As part of my (legitimate) New Years resolution, I’m trying to get my accounts in order, and not be so spendy. I also aspire to contribute more, with code, advocacy, or monetary donations, to projects I believe deserve support.

I cancelled my $9.99/month Door Dash subscription, and am either going to buy food from the grocery store, or, if convenience is more warranted, leave the house to get food. Door Dash delivery is effing expensive.

I’m also going to downgrade my internet from Comcast. I currently pay $108 per month for 2.2 Gbps speeds. I can get reasonably fast speeds, like 1000-1200 Mbps, at roughly half that price. I anticipate that the benefits I currently receive from a 2.2 Gbps internet connection will not be terribly or even noticeably reduced on a 1000 or 1200 Mbps connection. As an aside: For the first two years I lived with my grandpa, I was making due with 12 Mbps Internet from his Comcast account, and that was fine for what I was using the internet for at the time.

I started making a recurring monthly donation of $3.10 to the Wikimedia Foundation. I might also start a $5 per month donation to the Internet Archive.

My VPS and cloud server expenses are exactly what I want them to be, for now. I’m also thinking of not renewing my hyperreal.coffee domain, and just using my moonshadow.dev domain. The only service using hyperreal.coffee is my web server. Most other things use moonshadow.dev, including my email address. I see little reason to spend money on two domains, and the easiest one to cut is hyperreal.coffee. I’ve had it for several years, and it was fun while it lasted, but I don’t have a hard need for it anymore. Any links that break because of this are not terribly important or mission-critical. The same contents of my blog and website will still be available at moonshadow.

For the past year, I was using Fastmail as my email service. My subscription of $60/year is due to expire in the next month, so I cancelled it. I’m now back to using Proton Mail with a Proton Unlimited plan for $9.99/month, which includes a ton of other stuff besides email. There is not yet a Proton Drive client for Linux, and I don’t anticipate there will be one anytime soon, but my Nextcloud with Murena Workspace setup is working just fine for now. Since I have 500 GB of storage space on Proton Drive, I’m going to write a script that rclones snapshots of my Nextcloud directory to my Proton Drive account, to use as an alternate backup source for my Nextcloud content.

Speaking of the Murena Workspace account. It’s nice to have someone else managing it, but that is another $2.33/month expense. I’m considering canceling it. All I really need out of it is a file sync. It might be feasible to write an rclone script with functions to push and pull content to my Proton Drive at regular intervals. On my desktop machine, the idea would be to run a push function every hour, and only run the pull function manually when I use another device like my laptop. I can accomplish a similar functionality using external drives and ZFS send/receive, but since 500 GB of storage is already included with my Proton Unlimited plan, I might as well make use of it and benefit from the offsite storage.