… business customers can keep any device they purchased at no charge," AT&T said.

Gee how magnanimous (emphasis mine)

I’m an idiot and never linked the link

https://www.smarthomebeginner.com/authentik-docker-compose-guide-2025/

1. I got started with a guide from these guys back in 2020. I still use traefik as my reverse proxy and Authelia for authentication and it has worked great all this time. As someone else said, everything is in containers on the one host and it is super easy this way. It all runs on a single box using containers for separation. I should probably look into a secondary server as a live backup, but that’s a lot of work / expense. I have a Cloudflare dynamic DNS container running for that.
2. I would definitely advocate for owning your own domain, for the added use case of owning your own email addresses. I can now switch email providers and don’t have to worry about losing anything. This would also lean towards a more memorable domain, or at least a second domain that is memorable. Stay away from the country TLDs or “cute” generic TLDs and stay with a tried and true .com or .net (which may take some searching).
3. I don’t bother with this, I just run my server behind Cloudflare, and let them protect my server. Some might disagree, but it’s easy for me and I like that.
4. Containers, containers, containers! Probably Docker since it’s easy, but Podman if you really want to get fancy / extra secure. Also, make sure you have a git repo for your compose files, and a solid backup strategy from the start (so much easier than going back and doing it later). I use Backblaze for my backups and it’s $2/month for some peace of mind.
5. Do it!!!

This has the same energy as France’s longest land border being with Brazil.

It is the longest border France shares with another country, despite not being located in mainland France.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil–France_border

I mean that’s just kinda the way it is in the US / Canada. Though I hear Canada has even higher prices for less service.

Yeah I’m in the US and those “free” phone contracts over 3 years are objectively terrible deals when you look at the total cost of $100–120/mo or more with the “free” phone on one of the big three vs buying it outright and paying $25/mo (ish) with an MVNO.

Even if you assume a total cost of $100 at Verizon with the “free” phone—which I believe is a super low estimate—and you assume $45 at Visible (shameless referral plug)—which is their most expensive tier—you’re coming out at $1980 less in contracts over 3 years which could buy you (virtually) any phone you want and then some.

I’m sure there is more than one mom and pop outfit using them who thought they were just “new quick books”. I would certainly feel sorry for people who are swindled by con men, and this feels the same to me.

Is it possible they didn’t escape something from markdown like an asterisk or something else?

We have the best technology in the world, because of sue.

Good point, I forgot about that news

I mean they’re just resellers of the big guys’ network. I think Mint is a reseller of T-Mobile. Verizon has its own branded reseller labels. It all goes through the big guys’ network anyways so could they even claim that?

Haha I’m not stupid I know the IRS doesn’t accept gift cards.

The Microsoft tech support guys have been very helpful with my Linux laptop though, and I feel that I can trust them.

I mean I’ve definitely seen signs at checkout lines at grocery stores. I’ve also been asked when buying large amounts of gift cards what my reason for buying them was (in a very kind way, I would add).

Interestingly, this coating can cause issues for some products like the Apple AirTags. I know this because I used one of these batteries with a bitterest in the AirTag on my keys and the AirTag didn’t work.

It doesn’t help our friends in the EU, but I’m hopeful that the CFPB’s “Open Banking” rules might actually make it possible to do this with an open source product with OAuth and common APIs rather than these aggregators that are just web scraping your bank.

I’ve heard others recommend Low End Box before but I have no experience, so do some due diligence before selecting any of these!

https://lowendbox.com/blog/1-vps-1-usd-vps-per-month/

I started with the 2020 tutorial from these guys. They’ve updated it a few times through the years so I can’t speak to how good the new version is, but I’m sure it’s probably plenty to get started.

https://www.smarthomebeginner.com/traefik-v3-docker-compose-guide-2024/

After I followed this guide, I’ve deviated significantly as I learned and started to do my own thing. It’s a great place to start and learn the basics of containerized applications and once you have that then you can host most things that are dockerized. All I need to do now to start up a new service is pull up the README on Docker Hub (or better yet, if LinuxServer.io has a container that does what I want to do, on their website), figure out what I want to do with the variables and any setup that needs to happen, and then I add it to my .yml and start it up!

I’ve got it all tracked now on GitHub so I can see what I’ve changed and when and if something were to go wrong I could revert back to a known-good configuration.

Are they vouchers? I don’t remember from the article, but I’d assume it’s just the employees give Facebook their Uber account info and whenever it goes down to $0, FB automatically reloads the account. I’d imagine it would be way too much effort to pass out physical cards to everyone.

Your point about only retaining the worst employees is valid though

Well in this case, it’s $25 that wasn’t going to be spent that now does get spent. If you do that for a year it’s $7k additional. I don’t think it’s fireable, but I can at least understand from a bean counter perspective how that’s enough.

The only thing that I could imagine would make the pooling look really bad is if one or more people are not going to use their credit and so they “pool” it in with someone else who does want to use it, and the latter employee now has a $50/$75/etc. credit.