I also made this switch a year ago, in part because I'm Australian and so is Fastmail. I miss some of the Proton bells and whistles, and my visionary plan had some great inclusions, but Fastmail is great. I just use the web app on my graphene phone and it works fine
That seems like the worst reason to use a product. If I had the funds for a non free mail host, I would choose one thats not going to be easy to target with a TCN or TAN.
Maybe so, but I just assume anything I write is being read by multiple different parties anyway. I use Signal too, but I don't trust that either. Face-to-face communication (inside my portable lead chamber) is the way to go
Mail just isn’t something that’s built in a way that it can be a private service. I think most people should choose a provider based on price and features.
Yes, it’s nice that if everyone you know uses proton then you can send end to end encrypted emails with zero friction. But I consider that more of a side feature rather than a reason to buy it.
Purely Mail is a nice provider in that regard. $10 a year!
I do like FastMail a lot, though.
Proton mostly makes sense if you’re going to use the entire suite, which helps spread the cost and make it a good value.
Pocket Casts was originally developed by a South Australian startup, Shifty Jelly. Sold to a consortium of public broadcasters which included NPR. Then there was a change of heart the the public broadcasters decided that they actually don't want to be in the game, so was divested in a firesale.
Automattic has picked up a few of these assets for peanuts, Tumblr and Pocket Casts are amongst them. All are assets which were once much more high flying, but still have a core of dedicated users/fans.
All I care about is my favourite podcast app, Pocket Casts, which Automattic bought in a dumpster fire a few years ago.
But even if I don't personally use WP, the fact that something like 25% of the web runs on software which this lunatic has this much control over, is problematic in itself.
A couple of years ago I got tired of dealing with OpenWRT and various Tomato based firmware or hunting down compatibility between ARM and MIPS based routers. I finally took the plunge and bought myself a mini pc with an Intel N100.
The thing has 4 cores (no SMT), a 6W TDP and boosts to 3.4 GHz and can support 16GB of ram. The mini pc I bought cost me $200, includes the processor as well 4x Intel 10Gbps Ethernet ports. At 6W, it needs no fan, and the whole chassis is metal and specifically designed to act as a heatsink, which means 0 noise and 0 moving parts.
I ran a power virus on it for a few hours to test the thermals, and on a warm day in Melbourne, after hours of having all 4 cores running full throttle, CPU temperature never exceeded 90 C and the chassis barely hit 55 C.
The best thing about it? Full upstream support for any Linux distro and FreeBSD. No more wondering if this particular Broadcom chipset needs a weird binary blob, no more being hostage to an OEM and having to run old forked kernels.
I installed OPNSense on it, VESA mounted it behind our TV, and it hasn’t been seen or heard since. Not only has it been the most reliable router I’ve ever had at home, it’s providing various other services such as DNS server, apt cache, WireGuard server and client etc for my homelab.
I’ve been waiting for ARM to get here since ARMv8 was announced in 2011, but it just hasn’t happened.
Personally have the same experience too. I am tired trying to find out if the xyzPi of the day boards can do Linux. Vendors should also try harder. There are so many boards that release with half baked implementations or proprietary blobs. x86 always just works. Devices are also almost always just pcie devices even for those mini PCs with lots of interfaces. Compare to something like bananapi R4 that I think have some oddities with a mux chip not available in vanilla linux…
It's also super easy to spec out your own devices in this regime on x86. There are mini itx boards with n100/n305 with pcie slots so you can add your own cards, and the n100 has a surprisingly number of available lanes for its small size.
There just seems to be no viable "just works" solution in the below 10 or 20W range apart from raspberry pi, and Intel n100/n305.
Instead of Raspi I've got a N100 uATX mainboard with N100 (120 EUR). Fortunately it does work with normal 32GB DIMM (55 EUR, those were the days!). But I'm still missing a pico-PSU, which can be powered directly from 220V (for reasonable costs).
