I run PiHole on mine

I think what you’re doing is fine, in fact, it’s one of the Microsoft recommended methods of doing it.

Site is dead

I use ecobee and block it from the Internet. Works great with Home Assistant via Homekit.

You’re comparing apples and oranges, reverse proxy and VPN serve two different purposes.

None of my mine come as PDF attachments, it’s always “click here to see your statement” which goes through the login process to the company’s portal. I get it, they think they’re doing it for security. But email is no less secure than paper mail and they send paper statements in regular mail, so why not email?

Yeah, but you have to log in to the company’s portal and click through their menus to get the PDFs. I wish eBill/eStatements would mean sending them over email, that would be easy to set up an automated way to grab them and file them.

Sending me an email notice that eBill is available is NOT useful at all, it’s only a little more convenient than paper bills

legitimate (non spam) bulk email

I don’t think there’s such a thing, all bulk emails is spam to me as a user.

Any guides/resources on how to get started on that? I have backups and could probably get my stuff up and running after some tinkering but I love the idea of some script I can just run on a fresh environment that would bring all my containers up and restore all the data.

I stay away from anything not selfhosted. Any third party, no matter how good and friendly it seems now, will eventually screw you once they get big.

Besides, even if it doesn’t, I don’t want them to have access to my data.

Us, selfhosters - sure.

Average person who value convenience over privacy/cost - no. They’ll continue to pay and be in prisoned by the cloud.

So, I used Homebox for a few days now. I like the simplicity of it and I like the direction they’re going. However, there are quite a few bugs and data loss issues, it’s not ready for production yet. The thing is, these issues should be so easy to fix (it’s a simple CRUD app) that it makes me doubt the dev skills and possibility of other issues I haven’t discovered yet.

• The purchase date just increments or decrements by one day after editing an item
• When editing an item the notes/description fields show the data from the previously edited item, causing you to overwrite data

These two issues alone made me go back to my spreadsheet for now (good thing I kept a backup). I simply don’t trust the app to keep my data intact.

Not only do I prefer separate db for each stack, ideally the db and app are in the same container. Fewer containers to manage and makes the app nice and self-contained.

HA is geared towards selfhosted, locally controlled stuff (zwave, ZigBee, mqqt, local WiFi, etc). Because the cloud and privacy invasion is the mainstream, HA may require a bit more tweaking and technical knowledge to get up and running.

With that said, once you get it to how you want it, it’s been working rock solid for me for a few years now. I’ve built my house around HA automations and can’t imagine living without it.

The number of short IPv6 addresses is smaller than the number of IPv4 addresses, so that’s defeating the entire purpose of IPv6. Sooner or later you have to start using the long addresses.

And can be identified/tracked individually by outside entities. In IPv4, a website sees both my device and my kid’s device as the same IP. In IPv6 they’re different so this just provides more ways for them to track you.

I don’t need a social network in a village, I’ll just step out of my house and yell.

I never buy any appliances with WiFi or any IoT shit, I draw a hard line there. That shit is cancer.

Touche. Not dictating anything, just pointing out the obvious that when you sign up at an instance, the admin still has full control.

Which is why we shouldn’t get instances grow too large as then we have the same issue as any centralized platform.

It would be great if that was the way it worked, unfortunately right now it’s granular to the instance level, not user level. Not sure it’s even possible to get it down to user level unless every user runs their own instance which is unlikely to ever happen. The data has to live somewhere, so we need instances or instance -equivalent to host the data. Maybe if they get it down to where hosting your own instance is super easy one-click ordeal. Then each user would be truly in control.