Leatherman with matching bitset. Bought it on a whim 10 years ago and I use it constantly for lots of things. It wasn’t my cheapest purchase, but damn has it gotten me out of a lot of difficult project situations where no proper toolbox was available. I’ve literally filled and repaired entire server racks with this thing.

That was the worst part. You have this super-optimized build that you somehow managed to make work with an ungodly amount of personal time, effort, blood and tears. It will only work so long as the hardware survives and on this machine only, nowhere else. Any update can knock your build down, making you work on debugging anywhere from a few minutes to full-on weeks.

So you have a system that works at best as well as any other system which you could get flying within an hour with only a few clicks in the installer.

That’s it. That’s what you’ve worked for and need to continue working for.

I did Gentoo Stage 1 (which was very similiar to what you plan to do) in 2005 with a shitty laptop. 24 hours until I had a working shell compiled. A whole week until I had a graphical desktop working properly. Stupid me didn’t have enough and did it again in 2013 with better hardware within just 36 hours to the desktop.

If you seek a challenge that leaves you with angelic patience once you’ve overcome the never ending rages you’ll encounter to push through to the end against all odds, lots of errors, bad documentation, dependencies from hell AND keeping it running, which will inevitably raise your patience muscles strength again and again, then yes, do it. Just accept that at some point, something will break inside you.

There is this IMHO very interesting solution from India that uses edible cutlery products. It’s basically a form of hard baked bread in the shape of knives, forks, spoons, plates, bowls, … . They keep hot and liquid food very well for quite some time, and the forks, knives and spoons remain solid enough to eat perfectly well with. Eventually, they will disintegrate on their own within a few weeks or so if you don’t eat them first. All this without the need to cover the surfaces with anything at all, and also made so cheaply that they come very close to most current disposable solutions.

Ukraine alone won’t be the cause for a dystopian scenario with Russia as the world government, but I don’t like where it would be going if Ukraine fell. Russia surely wouldn’t stop afterwards. I’d rather see a world where trade connects people than a world where governments forcefully connect people via ideologies. The latter never worked out for anyone.