Just wanted to put this out there as a little PSA in case it's helpful: if you want a cloud server but don't wanna pay anything, Oracle's Free Tier is a life saver. Discovered it a year ago and couldn't be happier I did, since I'd never pay for cloud computing otherwise 😭.

Quick Specs:

For free you get:

• 24/7 uptime
• 200gb of storage space
• 24GB of RAM
• 4 OCPUs
• 4 Gbps Bandwidth

That's been more than enough for me and honestly feels too good to be true. Some things I've done with this:

• Minecraft Server
• Radarr/Sonarr Plex Setup
• I'd like to make my own backup solution as well!

If anyone has any other ideas for cool projects I could self host, please do tell I'm curious what else I could do :)

So I just upgraded to an M1 Mac Mini. I was a little iffy on it, part of me wanted to build a PC just to play games but I really like MacOS and I mostly play on PS5 and the Switch with the PC only being for indie titles and stuff that only works with a keyboard and mouse like RTS, 4x, or city builders. I just don't play PC games enough to prioritize gaming as a use case in buying a computer, but I also really like RTS and city builder games.

I figured WINE and Parallels would meet most of my gaming needs but my forays into WINE have been frustrating and buggy, and this reddit thread about what works on Parallels is, frankly, just kind of sad to look at. What's worse, apparently the new Age of Empires has some kind of pathfinding instruction set that ONLY works with x86 architecture. So it won't work under any kind of virtualization or emulation.

Enter Cloud gaming. It seems the big contenders right now are ShadowPC, GeForce Now, and Paperspace. Has anyone tried these? When I last costed these out Shadow was only around $15-$20 a month which was almost a no-brainer. But it seems to have gone up to $30 a month now, which gets costly enough to where it almost seems like I'd rather get a Steam Deck. Paperspace is like $10 per month plus another ~$1 per hour of play, which would probably end up cheapest for how little I play. But how it is in terms of configuration and latency I have no idea.