My workflow is going to be changing a bit, and this is as good of a time as any to review my current setup and services I'm using (not necessarily related to the new Mac) and see if I'm needlessly throwing money away or not. First, let's start with a list of some of the tech services I'm paying for:
$70.00 / year: Office365 with 1TB of OneDrive
$50.00 / year: Fastmail – email hosting
$64.00 / year: Mullvad VPN (5 Euro / month)
$72.00 / year: Write.as – Blog hosting
Breaking It Down
Office365
This is the first service coming up for renewal, besides Mullvad which is monthly only. Over the course of the last year, I've not really touched any of the Office apps, and the only thing really in use at the moment is OneDrive. Given I've got a Mac coming, I think I want something a little less Microsoft-centric and with Apple's office apps giving me what I potentially need, I think I can whittle this down and just look for online file storage. I do have iCloud for my iPad and iPhone, so that might be an option here. iCloud+ 200GB would come out to $36.00 / year, which isn't too bad and is just about half of what I'm paying now.
Fastmail + Mullvad
Both of these services work fine for me, and initially I was contemplating the idea of moving over to Proton (includes: 500GB space shared between Drive, Calendar and Mail and VPN) to combine the services, but I'd actually end up spending ~$10.00 more per month if I went that route. I may look at some other VPN providers and see what kind of pricing I can find. Fastmail seems fine, so the more I think about it, the more I'm thinking I'll just stay put.
Write.as
I just recently switched over here from a static site setup I was using, and honestly I'm paying for the convenience. The static site cost me nothing and was hosted over on Netlify, and honestly I'm thinking about that again especially as I look into getting a better handle on my budget since my move. As much as I like the interface, I'm definitely considering a migration back over to the static site generation side of the fence.
Final Thoughts
As you can see, I've got some things to think about and research. My goal is to be paying for services and getting everything out of them I can. That is, not paying for something and never using it (I'm looking at you O365). I'll post an update after I've done some research and made some decisions regarding what comes next.
Some days I feel trapped. Up until about 3 years ago, our work situation was such that my department had Linux desktops, where we had the choice of running whatever distribution we wanted to, as long as we were able to do our jobs. No issues, things were great... until corporate IT decided it was time to upgrade our machines. No longer would we have our Linux desktops, instead, they were forcing us onto Thinkpads with Windows. Luckily we have admin rights, but still, losing Linux was a pretty big blow to productivity for quite some time.
It's three years now since they've migrated us, and my current solution involves WSL2. It's the best I can do, and it does give me most of the tooling I need to work. The thing I'm really missing the most though is the desktop, or rather, window manager setup I was running. On my old Linux machine, I had i3 set up and it was a breeze to get things done, and with multiple virtual desktops it was easy. I know Windows 10 has virtual desktops, but I really haven't tried playing around with that yet.
At home I'm also using Windows because my streaming setup hardware either doesn't function at all, or has very hacky solutions to get it running. In my younger years, I used to love tinkering around with things to get them to work, but these days I just want things to work and I don't want to spend hours troubleshooting things. If I weren't streaming, it may not be that big of a deal. One might argue that I should give up streaming since I'm not doing it on a regular basis, and I had thought about that. However, I still plan to make an occasional Youtube video and the hardware I have will be necessary for that, not to mention I do stream when I get the bug to do so.
I had considered MacOS, and honestly I'm still thinking pretty hard about it. My current Windows rig would then just be streaming / video / gaming, and everything else on the Mac. The problem is the cost of entry into the Mac world. Time will tell, but for now, I'll be living here in the land of Windows.
One of the downsides of my move meant that I was losing ATT Fiber, and my only option for internet at a decent speed was Xfinity. I haven't been an Xfinity customer for well over 15+ years, so it's interesting to see how things have changed since then. Going into my new place, I was originally going to put the Xfinity-provided gateway into bridge mode and use the Ubiquity Dream Machine I had bought but never used. Initially to get internet going at my apartment, though, I just set up the gateway as normal and connected to it.
At that point, I found out it had WIFI 6 support, which my recently rehabbed desktop also supported. My main concern with having the desktop being wireless, though, was whether or not it would be fast enough to support streaming to Twitch. I got a chance to test that out this past Thursday and I found that it works great! A few of my followers even commented that the stream seemed even better than before, which floored me. This is great news for me, though, since now I won't have to figure out how to route an ethernet cable across the entire apartment.
The gateway is pretty limited, though. I can't change the assigned DNS servers, so once I get a a Pi-Hole configured, I would have to manually change over every device by hand, which I'd rather not do. I had a Dream Machine, but since I need the speed of WiFi 6, it's not going to be a good fit. In the end, I opted to go with an ASUS RT-AX86U after some research and recommendations. Thus far, it's working out pretty well and I'm happy with it.