Books were my weakness, but I accepted I had to cull after two moves and the reality that liberty and sustainability require minimalism. Don’t deprive yourself though. Finish your series. You’ll pry my Calvin and Hobbes and Tintin from my cold dead hands. Whereas I didn’t need a physical copy of 1Q84; there’s no pictures.

I still have my copy of 1Q84, and it does take a lot of space... For now I won't buy new books. I haven't bought much the past two years except for a handful of cooking books (which I do like to have physically). I think books I tend to look up stuff in are where I will draw the line in the future. We'll see about culling - for now there's not really much gain (except maybe some money if I am able to sell them), but if I could reduce it before my next move, that would be beneficial.

I love your self-hosting softeare and one day when I have time, I want to build the same. I’m simply time-poor right now between job and kids. I miss RSS feeds.

I've had a steady journey on this front over the past maybe 3 years - renting a small VPS or getting a SBC like the Raspberry Pi can get you started quickly if you go the route of Docker. I got into this from a privacy point of view. Really disliked being exploited by these big tech companies, and it kinda went from there. I'm my own cloud provider now, my own media streaming service, my own code repository hosting service etc.

Eating healthy makes you feel better and saves money. Kill your high interest debt as quickly as possible and the sodium and saturated fats in instant noodles are terrible. Oatmeal, rice, and pinto beans are cheap in bulk (seal the bags well with binder clips), easy, fast (you have to soak the beans for a day but your labor time is maybe five minutes with a pressure cooker like the InstantPot), and healthier. I target <50% of the daily recommended maximums for salt, sugar, cholesterol, and saturated fats, and my blood work shows it works.

My diet is not really that bad, but my main issue has been finding those really quick meals (like porridge has turned out to be). I would find myself too frequently rationalizing buying takeaway. Spent roughly 100€ a month on this. Turns out to be a much lower hanging fruit than I had anticipated.