I love wiki.JS Spun up several sites with it.

It’s classification AI not generative AI. Basically smart tagging. And it’s optional. Super helpful though and runs locally on your machine.

Nothing. Just helps pay for development.

Most databases don’t require a license, nearly infinitely scalable, robust, can handle mass edits and multi edits and can be interacted with by humans and variety of programs easily. SQL is a language commonly used to interact with relational databases.

Excel is limited to how much data can be stored in it, it has auto format features that will change what you type into something different (like auto interpreting things that look like dates) and each cell can either be data or equation. It can also be tricky to add lots of data at once, licenses are not free and multi people editing it at the same time can be tricky.

The limit on how much data can be stored in a db is typically orders of magnitude higher, you typically specify beforehand what type of thing is in each column (string, date, number, etc) cells can only hold data not equations they are built for adding lots of data en masse safely and can handle lots of “simultaneous” editors.

Geneitc scientistist have had to change they way they name genes to avoid auto formatting into dates in Excel. UK government attempted to track early COVID cases with Excel but the data was getting capped by the max size of Excel. NZ gov lost track of lots of money in their budget because of lack of being able to multi edit.

A relational database is a bit like a rigid excel workbook. You have multiple tables that are made if rows and columns. A column is an attribute (like population or height) and a row is a data entry (like town). Some of these columns can store keys to rows in other tables to be used as a reference. In our example case a table of townships might link to another table of counties or states or countries.

A non relational database is more like a collection of personal notes about things to allow for more flexibility.

I highly recommend starting with Grist or TablePlus both of which have nice GUI, free tier and can get your head around databases.

Bitwarden

At this point I think Facebook messenger and internet explorer are the only ones that don’t support it. Oh and maybe the ISS.

WebP has all the functionality of jpg, png, and gif while still being a smaller filesize. It has baseline support across browsers and devices. I’m no Google simp and work to de-google my family and workplace but this is a hill I will die on. Webp currently the best image file format.

The difference between coding and programming is similar to the difference between geeks and nerds: difference without distinction. Programming is the act of giving a computer instructions and coding is the act of writing code. We give computers instructions by writing code, so no difference.

Godot is a great place to start. It is a free game engine with excellent documentation and a bunch of online content. It uses a programming language that is simpler/more abstracted then C/C#. It is also way more forgiving then C. The documentation has a couple of tutorials for you to follow as well. Godot also allows you to export your game to browser, android, or Steam.

If that is too much for you you can try RPGMaker MV (nade for nonprogrammers) or Scratch (made for kids).

Don’t focus on learning everything at once. Pick one thing to learn / focus on at a time.

There are tons of free game assets out there for you to use to help you focus. For example when you are learning programming don’t worry about the images and sounds, use premade ones.

You can always go back later and make your own assets for them when you decide to focus on that aspect.

Along the way you may find you really enjoy one particular aspect of it and zero in on that, but for a baseline.

Make tiny simple games so you can see progress and share. This one was/is the hardest one for me. I’ve long wanted to make games and had huge grandeous ideas for one and always itching to make it but I need to tackle things that are reasonable that I can finish.

For 2D assets you could use GIMP for free or Affinity. As a solo developer I don’t recommend Adobe.

For 3D assets Blender is the best way to go and is free.

I didn’t know they had inport taxes on desktops. Thanks for the heads up.

In my experience, typically import taxes are there to try and encourage buying local. Does New Zealand manufacturer their own electronics, or is this import tax just a way to levy money? Or is it to reduce environmental impact?

Joplin

GetGrist.com

Team Tab Supremacy Unite!

Connect it to a DAV server and you dont have to learn a new software.

Thanks everybody for the feedback!

I did purchase a cloud plan from joplin directly, and it worked with all my devices instantly, no fuss.

Linode had advertised a “one-click” solution to get NextCloud up and running, but it was far from it. A couple folks linked a GitHub page with a list of NextCloud providers and I decided on Cloudamo, and that was way more up my alley then Linode. No ssh, no console, no installs, just easy GUI. I am just waiting on the nameserver change and then hopefully I am good to go there.

It sounds like hosting my own email is not a good idea. I already have a proton account that I am using for email. I tried using it for File storage, but it has been lacking, and others have been unable to view or download what I share with them. Does anyone have an opinion on if Skiff is better enough to switch over? Could Skiff pages replace Joplin? Someone mentioned lack of security with NextCloud. Would you recommend Skiff Drive over it?

I had never heard of mailbox.org before. Why might you recommend it over the others?

I will DM some of you for some advice on my local setup.

I’ll look into some of those links you sent, thank you.

I did try linode which advertised one click setup for some of these apps. But it still required dancing just the right dance just the right way and SSH’ing into a linux computer to initialize everything. Once initialized only one of my computers can sync with it, my phone and other computers say invalid connection. After troubleshooting for several days I tore it down and built it back up and now none of my devices can connect.

I do have Proton and that was painless to setup, but when I share files using a public link other people only get a blank screen. They have basically nothing for photos.

That is a fair point about needing to have someone troubleshoot for me.

I have been fighting with Plex for 2 years. Tried it on Windows and tried it on TNAS. Despite buying a static IP from my ISP and telling Plex to allow outside connection Plex always said it was unavailable outside my wifi. Most of the time it was anyways, but every once in a while it wouldn’t. It would often just a stream in the middle and say the media was no longer available. On LAN and off. Could never link an error log entry with any of these failures. It would often mis identify movies and shows despite me following the naming schema. For example /Media/Movies/Hulk (2008)/Hulk (2008).mkv would often show up as “The Twelve Kingdoms”

I have thousands of discs I am scanning in and after going through 15 tutorials and trial and error I could never get *arrs to work properly. I couldn’t get radarr or sonarr to watch folders for ripped movies and move them into the appropriate folder, and tdarr would happily check my files for errors, but refused to convert, compress, or find subtitles for my files. It would just “complete” the task in 1ms and do nothing and report it was done. After trying TDARR on the sixth different computer I almost through it through a window.

Thanks for the advice.

I’m ok with paying for a privacy respecting, offline syncing service.