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."

and the boys were already ten and eleven years old when I entered their life

I hope you got a good relationship with them! My son can't even talk yet. So, right now, he's just this cute thing that runs around and causes trou^H^H^H^Hgood things to happen.

 

Well, some of that is for classes for people who can't see that default 3-pixel wide scrollbar on Windows 11 in high contrast dark mode. :-)

Fair. Just making fun of Windows 11.

Yeah, you're blessed to have one of each. Until they start conspiring against you, which you KNOW is going to happen.
ha!

Hopefully we'll raise them better than that. And let them see us honoring our parents.

You charge to "upgrade" to Windows 11? How evil are you? :P

For all my pro-life ramblings, we were granted only one child.

Precious. I feel bad you couldn't have more though. G-d has been very generous to us.

Keeping up with two toddlers after age 50 can't be easy.

And yet i wouldn't trade it for anything! Thank G-d, we have a lot of help. Especially, when some neighboring girls come by to take our son for a walk. G-d bless them all.

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.

If every person using an AI assistant becomes a mechanical turk for sending data back upstream to the AI provider as a means to bypass robots.txt that's what isn't cool. Local usage for the benefit of that user should be ok, but not the follow on effects.

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.

The Walmart nearest to me has been putting more and more products in locked cases. Not just laundry detergent (WTF?), but things like razors, most OTC meds, batteries, and liquor come to mind. I went to a larger store a bit further away for some things for the puppy I just got and found they'd even put dog collars and leashes in a locked case. Waiting for someone to come unlock the case (which often takes several minutes) is bad enough. On some occasions, they've even insisted on carrying the item to the checkout instead of just handing it over. For that kind of hassle, I'd just as soon fire off an Amazon order if I don't need it right now.

tl;dr: The way Walmart treats all its customers like would-be criminals isn't exactly endearing.

Bluesky looks set to replace Twitter

Bluesky is an echo chamber for shitlibs who can't cope. If you liked pre-Elon Twatter with its "trust and safety" commissars, you probably will love Bluesky.