Smh my head, people will see a guy thriving with his milk bottle caps and claim he’s a barbarian for only having one cloth peg. Let birds enjoy things.

What’s wrong with it?

Celtic Rock. Enter the Haggis is my favorite artist (and for other Canucks, they’re from Toronto). If you’re curious, try listening to one of their instrumentals.

Liquor in ceramic is either very fancy, or the absolute least fancy (see: backwoods hooch).

Water reacts with aluminum over time. The inside of aluminum cans have always been lined. Same with aluminum water bottles and cans. If your aluminum water bottle is old and makes water taste funny, get a new one–the lining is probably shot.

I’m thinking it’s a real fight that is also accomplishing those other things.

It depends on the way you like to learn.

If you like to play around with things and look things up as you need, go with a beginner-friendly distro (Mint, ElementaryOS, and Pop!OS are all good options). This gives a more immediate payoff (in that there are lots of fun things to experiment with right away), but you’ll learn things kinda piecemeal.

If you like to learn by reading first, then starting with the absolute minimum and gradually working your way up, something like Arch might be great for you. It’s a much slower process and has a much steeper learning curve, but if you have the discipline for it, you’ll come out with a really solid understanding of how things work.

Most people start with something simple, and venture into the more intimidating waters when they feel comfortable. If you’re not sure, try Mint and go from there. You can always wipe it and install Arch later (if you don’t have anything important on this laptop, you can try lots of different ones without worrying about migrating or losing anything).

Truly autonomous driving (on general purpose roads) is a lot further off than the hordes of venture capitalists want you to believe. Not sure which state is letting them loose, but I can’t imagine it’ll end well.

C’mon, don’t server shame. Some of us want to leave the basement once in a while.

Stream that shit from a Debian server running Jellyfin!

“You must be the worst web scraper I’ve ever heard of.”

“Ahh, but you have heard of me.”

I believe this is called a “stand up”. That is, you’re standing up your real work for an hour so a useless middle manager scrum master can feel like they’re contributing.

Yeah, the water levels in DKC1 are pretty slick as well (Charles Cornell talks about that one too).

The DKC series also had some amazing music (especially DKC2). Overall some of my favorite games from my childhood.

Even DK64 was okay for me, though it came out at probably the best time for me to enjoy it (I think I was 11 or 12 and had lots of time to burn).

Here’s a great musical analysis on Stickerbush Symphony, for anyone interested.

The brain does what it must to survive. We normalize things that are insane to keep us from going insane. It’s… weird.

Agreed. We have our own drama over immigrants, but I don’t see Canadians turning away asylum seekers any time soon. My wife and I have already offered “extended visitation” offers to our LGBTQ+ friends in the states.

Not even Donald.

The answer also depends on your level of experience and how much you want to learn doing this. You mentioned you haven’t done this before, but are you otherwise comfortable using computers and figuring things out? Are you familiar with Linux and/or the command line? In addition, are you hoping to tinker around and learn a lot from this, or are you more concerned with just setting it up so you can use it?

There are options for all levels of expertise and technical interest, but I recommend starting with any hardware you already have or can aquire for cheap/free (especially if you’re hoping to tinker and learn more). As another commenter suggested, finding an old desktop or laptop and putting a NAS operating system on it would be a great starting project. Then once you play around with it, you’ll know if/where you want to spend some cash on something better. If you don’t have old PCs laying around, check on whatever you use for local buy & sell listings, you can probably pick up something for pretty cheap.

If you’re mostly looking to play around and you don’t have any extra hardware, you can also try things out in a virtual machine (download VirtualBox), which will let you learn without any monetary investment.

I’m using my old desktop from 2010. There’s no such thing as a server that can “do it all”, but any computer from the last 10 years would probably be a fine place to start. The more you do, the more likely you’ll be to hit some sort of performance limit, and by that time you’ll know more about what you actually want.

In short, find old cheap/free hardware and start playing around.

This is one of the rare occasions I would recommend putting “diploma withheld” on your resume.