There are some managed tunnel alternatives but they are not cheap. At this point it’s cheaper to rent a $20/year VPS and install one of these: https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling

I personally love frp

Edit: I have never tried it, but there’s also Tailscale Funnel https://tailscale.com/kb/1223/tailscale-funnel/

Look at the PDF carefully before sharing it. Most academic publishers put a timestamp on it that reveals who downloaded it, at least at institution level. Sometimes this is even embedded as metadata. If the PDF says anywhere “author personal copy”, please don’t share it on the author’s behalf.

This is mostly to avoid getting them into trouble.

Otherwise, go and share, authors love it!

Here is a possible case study for you. https://OpenRouter.ai.

They are doing what you think of doing, for the various LLM APIs. Three reasons why they offer added value:

1. Some people cannot access some of these APIs directly (GPT-4 in the advanced settings, Anthropic’s Claude is still close access)
2. They abstract the way these API are accessed so that the code to use different models does not have to change much.
3. For some reason, they cost the same as the original API

I use it. It’s more lightweight than AdGuard, in terms of resources. I find the UI to be at the same time a worse UX but quicker to achieve things. I don’t think that they perform differently once they have the same blocklists.

Not anymore https://www.ivpn.net/blog/gradual-removal-of-port-forwarding/

If you have an offsite copy of your files (and not in a sync service like Dropbox) you are already in a better position than most.

Restoring from offsite takes time, even with Backblaze’s option of shipping a hard disk. You may also have data corruption troubles, companies may close all of sudden. It’s just not as convenient as local copies.

A further copy that is locally available is simply a better strategy. Adding more copies after these two is not a bad idea but you start getting hit by the law of diminishing returns.

You can actually read more about the 3-2-1 rule in a Backblaze post: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup-strategy/

hoppy.network seems like a very expensive Wireguard provider ($8/month for 1TB@100mbit). For that purpose one can spend half that for a VPS with gigabit speeds, even a quarter that during promotions. That provides the same services plus whatever else you can fit to it. What am I missing that they provide?

Put.io only has torrents, though. There’s also premiumize.me which has torrents, Usenet, and some DDL. It has been a bit of hit and miss for DDL, though.

Speaking of, it’s been a while since I’ve looked at these downloaders. What are the most recent and good ones?

In case nginx does not work out for you, you can opt for more generic reverse proxies. frp is my favorite one: https://github.com/fatedier/frp

See https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling

Same, I would actually be curious to listen to a right wing tech podcast as the two concepts clash so hard in my brain.

I have self-hosted my own emails many times. Up to having three SMTP servers with failsafe option at DNS.

It’s super nice, but I would never self-host SMTP again. It’s a nightmare. I had to email or open a ticket at most ISPs despite my clean IPs. Most ISPs simply blacklist all IPs unless they are major email providers already.

My advice is go for it but let SMTP be handled by who will deal with these frustrations. MXroute is a great choice and it’s cheap.