Update: South Korea says it will send actual, meaningful numbers of troops into Pyongyang within thirty-one days, bringing a formal end to conflict on the Korean Peninsula.

/s but you know they’re thinking about it.

I’ve used TimeTrex in the past. For my needs “, it was overly complex.

This is one of those areas where I’d think long and hard about self hosting, if you’re doing more than tracking your own hours.

Lots of compliance risk here, and transferring some of that risk to the payroll company is part of what one pays for with those services.

In my case, I just needed to substantiate invoices for a couple of clients I contracted for, and I was strictly paying myself and once in a blue moon my wife.

I went into a smidge more detail over on my Mastodon last night, but my response is summed up as “WTAF? No! Freeware is an explicit license, as anyone from the BBS days will recall.”

I’m just now unravelling the last of the truly important bits of my life that are in their clutches, for that and other reasons.

Two phone numbers, a handful of documents I’ve shared over the years that probably don’t matter anyway, and a couple email addresses that I’ve been actively monitoring for months for anything important, and searches my password mgr for….

I should be free by 1 July at the outside, possibly a few days early if I don’t delay the actual deletion process. Feels fuckin great.

If your needs are fairly low on the processing side, you can snag a cloud VPS on LowEndBox for five or six dollars a month. Quality is highly variable ofc, but I’m reasonably my happy with mine.

No AWS, etc (though I don’t know offhand where the actual box lives), SSH access defaults to a key, and the rest (firewall, reverse proxy if you like, and all the other best practices) are but an apt-get away and a quick searxng to find and dissect working configs.

Incidentally, searxng is a good place to start- dead easy to get rolling,and a big step towards degoogling your life. Stand it up, throw a pretty standard config at nginx, and do a certbot —nginx -d search.mydomain.com - that all there is to it.

YMMV with more complex apps,but there is plenty of help to be had.

Oh…. Decide early on if anonymity is a goal,or you’re ok tying real life identity to your server if someone cares to look. Register domains and make public facing choices accordingly.

Either choice is acceptable if it’s the right one for you, but it’s hard to change once you pick a path.

I’m a big fan of not hosting on prem simply because it’s one more set of cables to trip over, etc. But for a latte a month in hosting costs, it’s worth it to me.

Yes I can. Deleted my last Google account yesterday. Got what I needed, and honestly once I liberated a couple phone numbers (too damn memorable to ever just give up), there wasn’t much left.

Been slowly migrating for awhile piece by piece, the timing just happened to work out well for the last piece, and the metaphoric peering in cabinets to make sure nothing got overlooked in the process.

I still have to deal with Win 11 for work, and having AI forced down my throat, but Google-free feels GOOD!

Visible is wholly owned by VZW, and runs a whole $30/mo inclusive of tax and such.

Best compromise I’ve found between network and not getting screwed or being surprised with outages.

That sounds like true freedom, and also like something I wish deeply that I had time and energy to make my daily driver - I’m a purist, but I’m also a pragmatist and i can feel the burnout already.

Respect for using it as a daily driver - even for a personal only machine, that’s a pretty high bar, especially long term.

American here - our FEC takes a very dim view of satirical and otherwise non-existent candidates who file the paperwork to run, which makes me curious... If the Count were to win, who would actually take the seat? Have we any idea who is behind the (highly effective) satire, and would they be able to seamlessly serve?

Just too easy to get over a barrel trying to DIY it, and the first time ya screw it up, you lose a ton of credibility with employees which also has a great deal of value.

Underrepresented at best, at worst it’s arguably too easy to forget that Alpine is more than just container images.

Not sure how to solve that problem, it’s my go to for rolling an image but wouldn’t normally make the shortlist for standalone machines. In a prod env, that’s basically Deb, RHEL derivatives, etc. In a personal env for me, Arch derivs tend to win out on non-critical services if only because I invariably learn something useful that I wouldn’t want to learn in prod.

Ante

Not anti.

Lunatics, through and through. Not even well educated lunatics. Just garden-variety crazies.

And people wonder why I don’t Facebook.

It does sound horrific, but mostly because it would be poorly executed by many devs.

Well, and the seeming trend towards install commands that look like curl $file.sh | sh

But if they’re not actively encouraging that, I see no issue with a well maintained install tool, created from well maintained toolsets that work on essentially any platform.

Presently, my Fediverse presence is mostly self-hosted by one definition or another. This Lemmy instance lives on my server, and my Masto is hosted by a company dedicated to exactly that because it's dirty cheap and one fewer thing for me to worry about.

Looking to add to the list.

Agree - I’m mid 40s with both deep and broad experience, US based so no picture or irrelevant biographical bits, and I still absolutely cringe at the idea of sending out 2-3 page resume/CV.

Could I reasonably fill that space with relevant and compelling information? Sure.

Do I think anyone would read it? Not a chance.

I support accounting professionals using one of perhaps four or five highly complex pieces of software that handles individual, corp, trust, and other misc tax forms

The churn rate is very low YoY, because it’s what they know. They have the freedom to move their data, and we will help them to the extent possible, but at most they’ll get a subset of client data and lose the ability to query agai t prior year datasets, etc.

They’re not locked in, but between 10/15 and, say, 2/15 is a damn short time to implement and learn a new piece of software with that level of complexity.

Interestingly, I’ve never seen a long-standing calculation bug in the program. The overwhelming majority of support is d/t user error or data entry error. From that standpoint, there is of course a financial incentive for it to work well - arithmetic errors would be unacceptable - but in terms of UI/UX, no one cares and if anything were improved folks would just whine about the change anyway - even if it made their life easier

Not a CPA/not your CPA, just a software guy who got lucky enough to be in the right time/place when I decided I didn’t have the energy for the startup world anymore.

I pay around 600 for myself and my wife, and that’s with my employer continuing to pick up a significant share of the cost of health insurance that I literally never see a deduction or bill for.

1,800 a year beats hell out of $7,200, a $5k deductible, 20% co ins, and $11k OOP max.

I’m forty-five minutes outside a medium sized pair of cities known for a decent state university, and glad to run into town for care as needed.

Landed in the hospital three months ago with something that got me a follow-up scheduled with neuro, in the practice associated with the hospital.

Three months to the day later, I’ve only just had the suggested test and the visit is still a month out…. With an NP. Not the MD who saw me in the hospital.

Honestly, at this point, I’m only keeping after that issue because I need their clearance to get surgery for my actual, pressing, immediate, and painful concern.

I’m mildly curious to see what happens in the next month or two, as I’m about to hit my OOP max. Never ran into that combo of scenarios before.

The one I’m thinking of has a couple months “bridge” program for uninsured/just started new job/etc, but very time limited and an even bigger hassle as they’ll only send out two weeks instead of a month supply with each shipment.

IIRC, if I had insurance and it explicitly excluded the drug, the card would cover it, but it’s been a couple years since I left that job so memory isn’t clear.

Central Illinois - basically everything within 50-75 miles of I-74 across the state. Doesn’t get bitter cold, not overrun with MAGA asshats (among the reasons we left another Midwest state), cost of living isn’t terrible, and easy access to Chicago, St Louis, and beyond.