I have one, and they are great. But wasn’t there just a scandal about a recent firmware update that applied DRM to ink?

You probably did the right thing for headphones.

I’ve been looking for real data on the effectiveness of Sony’s MX5 vs Max vs others - specifically I want to see how well they do passive and ANC across the frequencies we are exposed to. And Verge have come through with this video: https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/31/23852241/we-took-six-pairs-of-headphones-and-a-dummy-head-on-the-subway

Its a good video, but its also got real data from some experts. If you are TLDW - then skip to the end for a table from the experts.

The Sony MX5 are head and shoulders above the rest (with the max second in most categories).

I know it was a sorta joke… but I had to find out if it was true.

This link: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/AirPods+Max+Teardown/139369 provides an awesome breakdown on the contents and lots of X-rays.

It turns out the answer is no, although both batteries are in the right ear cup, and ifixit never do figure if there is a counterweight in the other ear. There’s just a gap.

And yeah… adding that weight was a crappy move and very un-apple IMHO. Their products should stand on their own and not require gimmicks like that. Having said that, this is Beats. Analysis showed that their products cost as little as $18 to make (including parts and assembly) - talk about cheap overpriced crap. The other few hundred dollars per set is marketing, distribution and profit. Shows what celebrity endorsements can get you.

Is this the cancel culture that we keep hearing is coming for the MAGA crowd??

And heavy. The Max’s are quite a bit heavier than competitors.

My 5 year old brother color laser is awesome. Cheap to run and toner doesn’t dry out, and it doesn’t wake up in the middle of the night and clean (i.e. use up) the ink.

However having seem comments like this, I think I will hold off on any firmware updates.

While technically that is true, if you have any other users they will be annoyed. And anyone running iOS will almost immediately get regular popups about the mail server being down (because iOS checks for new mail frequently - and yes I know this can be adjusted) and so they will be telling you straight away.

Also - I’m not convinced that all email servers obey the SMTP standard.

I forgot to mention - spam isn’t too bad with a well trained SpamAssassin.

Plus you will need to learn your virtualisation tool really well because of all the networking routes required and operating it on the command line. VBoxManage is your friend, but its just not friendly.

From a security perspective - I did everything in Linux, and only opened the required ports (plus ssh, which I moved to a random high port number). I have auto-update on for security patches, but NOT for regular patches (because Zimbra tends break things, so you need to snapshot first).

I’ve been running my own mail server for about 15 years now… Let me offer some insights.

• Its used by me and the family, so I do have other users who expect things to work.
• I used commodity hardware, with a Linux host (and guest).
• the mail server runs in a VM, so it is trivial to: stop, copying the VM to USB, restart.
• Maintaining uptime isn’t too bad, but when the mail server goes down, you need to get onto it quickly. I’ve had power supplies fail, HDD’s fail, memory fail.
• If you should happen to be out of town when a failure occurs (I’ve had this twice), then the server stays dead until you are back. That does not make your users happy. If its more than 4 days, then the SMTP standard says email is lost.
• There have also been a few software issues with Zimbra (my current tool) - the stats daemon filled the disk, the upgrader broke permissions all over the place multiple times. Each of these requires time to investigate, research online etc. Snapshotting is awesome! Right now I have a problem where the VM disk file is growing, but the space used inside the VM is not. I have zero’d out free space and compacted the VM but don’t know why it is happening yet. More research needed.
• You will learn to hate blocklists. There are many, and there are meta blocklists. You have to watch them because at any time, you will be added and your email will silently get dropped. Sometimes the blocklist trashes whole subnets because of a single actor, sometimes even more, and so you will get included due to other bad actors. Getting off a blocklist is hard… you send emails, you fill in web forms, you look for a contact details, you wait… Then some number of days/weeks later, you are off again.
• You have to learn DKIM, SPF, DMARK, managing DNS etc.
• I used to use self-signed certs and live with the warnings. Now I used Lets Encrypt, which is awesome!.
• You can try to get reverse DNS working, but that’s up to your ISP (who usually don’t care, so good luck). No rDNS can be viewed as bad by email recipients so your spam score starts at >0.
• If you run it at home, you will be part of a block of IPs that are known to be home users, so your spam score starts at >0.
• I’m lucky in that I run it on a spare public IP address on my server housed at work. But that will need to change soon.

I started using native Linux mailboxes, later added roundcube (web UI), investigated Mailinabox, but now use zimbra. That gives me calendar/contact sharing, email/calendar/contacts to iOS devices (which is the main way my family get email), and lots more. Moving data from one to the other took a couple of days of effort. (Yeah… I know its supposed to be trivial, but its not when you include tool research, testing, execution one at a time etc).

Bottom line - you will learn lots, you will lose many weekends and sometimes a weekday here or there as you try to handle emergencies, it will never be set-and-forget.

My original rational was learning, privacy and my own domain and nicer looking email addresses than [email protected]. I’m looking for an online alternative as its time to lighten the load, but I have a lot of services that we use in Zimbra.

Good luck with it!