Samon

Not GP, but at my previous job we had something very similar. The form did offer options for a handful of variables (on-prem VMware vs EC2, vCPU, RAM, disk, OS/template, administrators, etc), but once submitted, the ticket went to the cloud/architecture team for review, who could adjust the inputted selections as well as configure things like networks, firewall rules, security groups, etc. Once approved, the automated workflow provisioned the server(s), firewall rules, security groups, etc and sent the details to the requestor.

Isn't this just the food equivalent of software whitelabeling?

Receiving is only half of the conversation though - eventually you end up in a situation where you need to reply from the same address.

Also, be prepared for the tech support questions, the "I never received an email from X that they swear they sent", the "My emails seem to take ages to come through", the "My emails are ending up in the recipients spam folder", etc...

ImprovMX

In the newspaper industry, the 'Customer' refers to the advertisers who pay for the ads, advertorials, sponsored content, etc that actually make the publication a viable business model.

The individual who buys and reads the newspapaper is referred to as the 'Consumer'.

One of my university professors advised "multiply your best-case-scenario estimate by Pi". It's still absolutely plucking numbers out of the air, but I've found it to be pretty reasonable over the last decade or so...

For me, owning my own email domain is far more about control than privacy. I currently use some MX and SMTP trickery to forward all of my email to Gmail, effectively using Gmail as my 'email client' - but because the domain is mine, I can change that without too much headache, unlike if I were just using an @gmail.com address.

Another very happy (paying) customer of ImprovMX here. I have a dozen or so domains for family and friends configured this way, using ImprovMX for both inbound MX and outbound SMTP (using Gmail as the 'front end' mailbox, but using the custom domain/addresses everywhere).

I too gave up self hosting this all a few years ago - especially when hosting domains for others (family) who aren't tech savvy, I got sick of having to troubleshoot why their emails weren't being delivered. Outsourcing the delivery component to ImprovMX and the mail storage and even inbound spam filtering to Gmail, made things so much easier, even if it does mean relying on a centralised party like ImprovMX.

As an SAU member for almost 20 years, the site is a shadow of its former self. The technical areas tend to be very much a ghost town, with link-rot setting in pretty hard (broken images that were once hosted on imageshack or Photobucket for example really hurt the quality of many of the DIY guides etc). The social areas are mainly a handful of as you say the "old-school crew", but nothing like "back in the day". Other than a handful of motorsport/trackday events each year, the 'club events', especially the 'social' type like cruises and meetups, are almost non-existent. I'm not sure if that's because those events tend to now be organised over social media in smaller circles, or if they just don't happen.

In short, there's just not really much attracting new (or existing, evidently) users to the forum these days. I'd say it's a classic catch-22... people don't frequent the forums so the content (and experience) suffers, and then people don't want to frequent the forums because the content and experience aren't that great any more.

Just in case anyone reading this is considering purchasing the Astro Slide... be very wary. I backed the Indiegogo campaign over 2 years ago, still nothing. The wait isn't the issue here (COVOD and the related supply chain issues are real, I get that), but the major lack of transparency from PlanetCom is abysmal. A quick read of a few pages of the comments on the Indiegogo campaign page gives you a pretty clear picture of how many of the backers feel...

From memory, AliExpress wouldn't accept aliexpress@mydomain.com, but ali_express@mydomain.com was fine.

SuperMicro 5019D-FTN4 (or 5019A-FTN4 if a little low power Atom CPU would cover your needs)

You can set an organisation policy to disable personal ownership, which forces every password to be saved into an org, unless the user is an org owner or administrator.

Just sold my 1994 Nissan R33 Skyline that I've owned for the last 15 years - currently looking at importing a 2020 Nismo Note S.

Not exactly 'IRL', but many years ago I wrote a simple bash script to submit many entries into an online competition. Yes, I know... I did scour the competition T's&C's and they didn't have anything in there explicitly prohibiting it (its obviously implied, but I was young and bored...). Anyway:

Each entry required a unique email address, which then had a validation link you needed to click. I scripted this up using curl to submit the request using a randomly generated email address via a catch-all on my domain, reading the mail to extract the submission URL, and then using curl to hit that.

I actually ended up winning the 'random draw', but now I get ~18000 copies of their spammy newsletter! Unfortunately their unsubscribe page has the anti-bot protection that their competition page really should have had ;)

The multi-profile functionality in Chrome is just so much more usable than Firefox. Yes you can hack things together with command line arguments and shortcuts, but its nowhere near as seamless.

This. And other Google services like Hangouts. I've tried a handful if times to switch from Chrome to Firefox but my company uses GSuite so having to have Chrome running for Hangouts anyway makes the point moot.

I know its not shiny and new, but I still use Puppet to manage all of my physical and virtual servers.

Electro-house or hard trance. Something with a solid repetitive beat and minimal to no lyrics (occasionally those lyrics may be in a foreign language).

Exactly this. I work for one such large multinational news corporation, and its all about ads and analytics.

On the analytics front, we are measuring and reporting on pages and articles at a number of levels, from audience metrics around demographics, device type, time-of-day, time-on-page, scrolling behaviour, etc to the actual articles themselves, the section/category, even the individual journalist. We have real-time reporting and statistics on the 'performance' of any article, journalist, section, etc.

Tracking and measuring user behaviour is largely performed using a number of cookies.

Das Keyboard Pro 4 with blue switches. Honestly not that loud and I love the feel. Seriously solid construction (aluminium body and all that).

Has a decent WAF (wife acceptance factor) as long as I don't bottom out the keys too hard causing excessive thumping sounds ;)

Yep, we have proxy servers with SSL decryption/inspection. Root CA installed on all company devices.

There are a number of whitelisted URLs (banks, and services that refuse to work with a MITM'ed cert) but other than the initial headache during implementation, it is pretty seamless now.

As a nodejs dev, NodeRED appealed to me. I have lights, curtains, irrigation, aquarium, etc all controlled from my phone/tablet via a raspberry pi.

SAMBA 4 AD is a valid alternative if your requirements are relatively simple. You still need a third party product (or build one) to provide a web interface if you need that.

That looks amazing... will be interesting to see if it actually releases though.

This. I really miss my HTC Dream and Desire Z.

Thirded. I get about a month between charges with everything turned on (notifications - the main purpose of the device for me, as well as heart rate monitoring, step and sleep tracking). Its no Pebble in terms of functionality or third party development, but I had Pebbles since the initial Kickstarter and while initially I installed every app I could find and tried to use it for anything and everything, eventually I worked out that (for me at least) it worked best as a extension of my phone display, not a replacement.

A single 40" 4K display is basically 2x2 20" 1080p displays with no bezel space between. That means you would be turning your head quite a bit more with 2x 27" than a single 40" (although with some additional vertical movements I guess). I sit at a distance of about 800mm (~2.5ft) from the display and find I hardly have to move my head at all - I focus most of my work in the top two thirds with lower priority 'peripheral vision' stuff (IM, terminal windows, etc) down in the lower section.

I use a 39" 4K monitor and absolutely love it for both dev work and TV. Being a monitor and not just a 'TV with DisplayPort input' means it sleeps/wakes correctly, and I haven't watched free-to-air TV in over a decade, so I don't miss the lack of a tuner.

A former Tech leader where I work used to say "Never say you can't do something. Just provide options, cost and consequences. The business/management/client will make the decision for you."