and MATLAB, Visual Basic (with Option Base 1), and SQL.

A lot of languages have a .last() or negative indexer ([-1]) to get the last item though.

It’s how I got into programming, so I’ll always have a soft spot for it. Now it’s over 20 years later and I’m still coding.

Visual Basic used to let you choose if you wanted to start arrays at 0 or 1. It was an app-wide setting, so that was fun.

Somehow, millennials ended up being the only generation that at least kind of knows how to use computers.

a dialog came up, and faster then i could catch what it was, they closed it

My wife does this and then asks me to fix whatever is broken. I’d be able to help if I was able to read the error!

You don’t need Docker. The agent is a single executable file so you could just manually copy it to /usr/local/bin if you wanted to.

Why not?

This is a great video about the launch of Windows 95, that covers the history of DOS at the beginning: https://youtu.be/0Ol8ZSE-PEk. Worth watching if you’re interested in the history.

Get a macro pad and configure one button to type a forward slash.

How do you type URLs using that keyboard layout?

No I’m trying to use it with my work phone. I can’t connect my personal phone to the work wifi since it needs a certificate (802.1x) but there’s a separate guest network I can use if needed. Guest network is entirely isolated - different hardware, different backhaul, different IP range.

I love KDE Connect but I can’t figure out how to get it to work at work. Probably some firewall thing. It works fine at home, but can’t find my phone at work.

Why not Matrix via Conduit?

100% agree. Note that some cheap VPS providers are single-homed (only have one internet connection) with a budget provider like Cogent, but the good ones are usually multihomed.

Hetzner are great. One of the providers I use (HostHatch) is trying to have pricing similar to Hetzner, but in a larger number of locations. Their sale pricing during Black Friday is even better though.

I agree with you :)

Even on the same network, I like having a Zigbee coordinator with an Ethernet port. I put it in a more central location in my house, which helped improve the network quality.

As others have mentioned, VPSes (and rented dedicated servers) count as self-hosted. In many situations, a VPS can make more sense than a home server:

• Better internet connection - a lot of hosts have 40Gbps connections now, and it’s a data center grade connection with a lower contention ratio.
• Cheaper upfront - no initial purchase cost.
• Depending on electricity prices, it can be cheaper over the long run too, especially with a $20-40/year one (see LowEndTalk, GreenCloudVPS Budget KVM, RackNerd specials, etc). That’s the case for me in California - just the electricity for my home server costs more than some of my VPSes.
• Usually better hardware than you’d have at home - often AMD EPYC or modern Xeons (not a 10 year old E3 or E5), enterprise NVMe SSDs, etc.

AWS is very expensive compared to regular VPS services, and you only really get a benefit from it if you use a lot of different AWS services in a multiple regions. One EC2 instance in one region doesn’t really have advantages over a regular VPS.

If you do want to use AWS, consider using Lightsail. It’s like a regular VPS and has a fixed monthly price for some amount of disk space, CPU, and monthly transfer, father than being dynamically priced.

my Home Assistant server with z-wave, which needs to be physically nearby my other stuff

Not sure about Z-wave, but with Zigbee it’s possible to get coordinators with Ethernet ports (and this is generally recommended over USB ones due to the added flexibility), so your Home Assistant server doesn’t actually have to be near your Zigbee network, just the coordinator does.

You can do quite a bit with 4GB RAM. A lot of people use VPSes with 4GB (or less) RAM for web hosting, small database servers, backups, etc. Big providers like DigitalOcean tend to have 1GB RAM in their lowest plans.

Just keep an eye on the power usage, depending on how expensive electricity is in your area. I live in California which has very expensive electricity, and buying newer, more power efficient hardware works out cheaper than 10+ year old Xeons over the long run, even if you get the Xeon system for free.