I don’t know what you already do and what your insurance would cover but here’s a list of things that helped me tremendously:

1. I have two different inhalers. One for attacks and one prophylactic. Since I use the second one daily I haven’t had an attack in 10+ years.

2. Have an asthma diary. Measure your breath a few times a week and take notes. After a while you will recognize patterns days ahead when the chances for an attack might be higher. Medicate accordingly! I up the dosage for the prophylactic inhaler slightly when I see changes (e.g. during allergy season).

3. Breath out! That one sounds stupid, I know. Paraxoically the major problem with asthma often is breathing out, not in. So there are breathing exercises where you learn to focus on breathing out to make way for easier breathing in. It can be as simple as counting to 5 while breathing in and counting to 8 while breathing out with a 2 seconds break before again breathing in. Adjust the numbers for you. It calms your breathing and can even help with an attack (though I would still use an inhaler then).

I also have my lungs screened every two years. Ever since I follow the above list my measurements get better over time even though I am slowly past the “it will heal by itself” age.

Where I am from all the above steps are covered by insurance. I know for example in the US inhalers can be obscenely expensive so step 1 might be a problem. But steps 2+3 are low cost and are still very beneficial. So I hope you can find something in the list that eases your burden.

20 years ago I was injured in one eye. Without an operation it would have left me going slowly blind. The operation was invented maybe 20 years earlier.

Both my eyes had a cataract at a quite early age. Artificial lenses where invented AFAIK 50 years ago. The new lenses even correct my shortsightedness and astigmatism!

So if I had lived only 50 years earlier I would be blind on one eye and quite possibly without a lense or at least seeing really foggy on the other. Now I am sitting here with - 0.5/-1 and otherwise great eye sight.

There are no words how grateful I am for the wonders of modern eye medicine.

I really love it, too.

Hi!

I honestly just made a double pun regarding the new MB Pro with 8gb in the basic configuration and the coming Windows with the 16gb requirement - which both seem strange product decisions with lots of negative customer feedback.

Oh no! I won’t be able to run Windows on my new MacBook Pro!

Hetzner has Nextcloud in their your-storageshare.de offer. It’s a hosted instance which you are admin of. About 5 Euros a month for 1 TB of storage for the smallest tier. This was the way I chose after years of self hosting. Your-storageshare is awesome and I don’t get tired of recommending it. Maybe I should ask for a commission at some point…

In a way yes, we are running from company to company. For myself I accepted a few compromises along the way because I don’t have the time and energy to do everything myself. So this is where I am at.

Hosting email yourself is a nightmare and is getting basically impossible more and more (see here). So I accepted my fate and looked for a solution that fits my needs.

For cloud storage I used to self host Nextcloud and / or Syncthing for years. While it was fun in the beginning I loathed it at the end. Even with good hardware and Docker and 25 years of experience there was always something that stopped to work after a while - especially with Nextcloud. For Syncthing (which I really like) there is no real client for iOS (wife’s phone). Also exposing anything to the internet can turn into a nightmare pretty quickly. But my work blocks my VPN… You see what I mean? There certainly are solutions for all that but I was tired of looking.

Hetzner is a large German hoster with a quite good reputation. They need to follow GDPR regulations and because they provide closely monitored solutions for my work I know they do as much as possible. The Nextcloud instance is super reliable ever since I started.

I use Nextcloud tools for encryption at rest which is enough for me. They even let you perform cli commands (a few from a web UI, other through support mail). Support is fast and well informed.

It is certainly not for everyone! But for my scenario it is the currently best compromise.

If you aren’t too tech savvy I would recommend against self hosted services. There are amazing solutions out there but they will cost a few bucks.

For cloud storage I use Hetzner’s https://www.your-storageshare.de. It’s a hosted Nextcloud with pretty much all the freedom you can get. Currently it costs about 5 Euros per month for 1TB of storage. You can even share it with your family and friends because you can create more users on your instance. While I self hosted Nextcloud and Syncthing in the past this is just way less work.

Your-storageshare replaced Dropbox/Google Drive, Google Calendar, Google Contacts and Google Photos for me. That’s a pretty huge chunk of the services I use passively all the time. With Nextcloud’s encryption enabled and GDPR regulations in place it is IMHO as save as you can get without self hosting.

For mails I am quite happy with https://mailbox.org - it starts at 1 Euro per month but I recommend the 3 Euros tier. It’s no Proton Mail but somehow to me it seems more trustworthy. They don’t overpromise on features but provide a solid secure service. Most of the time I send unencrypted mails (due to various reasons) but you could use SMIME with it. Since it provides IMAP you could even integrate it with your-storageshare using the Nextcloud Mail app.

Both services support your own domains so if you fancy it you could set up www.IHadTwoCows.com for cloud and mail. Hetzner has you covered for domains too. Not the cheapest but reliable.

For search I use https://startpage.com. It uses Google results but anonymized. I am very happy with it.

And that, kids, is the story of how I banned Google from my digital life. (okay, Maps is still there but all the alternatives where just not good enough with traffic jams in my city)

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Yeah, No Doubt about it.

You see, it grows inverted exponentially. 6 GB equals about 22 GB. Your best option will be the 2 GB model which performs like 64 GB. If that still doesn’t fit your needs you could always download additional RAM.

I currently lease a 2 years old Renault Zoe (very compact car) for 200€ a month (0€ upfront). It was a special deal in Germany for a few months. I charge at home with solar panels and rarely drive more than the 300-350km range.

It honestly feels like the holy grail of electro mobility.

Stock und Steine brechen meine Beine

But chains and whips excite me

What did you write? I can only see *******!

The name of the fish “Stör” is the same as the word “disturb”. That alone offers a lot of potential for bad puns.

It is also weirdly common as a part of other words that don’t have anything to do with fish. And third, there are parts of words that sound similar to Stör.

Take all those ingredients and you can have a lot of fun with strange word combinations and only native speakers have a realistic chance of understanding.

Shout out to startpage! I use it almost exclusively and it is great.

Oh common guys, that doesn’t have to be about oral sex and you know it.

It could just as well be about doggy style.

I mean how would I know what I think if I can’t hear what I’m saying read what I’m writing?