They just did this to me. How can I tell them they failed this test?

Busy with day to day affairs, gotta pay rent/mortgage/medical bills, gotta feed the family, gotta keep working, can’t take risks, …

It would be the point of no return for the USA, and the conclusive end to the “Pax Americana” . Invading a peaceful neighbor? Unthinkable for a “so-called” stable country. The rest of the world rally to Canada’s side, there would be an effort to ‘contain’ the further damage we could do. (Mexico would finally pay for that wall :-/ ) We would no longer be trusted, and in that vacuum of power the rest of the countries of the world would be thrown into such a frenzy to fill that power, or to align with who they think could.

The battery turning into a Spicy pillow is always a Concern for using laptop as an always powered on server. So even though you will be away from it, make sure that there is a way for someone to keep an eye on it, once every week or two.

That said, I have been using a dell laptop as a desk workstation (and remote use) with an uptime of 2.5 years at this point.

I also use syncthing. And it works pretty well. There is some turmoil with the android version in light of changes so the underlying sdk. And I am not sure there is an iOS syncthing that would work as well. I actually use it primarily to sync my keepass databases, and before Immich, my photos.

The photo management Immich brings makes it a nice alternative for that use case, but either way I need to have one or more servers elsewhere managing storage so I can get things off of my phone into a system I can control.

I use Immich because I have multiple devices and multiple people uploading photos to it , so we can all organize together.

Self hosting anything also gives you a lot of practice and experience (and confidence) to also self hosting anything for others, an important skill for many to have in order to have a more distributed internet.

This is the first thing I have heard from her about what she’s working on since she had her “wings clipped”. Hope she is still doing good…