Frugal challenges, forcing myself to use my bicycle instead of my car where possible, declutter my belongings (why do I even have all this crap I never touched for the last year?!) and trying out weird things in general at least once (like throwing things at the wall and see what sticks).

This. Go ahead and tell everyone that you are worried about your mother and would like to see her anytime and check on her for your own peace of mind. Post a clear, preferably large, sign up front that there’s an active camera in the room. But do not insist on it. That’ll tell you all you need to know about the staff very quickly.

For the camera, use a regular old wifi-enabled baby monitor (App-controlled for best results) and connect it to a mobile Internet router. These routers have internal logs - learn how to access them, then check them (remotely, after setting up security in them) at intervals for suspicious reboot events.

Can confirm. Watching 50 Shades of Greek told me way too many aspects of the Greek mythology. The Intro alone sums it up perfectly.

If you carry a sharp screwdriver or stable hard knife around to puncture the battery rapidly, you may have something sort of resembling explosives, just very, VERY inefficient and unpredictably to set off. You’d be a lot better off using that screwdriver or knife instead to do whatever you’d wanna do with an exploding phone.

Not sure if trolling. Was talking about this specific kind of spam being visible there.

Eh. “The Internet is getting worse!” sounds alot like “New cars suck!”, “Politicans keep lying!” and “Everything was better back then!” - some sayings like “The young behave awful!” go back to long before the beginnings of civilisation (probably).

So I wouldn’t worry much. Once humans lose interest in something, they move on and the old huts, devices and whatnot slowly erode away. Guess why we are now talking on a federated network - because those big companies started rotting away and the smell slowly starts driving people away.

Just my opinion though. It’s still fun to see things crumble.

Perspective: My SO didn’t really care at first why I didn’t want to use the built-in TV speakers, but rather install some higher-end speakers and a DAC to drive them. After a while, she went to visit a friend and came back to celebrate our setup.

Value: Do you need a super-big, expensive TV or a smaller, higher PPI TV that you can sit closer to? What you really want is clarity, brightness, color, and smooth video. If people could never afford such a display and only had crappy TVs with bad video sources and only some smartphones as an alternative, the smartphone beats everything they know, of course. But if they could never afford high quality video sources and displays, how could they appreciate those things?

IMHO better than average is enough for everyday life. There’s more to life than spending money and not experiencing life to the fullest. That means I focused on a nicer Bluetooth headset, some better than average speakers for both TV and PC, … so I simply approach the point of diminishing returns on the quality scale, knowing full well I could do much better. But it’s not worth the effort to me if it slowly turns into either a game of high spending or a full-blown refurbishing hobby. Same with my car: I buy them used at about 4~6 years old and sell them at 8~10 years old, spending the least amount of money while driving mostly luxury cars with lots and lots of extras.

You craft and finish a plan before you walk up the mountain and then stop thinking about the mountain. You don’t look up the mountain, just at your steps and the way right before you. The mountain wants you to worry, but if you worry, you loose. So don’t look up the mountain and just walk, step by step.

Know that worrying about things like this is like trying to solve an algebra equasion by chewing bubble gum.

Leatherman with matching bitset. Bought it on a whim 10 years ago and I use it constantly for lots of things. It wasn’t my cheapest purchase, but damn has it gotten me out of a lot of difficult project situations where no proper toolbox was available. I’ve literally filled and repaired entire server racks with this thing.

That was the worst part. You have this super-optimized build that you somehow managed to make work with an ungodly amount of personal time, effort, blood and tears. It will only work so long as the hardware survives and on this machine only, nowhere else. Any update can knock your build down, making you work on debugging anywhere from a few minutes to full-on weeks.

So you have a system that works at best as well as any other system which you could get flying within an hour with only a few clicks in the installer.

That’s it. That’s what you’ve worked for and need to continue working for.

I did Gentoo Stage 1 (which was very similiar to what you plan to do) in 2005 with a shitty laptop. 24 hours until I had a working shell compiled. A whole week until I had a graphical desktop working properly. Stupid me didn’t have enough and did it again in 2013 with better hardware within just 36 hours to the desktop.

If you seek a challenge that leaves you with angelic patience once you’ve overcome the never ending rages you’ll encounter to push through to the end against all odds, lots of errors, bad documentation, dependencies from hell AND keeping it running, which will inevitably raise your patience muscles strength again and again, then yes, do it. Just accept that at some point, something will break inside you.