Yes I do, but I prefer to not be a part of a cult of fanatics (so-called "religion) who only pretend to live their life by some ancient book. Don’t get me wrong, the religious books, such as the Bible and Quran do contain a lot of knowledge and some pieces should be followed, but going to church on Sunday just to show everyone how “good of a Christian” I am is unbelievably dumb.
I see God as an entity that helps me, and I do believe in the afterlife. It just seems so bizzare to me, that I should follow some rules that people made, saying that God actually did… The church is a company like any other and I’m not going to support it, ever.
Oh boy, where do I even start. I guess we should first have a minute of silence for my wallet…
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Fixing old computers
In high school, I agreed to take the decommisioned PCs home. They were in various states of not working, I diagnosed the problems, bought parts, upgraded and fixed them all. I now had a ton of relatively old but reliable computers. What’s the logical next step?
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Home server room (homelab).
I live in a flat with a giant basement, so it’s full of these old PCs and servers. I needed a server rack, switches, cabling, the whole nine yards.
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Photography
New lenses and filters constantly bought. Sometimes a new camera body. This is my most expensive hobby by far, but I take care of the lenses so they at least hold value, unlike the PCs :)
After being friends with her for a year, one year less than the amount of time I had a massive crush on her, I asked her out. She rejected me, but we agreed to stay friends and she assured me that nothing happened and we can continue like before. However, I now feel like I’m being used (or how do you say it). She doesn’t talk to me as much, only contacts me when she has a tech problem. That doesn’t seem like a friendship. When I confronted her, she said she wasn’t ghosting me, stopped for like a week, then continued.
I still think about her every day.
I only use FOSS software, protect my privacy as much as I can, both are extremely important, but people like you make it hard to convince anyone to even consider thinking about these subjects.
You’ll never convince anyone to try it out with that attitude. I also recommend you don’t make assumptions about people, such as someone not using FOSS at all when they ask for your favorite Discord server. I know I used Discord as the last proprietary piece of software for a long time.
Can’t recommend anything that’s not already known, but the thing that helped me the most is building projects. I recommend you start a homelab.
A homelab needs hardware. I don’t know what kind of computer store you want to make, there aren’t any around me, but I imagine it will include some sort of hardware maintenance. Get yourself a couple of broken laptops or PCs, usually sold for very cheap and try to diagnose the problems, order parts, install them, troubleshoot them. If at any point you feel lost, use your favorite search engine. You will probably land on some Wikipedia page. Read through it, and if you don’t know a word, search for it. Repeat this recursively and your knowledge will kind of build itself :)
This hardware will probably be pretty old unless you spent a lot, so try to upgrade it. Get some cheapo SSDs, RAM, etc. I imagine customers would need a service like this.
A homelab may be useless without software. I had the most difficulty setting up and provisioning Windows (I’ve been a Linux admin for God knows how long), so since you’ll have a few working machines, install Linux on at least two, install Windows on at least two (of course use something you have laying around as well), so that you can try out different OSes and ways to communicate between them. Now you have a home lab :)
On Linux, the skills I needed the most to provision my own servers (off the top of my head), disk management (mounting/unmounting volumes, formatting, partitioning, etc.) working with services (searching for “systemd” and “systemd service” should yield very good resources), basic UNIX shell utilities (cp, rm, mv, etc.). Linux man pages are also your friend. I imagine you probably won’t be working with servers a lot, but there is no better way to learn Linux IMHO. Run a web server and some sort of file sharing server, such as Samba.
From the above, learn the equivalent on Windows + Active Directory. This is where you’ll see your knowledge celitify.
Network them. Get a switch that supports VLANs, I recommend older enterprise switches, such as the Cisco Catalyst 3xxx or HP Enterprise switches, which you can get for cheap. They use a command line interface for configuration, but the guides for it demonstrate a ton of key networking concepts, which you will definitely find helpful when diagnosing problems for a customer, trying to imagine their network layout. Here, I recommend NetworkChuck and David Bombal on YouTube. Again, if you don’t understand something, search on the interwebz, applying the recursive method mentioned above. Then run Wireshark on one machine to scan the network traffic and search for anything unknown.
I know I went a bit too far, but once you build a homelab, you will be able to fix at least 90% of problems people encounter with hardware, software, networks, because you’ll naturally build a thorough understanding of the systems and networks your customers have at home and even be able to replicate them.
Hope this was helpful at least somewhat, and sorry for the long comment. If you need help, feel free to reach out to me or any other admin community, we’re all happy to help :)
Wish you the very best!
Cash and only cash. I live in Europe, so basocally wherever I decide to travel, my euros will be accepted, otherwise I’d rather get ripped off by an exchange than give a single piece of metadata to my bank :)
Travelling to places with a different currency outside the EU, I take my debit card and on the very first day withdraw some of the local currency from an ATM.
I always write by hand, it makes me less focused on formatting (even though little is required in this case) and lets the thoughts flow easily. I write with a mix of Demotic and Ancient Greek, English and Slovak, so this way I don’t have to bother with switching keyboard layouts. Make sure you buy a quality pen to make your diary writing experience that much better :)
I usually write at the park or on the beach, but once I come home, I open up a Markdown file in my favourite text editor, type out the previously written text and save. Then I encrypt it with GnuPG and burn the paper I was writing on.
Sounds cumbersome, but for some reason this approach makes me the most peaceful, I honestly have no idea why :)
I have a collection of various Zeiss lenses, because my proffesional photographer friend told me he enjoys them. They’re amazing, but I refuse to even share how much I paid for them, since I’d probably cry :D I also have a few from various brands like Canon, Sigma, etc.
In terms of cameras, I always bought a new one, used it for a while, sold it and bought a new one. I settled on the Canon 1DX Mark III in the end, I think I’ll use this one until it dies.