• 10 Posts
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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2024

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  • I’ve had a very, very American week.

    It’s been shockingly cold (15-ish, but in Texas so that’s a life-threatening emergency), but all the money I’ve put into repairs and replacements of house stuff has kept me from completely freezing, just a little frostbitten.

    …At least, until tomorrow, when everything should thaw and I find out how many plumbing repairs are going to be required due to burst pipes/broken faucets/etc.

    And my LGS got all of my new guns in as a single shipment which they didn’t expect, so that happened a few weeks earlier than expected. Now to spend an infinite amount of money on ammo, accessories, and sundries.

    I’ve also got all the chicken coop and planter beds lumber and assorted other hardware sitting in the back yard waiting for a time wherein I won’t freeze to death to build them. Should be big enough for 4 hens, which means I fully expect to be a millionaire by July.

    I need to get some potato and carrot and onion seeds (yes I know, potato seeds aren’t really seeds) for the raised beds. I’ve decided I’m going to scale way back and just do some basic root vegetables instead of my more ambition leafy vegetables and fruits and herbs plan, because I just plain don’t think I have room to grow enough of that to matter.

    And I have my MSF course scheduled in two weeks, so assuming I don’t completely flop, I’ll be legally allowed to smear my entrails across the highway via an oopsie on a motorcycle.



  • Do you have a credit card?

    If you do, Oracle offers a shockingly generous free tier of stuff. 2 little baby EPYC VPSes, a 4-core 24gb ARM instance, and a bunch of other sundries including 10TB/month of data transfer.

    You can run a LOT of fediverse services on those free Ampere instances, and even something like GoToSocial will run on the little baby EPYCs.

    And to just cut off the incoming dudes: yes, Oracle is a shitty awful company with shitty awful policies run by a shitty awful billionaire, but that’s no reason to not take free shit from them.

    (And to the next group of people: I’m closing in on 4 years of free Oracle shit and they haven’t banned me, so I’m inclined to think all those stories are incomplete and they were doing something - mining, portscanning, hosting questionable shit, torrenting stuff, running a vpn that was abused - more than “nothing”.)



  • Universiality, basically: almost everyone, everywhere has an email account, or can find one for free. As well as every OS and every device has a giant pile of mail clients for you to chose from.

    And I mean, email is a simple tech stack and well understood and reliable: I host an internal mail server for notifications and updates and shit, and it’s rapid, fast, and works perfectly.

    It’s only when you suddenly need to email someone OTHER than your local shit that it turns to complete shit.


  • No joke.

    I’ve gotten to the point where I just don’t really play anything anymore because of it.

    You go ‘boy I’d like to see what new games are coming soon’ and you immediately land in a cesspool of people throwing a fit that there’s a black guy, or a trans girl, or a white chick that doesn’t make their little peepee hard, as well as any other awful sexist, racist, ableist swill you can possibly imagine all over every inch of anything that remotely looks like gaming media or discussion forums.

    I just kind of have quit looking, and just playing old games for the 2nd or 3rd time, despite the fact I would happily have bought anything that seems remotely fun a couple of years ago because I don’t want to subject myself to those morons, end up playing games with them, or like, having anyone confuse me as being one of them as you said.












  • In general, signal has proved they store no data besides the phone number itself, and in court they have only been able to give phone numbers.

    My problem with signal is actually this, because it’s only part of the story.

    Let’s say the FBI suspects you of doing something horrible, like say you played baby shark in public. They have good cause to believe you’re a Signal user, so they get a judge to authorize a subpoena based on your phone number, and Signal complies - and, yes, all they’re doing is confirming to the FBI that you have an account with them.

    Now they’re going to go after you with ‘We know you have a secret messaging app you use, Signal, and we know you used it to plan playing baby shark at the mall last Tuesday.’

    And so, if you’re not really clear on how all of this works, it’s a fantastic wedge to try to pry actual incriminating information from you. Or, hell, you let them look at the app on your phone negating the whole damn encrypted part in the first place, because you’re sure they already know.

    Properly secure messengers shouldn’t be tied to that level of PII, because, well, cops can still try to use it to bludgeon you.

    Maybe a little paranoid, but I’ve decided to embrace some of the paranoia since not doing so means you have to trust in the rules and policies that the law puts in place and well, uh…