This is one of the hardest earned lessons I’ve ever learned, and I’ve had to learn it over and over again. I think it’s mostly stuck now but I still make the same mistake from time to time.

As in efficient per watt or some other metric?

Sold!

You can do the right thing for the wrong reasons and this is a classic case. He’s an ethno-nationalist. Ask him how he feels about Kurdish minorities or the genocide of Armenians.

Sure, but this is the thing that really annoys me: my state has really good eID, it just doesn’t work with the EU stuff. It works with literally every other government service, most companies, often as physical ID, for payments, etc etc

I had the exact opposite experience! I went through a lengthy process of signing up for and activating the weird nonstandard eID that most places don’t accept over the normal one I already have and use for everything, the only one they supported, only to be told I can’t use it without manually contacting the company, have them invalidate my activation and then go into some office to get manually re-activated.

No need to be that maximalist. Don’t self host email on a desktop machine you turn off.

Can you (or a human) expand NPM, presumably not the Node Package Manager?

Technically no, but for most intents and purposes yes. That office is literally a closet for clothes and there’s not much we can do about that, but we desperately need an office.

Once we can afford one I’m planning to have an actual electrician do real wiring. It’s ironically very illegal to do that yourself which means I have to use off the shelf crap, because electricians are not cheap.

This isn’t anything near what I’d call an ideal setting, and thus what I have is “oh well it doesn’t literally burst into flames right now”, more or less.

Here’s a more complete view of the office closet:

Oh you sweet summer child let me snap you some cable management pictures when I get back from the office

I’ve also set up both and in my experience Nextcloud is much much more complicated to set up but simpler to use and syncthing is pretty much the exact opposite.

In my case, a rather long time ago, it failed to reliably sync my files, had a super annoying web based UI, was a pain to get all my devices to talk to each other because because they had to join some sort of peer to peer network and authenticate with the earth other all three. It also didn’t have any working solution for mobile devices. Hopefully all of that’s fixed now because there’s no inherent reason it couldn’t work.