Did some europeans countries not also have a retirement income of sorts?

At that point the computers is promoted (or enslaved depending on pov) and called a (home) server.

One nuance. You don’t need to provide access from outside your home network if you don’t want to open the ports, i prefer that most of services remain local for security anyway. Once those ports are open, you or anyone else can connect to the services using your_external_ip_address:portnumber

You also dont need to run it 24/7, i started with a minecraft server that ran on planned times only, then a system that was online during afternoon-evening but not at night-morning.

It is also possible if not recommended, to use a vpn to tunnel in your network and than you can access everything just like if you where at home from anywhere.

If it all sounds intimidating, a laptop to try things out will do fine. Don’t expect a perfect polished system on first try, i have redesigned my network from scratch multiple times over the years. If you do want to get serious there are plenty of offices that have “old” desktop servers with pretty impressive hardware, the fans may make a lot of noise though.

The Hardware in my current home server is mostly parts that got upgraded in my main pc. I have reached a point where i am willing to sometimes spend extra money on what my partner sometimes dubs “my second pc” but it is also doing a lot for us at this point. Much cheaper then a store-bought NAS.

Op mentioned not living in the US so this may not be a legal option.

I am not sure about most of these but I remember a European discussion on wether pepperspray should be legal or not.

This was amazing to read, thanks.

Start getting into self hosting, you dont need all that expensive hardware. An old laptop can get you started.

Heres some stuff you can do.

Fix youtube:

A script (with yt-dl) on a schedule checks a list of channels to download x amount latests videos from their channel.

Fix Television Streaming:

Jellyfin allows you to stream your own content regardless where you sourced it. I output the youtube videos from above in it

Fix Music Stream

Ive setup Navidrone to stream my music library. Previously i only ever played locally stored music but storage space limits forced me to look beyond and its been working well

Fix Cloud computing

Get full control and ownership of your data so it cant be exploited behind your back. Nextcloud is well documented on how to setup your own cloud system including office apps, calendars.

Fix personal online communication.

Signal appears to be one of the only ones competent to so it right.

In general on the web:

• Always ublock origin, I’ve yet to see a better one and i flat-out wont use the desktop web without.

• Use bookmarks for sites you visit regularly rather then giving search engine the extra traffic every time. This sounds super mild but its actually a focus lifehack. You dont need 90% of the shit your being distracted with.

Most people only need a handful of urls for a few functions. For me half of those are selfhosted and those that arent are in someway selected and configured for personal least hassle least shit experience. Ever since I bookmarked Wikipedia and wolfram i’ve used them more to get answers than conventional search engines.