You can do some pretty cool things with WW SP, but I feel like working with it really makes me appreciate Linux and the Foss community so much more. WW always feels so proprietary.

Fedora core os (FCOS) vms on XCP-NG with trueNas for persistent storage. With FCOS, vms configurations can stay version controlled and deployed using open Tofu (terraform) and butane/ignition.

Interest rates seem slightly correlated with spending sentiment, but I have mostly just seen folks reigning in excessive project spending and trying to manage project cash flow a little more aggressively. Might depend on the subset of mfg you are involved with.

Sesame oil in ramen definitely takes it to the next level. Another fun addition is liquid dashi concentrate, which lends a nice deep umami flavor.

The other umami adder that’s worth playing with is fish sauce. I find that as it cooks it loses its aroma, making it easy to use in a wide variety of recipes.

One factor is that laptops need a little more design work to build out main boards and validate relative to a desktop, especially considering that you optimizing for power draw and that very little of the design is socketed. As a result a good chunk of the Linux laptop market uses OEM provided designs and then tailors their software around it. Last I heard system76 was working to bring that design work in house.

This is very much a choose your own adventure that depends on a number of factors such as the services you’re hosting, ease of access for other household members, your hosting setup, additional privacy concerns, ect.

Here a couple of resources for different methods:

Techno Tim’s overview, reverse proxy through cloudflare https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cs8yOmTJNYQ

Cloudflare proxy straight to the hosted service https://www.cloudflare.com/products/tunnel/

Create a peer to peer vpn sidestepping opening ports: https://tailscale.com/blog/how-tailscale-works/

OpenWRT is good option another that could be worth looking into might be Vyos. As far as I can tell the big issues in this space is comprehensive hardware support.