## Welcome If you are here to learn and explore, welcome to the tribe, and if you feel you can positively contribute please engage. > [!sub]- [[📌FREE subscriber-only Products|📌FREE subscriber-only Products. Subscribe and get a chance to win!]] If you are a manufacturer or someone with deep knowledge of any subject, please let me know of your brand/products/content. **My aim is to spread the word of all worthwhile endeavours**. > I am running a lot of projects and I test a lot of products. Every month a paid subscription of that month will be chosen to receive a fully functioning technology product for free. It could be a brand new product, something that was on test or a product from my projects. > > Additionally, and for every 128 new subscriptions a random subscription will be selected to receive a product for free as described earlier. > > The minimum subscription investment, to be considered for the draw, is U$4. If your paid subscription is worth more money, you increase your chances of winning in increments of U$4. For example let's say your subscription is worth U$12. You get 3 chances to win something (12/4 = 3). > > Wishing all best of luck. The list of products past and future, as well as the winners, will be listed on this portal (if people allow us to use their names) under the name [[📌FREE subscriber-only Products]]. > > To start a paid, one-off or timed, subscription, click on the link above or visit [[📌Subscribe & Engage]]. ## A brief history I have been in the technology industry for decades. I am as passionate as when I started, back at the age of 16. I much prefer progress to stagnation and therefore I am all in for change, for better or worse. ## The tribe and the community I passionately believe assisting others, even without benefit, is an advantage. My motivation for this effort is to expose the most noble technology and science resources (articles, publications, companies, individuals, projects) available in the technology multiverse, covering the entire technology spectrum: - domotics - informatics - hardware - software - techware - administrator - developer - user - educator - producer - seller Over time, I hope more individuals, sharing the same passion and interests, might be willing to contribute to this effort. I like taxonomy, so you might see me using words not used anywhere else! I aim to provide a glossary of terms for reference. The technology field is vast and there are only 24 hours in a day. Therefore I need to narrow down the scope, at least in the initial stages. Below are the content guidelines. - Language is English only, although I am multilingual and English is not my mother tongue - No coverage of the Apple ecosystem; exception is technologies - Primary software focus: open systems (e.g. Android, Linux), open source and anything open ecosystem - Secondary software focus: Microsoft Windows ecosystem - Primary target audience: anyone who would like to operate a homelab or are enthusiastic about using the latest technology - No games coverage; there is a plethora of resources out there - All published information is completely free of advertising, marketing influence, ulterior motives, intentional bias, or any other influence of any kind, except my own honest personal opinion and experience - Honest, transparent, facts based information is at the core of all communication - None of us has the time or money to waste; therefore everything is aimed at optimising time (as short as possible without compromising clarity) and maximising value (getting your money’s worth) - I stand to be corrected when I get it wrong, so please engage - I refuse to use platforms which are owned/run by individuals of questionable ethics (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Tesla, etc.). Money makes the world go round, however, I believe there are other things of higher order, like being honourable and ethical. The pie is big and there is space for everyone to survive and/or thrive. Greed of any kind (money, power) is deplorable in my humble opinion. - Within reason, price is not the primary selection criteria for anything. Free is good, but it is not always the best value or even the better option. ## The publication I aim to post once a week, although some of the material can take up to a month to create, especially when dealing with new and complicated technologies. I will never provide filler content, wasting everyone’s time. If for some reason I do not have enough beneficial content to post in a week, I will not post, or the post will be very short. If you would like to be notified of updates, **please consider subscribing to my newsletter**; **it is free of charge and comes with no strings attached**. If you would like to support my effort please consider becoming a paid subscriber. You will help me test more products faster. **Quality over Quantity.** My ultimate aim is to create an infinite space for content (text, images, videos); starting with an overall technology pane, and being able to infinitely jump and zoom in and out to other panes. An example is depicted in the image below, where you can zoom in and out on any part of the pane, plus jump to another pane above or below. ![[introduction-0.png]] Although I create the content in this form, the tools are not there yet to be able to publish it. So for the time being, publishing only in discrete pages and in the future, hopefully, one canvas for everything. The content framework is illustrated below. #### Domotics - Informatics Domotics is about the space/habitat around us and informatics is about the technology infrastructure required to make things smart and functional. Everything else is considered a subcategory of domotics and/or informatics. ![[introduction-1.png]] #### Hardware - Software - Techware Techware is about the standards, the protocols, the interfaces, the frameworks and the technology ecosystem, which is neither a hardware nor a software product. Hardware has two broad divisions, based on engineering and function. ![[introduction-2.png]] Software is divided into broad categories, based on function. ![[introduction-3.png]] #### Developer - Administrator - User I will cover hardware and software topics relating to different groups of people, playing a different role in the lifecycle of a product/service. #### Educator - Producer - Seller My approach to everything is holistic, attempting to expose all the sources which I believe add real value into the technology multiverse. #### The Infrastructure Most of the software will be built using an opinionated infrastructure, based on virtualisation technologies. Here is the list of the opinionated infrastructure components: - The compute architecture is x86-64 based, as, at the moment, provides the widest spectrum of capabilities/options. - Virtualisation is based on [Proxmox VE](https://proxmox.com/en/proxmox-ve), a Linux open-standards based type-1 hypervisor. - Most of the cloud infrastructure is based on [Cloudflare](https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/), which offers a fantastic free tier with rich functionality. - The domotics server is based on [Home Assistant](https://www.home-assistant.io), as it simply is the best overall domotics platform out there, plus it is #open-source and actively developed. - The preferred server OS is [Debian](https://www.debian.org). If Debian is not compatible, fallback is [Ubuntu](https://ubuntu.com) or exceptionally [Alma](https://almalinux.org), [Alpine](https://almalinux.org), [Fedora](https://getfedora.org). - #self-hosted, #open-standards, #open-source, #open-systems, #open-tech software wherever feasible. ![[introduction-4.png]] <a href='https://ko-fi.com/S6S0K9U5Q' target='_blank'><img height='36' style='border:0px;height:36px;float:right; ' src='https://storage.ko-fi.com/cdn/kofi1.png?v=3' border='0' alt='Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com' /></a>