I keep my seedbox in the planter at the coffee shop down the road with free WiFi.

I couldn’t afford one of those fancy 2-cassette boomboxes, so I had my friend bring his tape deck and we put them real close together in the quietest room of the house and recorded that way. Having several siblings meant that there were no quiet places, so we used the empty garage when my parents were at work. The audio was autrocious, tons of echo and static, but I played that tape thin until it snapped.

Several countries require proof of ID to purchase a SIM card.

I use OSMAnd+. The searching is the biggest problem, so I will contribute to StreetComplete in an effort to improve the areas in which I travel.

When I do need a location that isn’t found in OSM, I’ll grab the coords from LatLong.net and copy/paste them into OSM. When I get to the destination, I’ll pop open street complete and fill in details in the hopes that next time will be better.

Not MENSA, but came to the unfortunate realization that I’m on the skinny side of the intelligence bell curve late in life. For me, I was frustrated that I could not easily relate my thoughts and ideas to others. I’d just get a blank stare or worse. I figured that I was dumb and everybody else knew something that I didn’t. So I kept quiet and kept all my thoughts to myself.

Many years later, I tried again to voice my thoughts and ideas, but would use lots of examples and references to areas where my listener may be familiar. That seemed to work.

It was only when I started talking about my feelings to others when I realized that things in my head work differently. I’m able to absorb information faster and deeper but also extrapolate those learnings to other unrelated areas.

My mantra is “plan to be hacked”. Whether this is a good backup strategy, a read-only VM, good monitoring or serious firewall rules.

Are you referring to the AI search results? If so, I’ve fallen into a similar strategy. I’ll search for something, usuaply how to do something then read the AI result. If it’s what I’m looking for, then I’ll click through to the referenced articles. The AI result is usually too vague. Part of my problem is probably bad searching skills on my part. I’ll often find what I’m looking for way down the first page or sometimes the second page of results. The AI cuts through that searching page after page or tells me that I need to change my search terms.

I suppose that makes perfect sense. A corporation is an accountability sink for owners, board members and executives, so why not also make AI accountable?

I was thinking more along the lines of the “human in the loop” model for AI where one human is responsible for all the stuff that AI gets wrong despite it physically not being possible to review every line of code an AI produces.

I was thinking about this the other day and don’t think it would happen any time soon. The people who put the CEO in charge (usually the board members) want someone who will make decisions (that the board has a say in) but also someone to hold accountable for when those decisions don’t realize profits.

AI is unaccountable in any real sense of the word.

It’s a VGA connection and, yes, my primary concern is resource usage. I’m running 2-3 VMs on it so that I can easily migrate the VM around.

I had plain old top and it was boring. I did not know how many alternatives there were.

I’ll also have to check out cmatrix.

This is an excellent idea!

The cash registers at a place I worked had this for the PS2 keyboard connection, too. IIRC, you needed to slide back a sleeve before giving the cable a tug. All this was behind the tight counter, buried under a layer of dust and whatever else fell behind the register. A skilled coworker could do it with one hand, but I never mastered that skill.

Generally, no. On some cases where I’m extending the code or compiling it for some special case that I have, I will read the code. For example, I modified a web project to use LDAP instead of a local user file. In that case, I had to read the code to understand it. In cases where I’m recompiling the code, my pipeline will run some basic vulnerability scans automatically.

I would not consider either of these a comprehensive audit, but it’s something.

Additionally, on any of my server deployments, I have firewall rules which would catch “calls to home”. I’ve seen a few apps calling home, getting blocked but no adverse effects. The only one I can remember is Traefik, which I flipped a config value to not do that.

This smells a little funny, as others have suggested. I read an article a while ago that suggested that we’re not running out of raw materials; we’re thinking about the problem wrong:

Chachra proposes that we could – we must – treat material as scarce, and that one way to do this is to recognize that energy is not. We can trade energy for material, opting for more energy intensive manufacturing processes that make materials easier to recover when the good reaches its end of life. We can also opt for energy intensive material recovery processes. If we put our focus on designing objects that decompose gracefully back into the material stream, we can build the energy infrastructure to make energy truly abundant and truly clean.

This is all outlined in the book How Infrastructure Works from Deb Chachra.

I read recently that the lidar on many self driving cars can wreck the CCD on most phones. I don’t know how it works, but maybe parking one of the cars by your front door will solve your problem.

The issue does not exist with the version installed from F-Droid. I think the Play Store version is a different build with the feature disabled as a condition of hosting it on the Play Sore.

The Android app itself still works with the permission, and we released new versions on the external F-Droid store. So the limit is a “purely” Google Play Store-related problem.

Mostly true, but a few months ago there was some reports of an automatic firmware update that blocked 3rd party ink or toner. It was probably my fault since I just bought a Brother and this sort of thing always seems to happen to me.

This reminds me, I need to learn how to partition my network to keep thebprinter from reaching the internet.

Cory doctrow frequently writes about how voting with your dollars is somewhat ineffective because then the richest people have the most votes.

I still boycott places, though.

I don’t know the building code for your area or if it would even work with the other stuff in the area, but the idea is to lay at least 2x2’s every 16", put Styrofoam between the 2x2’s, lay plastic or tyvek or some vapor barrier over it all then lay down plywood and carpet on top of that. It’s a lot of work to retrofit this into an existing space, but if you’re starting over, it may be worthwhile.

I had a townhouse on a concrete slab and in the winter, the cold would transfer through the concrete to the point that when it was below 0F, the water lines running through the concrete would freeze up.