todotoro

Video games come to mind. You could probably figure out how to host a game server of their choice (think something like Minecraft) so him and his friends can play. Docker is a nice shortcut for that, and you also get to sprinkle in some networking knowledge too for opening ports and such.

If games are off the table, could try to figure out some hardware to interact with. Having some sort of robot that you can control with an API could be fun.

On the line with hardware, you can get a raspberry pi, and try to work with him to blink an LED via Scratch or Python. Then work to something even bigger.

If typing is a struggle you could do typeracer or something like that to figure out who can type faster.

You could build a basic website together with some CSS and HTML. Make like, a fan site for his favorite band (or whatever hes into). Maybe he wants to make something for his friends to see.

Or, ask them if there is something theyve wanted to know how it works…then build some sort of project using it.

Great link and good point. Subbed, ty for sharing. ( I’ll believe what a NetNavi says about AI anyday).

So, I bought a Pinetime with tariffs applied to go with GrapheneOS. It came to me about $50 USD shipped. For that price, I would do it again if it broke.

My needs are very basic, I can control music, see notifications, and get my heart rate on a graph when I work out. I only switched to this from Sensor Watch, simply because of the heart rate sensor.

Speaking of, you would be surprised what you could make a Sensor Watch do for you with no connectivity to your phone. I had totp for work, chess, and sunset/sunrise times as well as a onboard temp sensor.

Suffice to say, I think nowadays Ill readily pay more for FOSS with less features than something else just on principle. So I wouldn’t let what could be conceived as a “bad deal” stop you if your convictions are strong enough.

Happy to oblige your request stranger.

Softserve is perfectly usable, especially if your needs are more basic (its for you, no need for PRs, etc). The only gotcha is you’ll need a ed55219 key to use it.

It has been stable for me the last few years I’ve known about it. Ive run it as a container of some sort for that entire time. It’s definitely still maturing though, with more features added semi frequently.

I use it for literally everything I want self hosted, which is like 7-8 git repos for different things.

If you decide to go the Kubernetes route, you can try k3sup to bootstrap your VMs k3s, it a nice half step abstraction between Ansible and running curl yourself:

https://github.com/alexellis/k3sup

I’ve landed on k3s as my k8s distro in my environment for a number of reasons. It seems to have the “mindshare” of selfhosters, and theres lots of k3s documentation to peruse. I also really like that you can preload manifest files if you do decide to use Ansible, which makes cluster deploys that much more organized.

If you want to go a little off beat, you could try “Canonical K8s (not Microk8s)” as a snap. That worked REALLY well, and lets you do cool shit like “k8s enable loadbalancer” to automatically enable whole components for you, if you just want to focus on “consuming” Kubernetes instead of building it. I did notice a little overhead doing it as a snap, but my Proxmox node that runs the VM is purposely low spec (Celeron quad core if you believe it, 7 tdp tho)…so your hardware wouldn’t likely notice a difference.

https://documentation.ubuntu.com/canonical-kubernetes/release-1.32/snap/tutorial/getting-started/

If youre doing Proxmox already, if you don’t already have a VM template and/or Terraform/OpenTofu with Proxmox operator…it may help to tool on that too. Easier to destroy/build VMs when you get frustrated.