FriedrichN

That's pretty much what I mean. Implementing the authenticity measures is very easy, making sure the e-mails get delivered to peoples inboxes without getting marked as spam is hard.

I just wish these big parties would give you a more formal way to make clear you're not a spammer.

Self hosting is not that hard actually.

The problem lies with the big e-mail providers marking your e-mail as spam, even if you have everything configured right (MX, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, etc.) and you're not on any blacklists. They use their mysterious opaque algo to determine that your e-mail is spam and you have no idea what you could do to not get in peoples junk boxes.

Very cool! I will be playing with this.

The only thing that jumped out to me is a lack of a panic button that stops all sound.

You are right. However, it is my work and I do have an emotional connection to my work and my frustrations with certain technologies are very real.

They absolutely do. But I usually don't have to explain the config language and it's widely supported, that is an absolute upside of .ini files.

I'll use what I'll have to use, it's a tool like you said. But I don't have to love it. Configuration is a necessary evil and whatever I end up using, I'm never fully satisfied with the end result.

I'll just come out and say that I hate every single configuration language. All of them suck in their own unique way and every time a new one comes out it fixes some issues of the language it's supposed to supersede but never without introducing new problems. And eventually you're left thinking that you should've just used a .ini file.

I actually really like the fact that my Garmin Instinct is not really a smart watch, it makes connecting it to your phone optional. Mine has never connected to a phone because I don't like to run Google's spyware on my phone. Yet, I can use most of it's functions I care about (time & date, GPS, moon & sun, compass, steps, heart rate, temperature, sports-specific stuff) without giving up my soul to Big Tech.

That probably doesn't work either unless they work in an automated fashion. Did the chef put two or three dashes (official SI unit) of this or that on your meal? A a "dash" or "splash" or "spritz" of certain things can easily mean 100-200 kcal. And if you deal with things like meat, maybe the cut you get today is more or less lean than what you got last week.

I think tracking calories for a couple of weeks can be very enlightening for a lot of people, granted you don't have a personality type where this can get you into trouble. But for the long haul it's not really useful or even feasible, you're better off getting to know what sort of way of eating suits you best and how to correct if you're getting off course. Anyone can stick to a very strict regime for three months, but the trick is to stick to a proper diet you can enjoy for three decades and then three decades more.

I'll second the recommendation of fiction (I love the classics) and add a recommendation for reading philosophy and specifically the history of philosophy. Learning how our frame thinking evolved from the time of the Greeks to the middle ages to more modern times has been nothing short of illuminating for me personally. I don't think you need to read the original works or the really academic stuff (you can if you want to) but having a feel of how our thinking got to be is really useful.

This is actually what I do most of the time. I feel like that anecdote of RMS where he says he wgets web pages and e-mails them to himself.

This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who has paid attention to their cats' behaviour when another pet dies. I remember when one of our four cats didn't come home, there were definitely changes in how the remaining three behaved. Apparently the cat got hit by a car and was found by someone and dumped in one of those bins where they dump dead animals for rendering. We took her home and laid her on the lawn so the other cats could know that she was dead. Each of the cats came one by one, giving it a sniff and concluding that she was dead. One of them however stayed with her until we took her away to bury her, an incredibly endearing display. It took a while before they all started acting like they did before.

And with the subsequent deaths of all the remaining cats, as they are all sadly deceased, I saw similar things happen.

We should not anthropomorphise animals, but that doesn't mean they don't have complex feelings or thoughts. If we find that even bees can "play", it's not that weird if cats can "grieve".

I would have done that if the venue were closer to me, but it's just a little too far away for that. There might be tickets available just before the show, but I'm not willing to risk driving all the way there just to be disappointed and drive all the way back.

Recently I attempted to buy concert tickets from a well known ticket seller. It insisted I was a bot, even after disabling my uMatrix and uBlock Origin. There was no way to prove that I was not, not even a CAPTCHA. So I decided to simply not buy any tickets.

This is just one example. I get increasingly frustrated by how shit everything is and my way of dealing with it is to disengage. It is rather sad, but I was not put on this earth to wrangle apps, QR codes, verification codes, passwords, usernames, e-mails, TOTP codes, updates, activation codes, etc.