Actually, amateur TV broadcast was something that interested me. I had the opportunity to buy an SDR with wider bandwidth, but I wasn’t sure how much I’d get into it, so I kept things cheap.

Another thing I’m looking into is ADS-B flight tracking. My house is within range of a sports arena where there are all manner of overhead banners get flown. Might be fun to follow them around on a map.

If you post on !amateur_radio@sh.itjust.works, I’d read.

I bought a cheap RTL-SDR to help solve a CTF challenge at DEFCON. The 2m/70cm antenna on my roof is begging for a fun project that’s not just talking to other hams.

“Honey, the water is about to shut off. Can you file a JIRA ticket to fill out bathtubs? I should be able to get to it next sprint”

Not that I was ever interested in being military, but I was at a lunch with two older lifelong army retirees. They kept talking about how military service broke their bodies and politicians won’t cover their medical costs. These injuries were independent of any combat: It’s just expected that you sell every part of yourself when you sign up.

Who wants to be 45 years old with a limp, be unable to hear a quiet conversation, and have horrible back problems?

Yes, OP I highly recommend a GL.iNet device. It’s pocket sized and always does the job.

It’s also great for shitty wifi that tries to limit how many devices you can connect. The router will appear as one MAC and then all your other devices can route traffic through it.

As someone who has owned enterprise servers for self-hosting, I agree with the previous comment that you should avoid owning one if you can. They might be cheap, but your longterm ownership costs are going to be higher. That’s because as the server breaks down, you’ll be competing with other people for a dwindling supply of compatible parts. Unlike consumer PCs, server hardware is incredibly vendor locked. Hell, my last Proliant would keep the fans ramped at 100% because I installed a HDD that the BIOS didn’t like. This was after I spent weeks tracking down a disk that would at least be recognized, and the only drives I could find were already heavily used.

My latest server is built with consumer parts fit into a 2U rack case, and I sleep so much easier knowing I can replace any of the parts myself with brand new alternatives.

Plus as others have said, a 1U can be really loud. I don’t care about the sound of my gaming computer, but that poweredge was so obnoxious that despite being in the basement, I had to smother it with blankets just so the fans didn’t annoy me when I was watching TV upstairs. I still have a 1U Dell Poweredge, but I specifically sought out the generation that still let you hack the fan speeds in IPMI. From all my research, no such hack exists for the Proliant line.

The problem with chromebooks is that the base specs are pretty shit. A lot of them have 4 GiB of RAM and maybe 16GiB of disk if you’re lucky.

They were designed to be thin clients to connect students to the internet, and little else. Maybe they could be hacked into something useful, but I don’t think it’ll ever make a good PC. They were always destined for the landfill.

Meanwhile, the best thinkpads were quality machines back when they came out. IMO, that’s why they’re still so versatile today. Free software can’t fix bad fundamentals.

is it dishonorable to find loopholes in the rules of the honor culture

Dueling culture in 18th and 19th century Europe was commonly organized around concepts of “gentlemanly honor”. Even back then, people recognized the need for loopholes.

Consider the case of two friends who got drunk at a tavern, each one declaring how much they loved the other. Eventually, one friend goes overboard “I love you more than you know!” to which the response is “But that cannot be, for my love of you is infinite!”. Soon this becomes an argument over who loves the other more, and eventually they have to settle their friendship like gentlemen: With swords at dawn. If they’re smart and sober up in time, their seconds will work out a solution before the fight, but there are cases recorded where the friends kill each other because honor trumps love.

There were also loopholes which worked to favor the person that society already deemed more “honorable” (wealthy, connected, liked, etc). It was generally accepted that a gentleman of certain standing could honorably refuse another’s challenge to duel if their social stations were different. Think a “new money” banker’s son challenging a minor nobleman over a loan that’s due. It simply wouldn’t look good to have some commoner slaying an aristocrat, even if said aristocrat was an asshole.

In the future, I highly recommend using Kimwipes to clean off your lenses day-to-day. They’re little papers designed to wipe off lab equipment without leaving any scratches or residue, and you don’t need to spray them with any cleaner either. Just a dry wipe until the lenses are clean. If I’m careful about how I use them, a wipe can be reused 2-3 more times before disposal.

Since I started using them, I’ve never had problems with the antiglare coating coming off.

I’m talking about all those Intel programs that come preinstalled.

“Intel device smart updates” “Intel audio control center”

That kind of garbage

Stop “non-essential work”…

But I bet they’ll still ship bloatware updates for Windows

Not sure what motherboard you have: Most consumer boards only support “FakeRAID”, which requires a kernel driver to actually function. Good luck finding a vendor who wrote a driver for Linux.

I’d definitely recommend software RAID instead, as you’ll have better support. I like btrfs, so I’d recommend you set up your new drives to use a btrfs RAID configuration. mdadm is another option, if you really like ext4.

I don’t actually like those big recliners they have in movie theaters. They’re too plush to be comfortable (if that makes sense) and the droning whine of the electric motor is annoying when someone adjusts their seat during a screening.

Are you an emacs user?

Try org-roam. It’s a similar system to obsidian, but fully open source. You have all the note taking techniques of org-mode, and all the scripting power of emacs.

Assuming that the disk is of identical (or greater) capacity to the one being replaced, you can run btrfs replace.

https://wiki.tnonline.net/w/Btrfs/Replacing_a_disk#Replacing_with_equal_sized_or_a_larger_disk

I’d recommend BTRFS in RAID1 over hardware or mdadm raid. You get FS snapshotting as a feature, which would be nice before running a system update.

For disk drives, I’d recommend new if you can afford them. You should look into shucking: It’s where you buy an external drive and then remove (shuck) the HDD from inside. You can get enterprise grade disks for cheaper than buying that same disk on its own. The website https://shucks.top tracks the price of various disk drives, letting you know when there are good deals.

As an emacs user, I use M-x man. All my standard keybindings make finding what I need very easy.

Of course, it’s not so fast if you aren’t already in emacs.

Our vacation days generally consist of stalking the area for good food and doing tourist-y things to fill the time between meals. My partner’s favorite thing to do during vacation downtime is to find more restaurants and cafes in the area for the next day, so hotel food is never a factor.

What you’re looking for is a revocation key. You can generate one in GPG at the same time that you generate your identity key. The method of securing it is up to you. In your example, a simple way would be to encrypt it with the 5 sequential keys. Or you could break the revocation key up into K parts with Shamir’s secret sharing algorithm.

This example assumes that you’re using existing Web of Trust PKI to manage your public keys: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/59664526/how-the-correct-way-to-revoke-gpg-on-key-server#62644875

“Remember: No PID”