios become much higher: In the Stasi's case, there would have been at least one spy watching every 66 citizens! When one adds in the estimated numbers of part-time snoops, the result is nothing short of monstrous: one informer per 6.5 citizens. It would not have been unreasonable to assume that at least one Stasi informer was present in any party of ten or twelve dinner guests. Like a giant octopus, the Stasi's tentacles probed every aspect of life.

— John O. Koehler, German-born American journalist, quoted from Wikipedia

In the USA is it common to have self service tills at supermarkets that accept coins?

If it accepts cash, it should accept both coins and bills. Any change I manage to accumulate usually gets fed into the coin slot at a self-checkout before I swipe a card to provide the rest of the payment. It's better than handing it off to a Coinstar machine, as those skim off a percentage of what you feed them.

The Las Vegas Fry's is still vacant, too. Best Buy has this market to itself.

I like being able to pull all my mail to my main machine, filter it into folders and have it, backups too.

I do all of that on my mail server. It's then accessible over IMAP, or I can fire up Roundcube in a browser. The filters are also managed through Roundcube. The VPS it runs on costs me maybe $12 per month, and that's not even the cheapest option out there.

Embrace the power of "and."

For 20 years, plus or minus, personal computers reversed that idea.

I gave all my Apple wealth away because wealth and power are not what I live for. I have a lot of fun and happiness. I funded a lot of important museums and arts groups in San Jose, the city of my birth, and they named a street after me for being good. I now speak publicly and have risen to the top. I have no idea how much I have but after speaking for 20 years it might be $10M plus a couple of homes. I never look for any type of tax dodge. I earn money from my labor and pay something like 55% combined tax on it. I am the happiest person ever. Life to me was never about accomplishment, but about Happiness, which is Smiles minus Frowns. I developed these philosophies when I was 18-20 years old and I never sold out.

What self hosted solutions have you been looking at?

I've used TTRSS ever since Google Reader went away, however long ago that was. Works like a champ, and there are one or two Android clients that talk to it.

I don't think it directly supports remote streaming

It does, but you'll need to route the incoming traffic through manually. For me, that involves having the router forward traffic on port 443 to the server and configuring a reverse proxy on the server to hand off traffic addressed to jellyfin.$HOME_DOMAIN to the Jellyfin daemon. In my case, Jellyfin is one service among many on a Docker host, with Caddy directing incoming traffic to wherever it needs to go.

It's not automated like Plex, but I've streamed movies and TV shows from across the country without any problems.

I recently switched my service plan (with Cox in Las Vegas) from 500 Mbps with a 1.2-TB (IIRC) monthly limit to 250 Mbps with no limit. After a couple of months of overages that basically doubled my bill, it'll be nice to have predictable billing no matter how much we end up using. 250 Mbps has been fast enough so far.

Plex is available on many more devices. Jellyfin has PC, iOS, Android, AppleTV, AndroidTV, Roku, and LG TVs. But Plex also has PlayStation and Xbox, Samsung TVs, Vizio TVs, and many other smaller streaming boxes.

I used to run Plex. I even paid for a lifetime subscription years ago. I now run Jellyfin; it's been less of a hassle to keep it running and it puts less load on my server. I shut off my Plex container last month after switching my parents' Rokus over to Jellyfin. At home, I switched to Chromecasts (the newer ones that run Android TV) after having run OpenELEC on Raspberry Pi 3s for a while.

Plex also has better remote access support. Just enable it and setup a port forward/firewall rule. Jellyfin? Have fun configuring a VPN on each client to access it.

My Jellyfin instance shares a box with a bunch of other services. Caddy routes traffic on port 443 wherever it needs to go: to Jellyfin, to one of the *arrs, to Nextcloud, GitLab, etc. One rule at the router passes inbound port 443 off to Caddy. No VPN is necessary.

By comparison, there were more than a few instances where Plex's "it just works" networking configuration didn't just work.

I think Southwest has a free checked bag and charges for carry on.

They don't charge for a carry-on or up to two checked bags.

Known VPN services have identifiable server addresses that can be blocked. Instead, you can set up a cheap raspberry pi (or other) at your home and use an encrypted SSH connection to that [raspberry pi] from far away. Then turn on your SOCKS proxy (part of WiFi Details on Macintosh) and check to see that your IP address shows to the world you access as that of your raspberry pi. I do this all the time, including right now. It also helps to watch sports events.