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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)ON
Posts
15
Comments
228
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • I worked on a product that was only allowed to return 200 OK, no matter what.

    Apparently some early and wealthy customer was too lazy to check error codes in the response, so we had to return 200 or else their site broke. Then we'd get emails from other customers complaining that our response codes were wrong.

  • 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.

  • No thanks. I'm good.

    Jump
  • A story I heard was that it was the poor indigenous farmers who were forced to cultivate coffee for the Dutch. They weren't allowed any of the beans they grew, but were able to collect it from the dung of civets that prowled around near the plantation. Of course, once the colonizers learned that it tasted "good", it was commoditized too.

    Might be apocryphal.

    1. Study free materials available online.
    2. Take free practice tests.
    3. Look for license exams in your area, or take an online one. Exam fees in my experience have been ~$25 and go towards whichever club is proctoring.
    4. Pay the $35 FCC licensing fee and get your callsign.

    Theoretically, that's all you need. It's possible to use certain internet linked amateur transmitters for no cost as long as you have a valid callsign. However, I promise it's a lot more fun with a real transceiver. You can buy a bare minimum, highly hackable handheld VHF/UHF transceiver for as little as $20.

    Or you can slowly give your soul to the moneypit of HF equipment...

  • If it's just for movies, consider an Intel ARC A380.

    Small, cheap, great transcoding performance, and its drivers should be shipped by default with most distros. It really can't do games though.

  • In the USA, property taxes are how most towns and cities get the majority of their funding. 200€/year would be crazy low.

    In my medium cost of living town (USA), taxes come out to 4, sometimes 5 figures a year. Plus as the area becomes more desirable, property taxes (based on the sale price of a home) go up for recent buyers.

  • You could replace the systemd service with a systemd timer. Not sure how often you reboot, but maybe once a week would be sufficient?

    You could then wrap it in a script that checks for packman's db.lock file. It would sleep as long as the lock file is present, which indicates that an update is active.

  • 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.