Yeah, my education is in electrical engineering and industrial automation. I’ve grown up using computers and like to learn, but I’ve never had any formal education on the subject except for high school programming classes, an intro CS course using Scheme, and a Python 3 bootcamp on Udemy. Everything else that I know is just from hands-on experience and using a search engine.

For hosting services and managing my domain, only a basic understanding is necessary, so I don’t feel held back by it. I do wish that I could contribute to my favourite projects, though.

I mean… you could just ignore it.

I’ve had a job where the whole thing was removing dirt and nails from demolished barn boards. Genuinely zero skill involved, just a lot of time spent doing the same thing.

I guess you need eyes and hands? And the ability to show up. Those don’t feel much like skills though.

So a few podcast apps support a service called gPodder, which provides cross-device syncing of subscriptions and episode progress, but the gPodder servers are slow and often time out, rendering the service useless.

oPodSync is essentially a drop-in replacement for gPodder. My use case is that I listen to podcasts on both my desktop and my phone, and I want episodes to be seamlessly accessible on both devices without having to manually do anything.

It’s very resource-light, so if you have any interest in podcasts at all it’s another piece of cool tech that gives you more control over your data. I used to use Player.FM, which is still a cool app, but I was paying them $13/year for a small handful of premium features I didn’t really think were worth that much.

Yeah, no worries if they’re not all useful to you. I still do the actual updates manually, Diun just tells me when to do them so I don’t have to routinely check project pages or follow an RSS feed.

Ah, cool. Thanks for the additional info. I never kept up with Watchtower since Diun fit my needs. I’ll check out Degoog; I don’t mind several hundred line config files though, I usually go through all of the config/env settings prior to setting up a new service.

You could look into:

• SearXNG (aggregated search engine)
• Mealie (recipe collection & meal planning)
• CryptPad (replaces Google Drive)
• oPodSync (gPodder-compatible podcast syncing server)
• Sure or Actual (personal finance tracking)
• Diun or Watchtower (container update tracker; IIRC Watchtower auto-updates by default, Diun does not)

Thanks for posting, I gotta add the random facts to my Glance dashboard now.

I can give you an anecdote to answer your question, but it’s in the inverse: I recently moved from a 2-storey apartment in a sprawling city block 10 minutes from downtown to an 8-storey building near a farm in the same city.

The level of ambient summer heat that I deal with now is drastically lower in comparison (probably close to 3-5°C) because of the increase in airflow and that helps to reduce thermal loading and urban heat trapping, which result from the effects of convection and radiation on the buildings in the area.

For some background, thermal load is basically the amount of heat energy present in a given area or object and urban heat trapping is essentially when a high thermal load in an urban area has an overall warming effect.

I actually prefer XMPP. It’s also less of a hassle to set up than Matrix and the protocol is much more mature. There are still issues, but it’s rather functional for audio and video calls (if you’re using a supported client).

Edit: For clients, I use Cheogram on Android and Profanity (which is a TUI) or DinoX (for calls) on Linux.