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Comment by yosito | Hacker News Reader

> My wife complains that none of the devices in our house work, and she’s right

This hasn't been my experience at all. I find my devices often work much better than my peers' devices. Just yesterday, I blew someone's mind by being able to unzip a password protected zip and open a password protected pdf with my phone. They had been sending people documents like this for years and never saw anyone open it with their phone. Open source software is often more powerful than the mainstream alternatives, and the algorithms are easier to control, rather than be controlled by. Yes, it takes a bit of knowhow and work to configure things and get them running smoothly. But even the discipline itself has benefits. My guiding principle in all this is "Program or be programmed".

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This encapsulates something the article misses: those with technical know-how can typically still thrive with others while living a tech-ascetic lifestyle, but the facade is broken as soon as non-technical friends and family come into the picture.

My most-used means of file transfer is "e-mailed zip file", and generally this works well - until, of course, someone can't open a zip file on their phone. Which I'd assume is most phone users. The phone doesn't need an unzip utility, because a phone user expects a link to some cloud service (Google Photos, etc.) to achieve the same thing. The content doesn't live on the device; it's just a dumb terminal.

Taken to its extreme, I recently had to downmix several HD videos taken on a phone onto a DVD, and _physically mail it overseas_, because even the cloud option wasn't open to the user.

The article discusses this exact point:

> The thing that has always bothered me about this, and which continues to bother me, is that I’m only able to live this lifestyle because I have the technical know-how. The average person would neither know how to do any of the things I’m doing (installing a custom Android ROM, setting up Nextcloud, etc.), nor would they probably want to, given that it’s a lot of extra hassle for a sub-par experience.

I'm deep into "I know how to do this stuff, or could work it out, but I really cannot be bothered and will put up with the mostly-adequate experience so long as someone else manages it".

I used to run my own mail server. Heck, I used to lease out shell accounts and run email for other people. But gmail is just better at dealing with spam, probably because they manage a huge fraction of all email.

I still have the 20-year old email address, ticking over, delivering mail into a shell account run by someone else. It's about 50% spam, 49% things I've not bothered to unsubscribe from, and 1% really important stuff from long-dormant sources that I'd forgotten about. And of course it's there if I need to go back for whatever reason.

Back in 90s, I was trying to send a game to a friend via dialup. After 3 hours of failed attempts I gave up and walked a floppy disk 2 miles to his house.

I put a fair bit of work into making the foss tech things in my house _just work_.

For instance, I run a tablet on my kitchen counter with the homeassistant interface. It displays photos when not in use.

My piHole setup (multiple of them for redundancy) can be paused from the homeassistant dashboard.

There's a different dashboard for access to Plex or other web UIs. Everything runs behind a reverse proxy with pretty URLs and authentication is from a single source usually.

The one bit of magic is the vpn for when you're out of the house. So it goes.

I'm curious how you implemented the VPN for when you're out of the house. I'd like to have an always on VPN, but too many sites I need to access block VPNs.

The VPN is partial - it only handles an IP range. I use a commercial vpn provider for full tunnel, and it works well for access (Mullvad).

> Just yesterday, I blew someone's mind by being able to unzip a password protected zip and open a password protected pdf with my phone.

Are you saying iOS and Android can’t do those things? Because they definitely can — the reason they never saw anyone do it is probably because most people wouldn’t bother trying.

> I blew someone's mind by being able to unzip a password protected zip and open a password protected pdf with my phone.

Yes but can you make a phone call? Have you ever tried to make a phone call on your cell phone and it did not work? I have, on multiple occasions. I cannot say the same thing for a land line.

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