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Cake day: February 12th, 2025

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  • Dolly Parton is urging Republican Gov. Mike Braun of Indiana to reconsider getting rid of her popular “Imagination Library” program, which provides free books to children ages 5 and under.

    “We are hopeful that Governor Braun and the Indiana Legislature will continue this vital investment by restoring the state’s funding match for local Imagination Library programs. The beauty of the Imagination Library is that it unites us all—regardless of politics—because every child deserves the chance to dream big and succeed,” her representative said in a statement.

    Indiana Republicans have cut the statewide program’s required matching funds from the new budget despite it being “hailed as helping to raise Indiana’s child literacy ranking from 19th to 6th place nationwide” and only costing the state $4.1 million over the last two years.

    “It was a disservice to remove it,” says Democratic Indiana Rep. Maureen Bauer.

    Most telling is that the state’s Republicans, who included school vouchers for wealthy families in the budget, didn’t bother to look elsewhere for savings.

    According to Rose Meissner, president of the Community Foundation of St. Joseph County, the matching funds needed equate to just $1 per month for every child in Indiana.

    Parton has run into this kind of ghoulish right-wing behavior before.

    In 2022, a Kentucky Republican state senator tried to censor Parton’s library as a part of the fascistic right-wing move to censor children’s education. But after getting an earful from a few million Parton fans, they quickly backtracked.

    The Imagination Library, founded by Parton in 1995, is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year and sends out more than 1,000,000 books every month to 21 states and 5 countries. To date, the program has given more than 270,000,000 free books to children around the world.

    The idea that the GOP would take away children’s books is unconscionable—but not surprising.







  • I have a 3d printer. Honestly, it’s mostly junk that gets printed. I like the idea, but the utility isn’t there. It’s a solution in search of a problem.

    But I’ve made a few neat things. My own design for cabinet and drawer hardware and some custom knick knack souvenirs for a gig I work on each year to give to the crew.

    What I want is a large library of 3d model replacement parts for things like my car, but they haven’t been made available so I’d have to model them myself and I’m not that good.


  • I second the super micro picks. They are relatively cheap and super reliable.

    Currently I run a 36 bay 4u supermicro server. It runs unraid because I’m lazy and it seems to handle the mismatched disks really well. Most of my stuff is now docker containers out of laziness. But I prefer VMs for production services. I built this box to also be able to handle external SAS cards in case I need to add another shelf. But I really wish unraid would support multiple pools of their main storage type. But I hope to replace all my disks with 22tb before I get to the next shelf.

    I used to run a 7 node ceph server for my storage. Which has a ton of benefits going into data warehouse stages. But it ended up being more frustrating than I needed. At least 5 years ago when I was running it.