It’s not really because it fell over. It’s because it wasn’t supposed to fall over. Consumable launch materials don’t contend with this because failure to return is a success. This is a failure. This must be learned from and fought against/prevented going forward.

If you’ve got a VPS at your disposal, many of the homepage softwares I’ve tried over the years have some amount of caching to make them quite fast or even operate offline(“Homer” for one required me to deeply purge my cache as it would still appear when my site was offline…despite having replaced it long ago! 😂). Or, if you wanted to roll your own static HTML page, you can absolutely add a Service Worker for your own offline caching.

That’s where I’m at now. I use a custom ServiceWorker static HTML for my homepage and tab page on all my devices. This page is a bouncer, checks if I’m at home or not(or if my local dashboard is offline) and either redirects me to the local homepage which has all my HomeLab services on it, or if it fails just tells me I might be abroad or offline and lists a few public websites.

And yes, this works offline or over a shitty connection. Essentially the service worker quickly provides the cached page from the browser storage, then tries to take the time to check the live version. If it gets one, it updates the cache, if not, enjoy the offline version.

Might be a bit over the top, but I set up a custom homepage startpage, and then grabbed the New Tab Override extension so that it opens on new tabs as well as being my homepage.

So if you can think of any websites that might do what you want like cardd or link tree, or are interested in making your own little webpage and hosting it somewhere free, that might work and as a bonus will be the same across all your browsers and devices. Could even load it up on someone else’s computer if you remember the link.

Now would be a good time to look for a .com you like, or one of the more common TLDs. And register it at Namecheap, Porkbun, or Cloudflare. (Cloudflare is cheapest but all-eggs-in-one-basket is a concern for some.)

Sadly, all the cheap or fun TLDs have a habit of being blocked wholesale, either because the cheap ones are overused by bad actors or because corporate IT just blacklists “abnormal” TLDs (or only whitelists the old ones?) because it’s “easy security”.

Notably, XYZ also does that 1.111B initiative, selling numbered domains for 99¢, further feeding the affordability for bad actors and justifying a flat out sinkhole of the entire TLD.

I got a three character XYZ to use as a personal link shortener. Half the people I used it with said it was blocked at school or work. My longer COM poses no issue.

Is there a list anywhere of this and other settings and features that could/should certainly be changed to better Firefox privacy?

Other than that I’m not sure I’m really going to jump ship. I think I’m getting too old for the “clunkiness” that comes with trying to use third party/self hosted alternatives to replace features that ultimately break the privacy angle, or to add them to barebones privacy focused browsers. Containers and profile/bookmark syncing, for example. But if there’s a list of switches I can flip to turn off the most egregious things, that would be good for today.

You would go for a Raspberry Pi when you need something it was invented for.

Putting a computer on your motorcycle or robot or solar powered RV. Super small space or low-low power availability things, or direct GPIO control.

A MiniMicro will run laps around a Pi for general compute, but you can’t run it off a cell phone battery pack. People only related Pis to general compute because of the push to sell them as affordable school computers, not because they were awesome at it, because they were cheap and just barely enough.

I agree cash is the right idea, for now, but can you say for sure cash payment will be possible forever, or even the next 50 years? Wouldn’t it be better to blunder around with new ideas while cash is still a good fallback? Not saying I like crypto, and the cost on resources and the environment sucks bad, but I can at least appreciate them trying something. Now we just need to come up with sustainable options…

I get that cash seems a pretty durable idea, and it’s lasted for hundreds of years, but it did so before the massive societal turn towards technology we’ve made in the last 30 years.

Between Lemmy and Reddit, I’m a long time lurker, rarely a poster, especially as toxic as Reddit was I just found what I was looking for and moved along. Don’t mind me, I’m just:

PassingThrough.

Absolutely. You can even throw the telephone in there. At the start it was a great way to reach Grandma across the country or the doctor across town. Now most of the traffic on it is robots and extortionists trying to fool Grammy into giving her money for some lie or another.

I don’t even answer my phone for numbers anymore…be on a short named contact list, leave a voicemail reminding me you are someone I should put on that list, or nothing doing. Sucks for anyone putting me down as an emergency contact though…

And I feel TV being 25% ads is being pretty conservative…oh, but streaming! Swap the ads and channels you don’t want for a higher per-channel price and no ads…oh, wait, now you get a higher price and the ads!

There’s a whole lot going towards ending the web as we know it.

Censorship, consolidation, AI, greed, to name a few.

Why, I couldn’t even get into the article before it faded into a paywall.

I get people want to be paid but splashing cash on every page is not the internet as I knew it.

Getting to this article from a social site(Lemmy) was also not how I knew it, that’s the consolidation part. After MySpace, in the era of Facebook pages it started. Less personal websites, less websites in general, just get everything from Facebook and Reddit.

And sure, AI is also going to water down content, with prompts written by cheap corporate lackeys that we will still have to pay subs for after a social site sends us there.

And then there’s also the censorship and laws coming out to restrict what’s available. First to protect the children while they are young, then more to “protect” them as they get older, and eventually they will know nothing but state approved media.

To quote the article,

It’s the End of the Web as We Know It.

And I’m old and bitter about it. It had good promise, but enshittification took hold as was inevitable.

I use Minio https://github.com/minio/minio, though there are others. As someone who never worked with s3 before but wanted to try it and use it with some apps that supported s3 as a storage target, it’s been working fine for me though I’m certainly not using it to its potential. Has web access and all.

Others might be:

https://github.com/seaweedfs/seaweedfs

https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/

That or they do prescription inserts, or just sell you the computer and you get other glasses that do, like Viture https://www.viture.com/