Everything is just peachy this week except that I’m still trying to sort out why my I’m unable to access the internet when I’m connected to my unraid wireguard instance.

I am also finally ready to ditch my plex instance, too. Got some self-inflicted permissions issues sorted and it’s been smooth sailing for long enough that I’m ready to make the switch

Not sure why you think that. It really depends on the performance of the new parts. If they’re (pulling numbers completely out of thin air) 25% faster at the same TDP, then that’s definitely more efficient. At that point it you can just use PBO to tune performance down to whichever power envelope fits your use case

I’m not trying to build smokeless necessarily. Mostly, the rocks are for even heat distribution and appearance. I worry that the rings i bought won’t support flagstone, so it needs to look good without them

Either is fine, I’m trying not to break the bank on it though. The pit will be outside, below a high canopy but not covered/roofed. I’m also not sure where I’d even find some of the more esoteric rocks. Would chipped marble work here?

It’s almost 100% file sharing these days. Something I greatly lament. The entry barrier seems like it’s just too high these days. That could probably be fixed with better client software, but it would also require a willingness for folks to get on board with a “dead” platform. Lemmy growing as much as it has was nutty. I’m not sure that could happen again

Usenet never really went away, it just got quieter in favor of easier to use options. I still use it pretty frequently for the couple of things is really good for.

It’s a gross oversimplification, but think of usenet as a kind of early social media or proto-forums. Before websites, facebook, or anything resembling the modern internet took off, news groups were howl ike-minded people connected. You could post articles to various groups, sort of like a dead drop, and that post would be related around to all of the various providers based on who subscribed to whom. The user interface was very similar to an email client and you could look at it like sending email to a global address (with no user@ part)

The structure of usenet was based on dot syntax, with the topic scope becoming progressively more narrow as you went along. You would have things like: alt.books.scifi

alt.books.scifi.authors

alt.books.scifi.authors.asimov

or comp.software

comp.software.unix

comp.software.unix.compilers

with each of those groups focusing on more specific topics as they went down the hierarchy, and thousands of groups and subgroups.

Usenet was one of the first federated services, too. Due to how replication was managed, no one single server or host controlled it. Your server could go down, but any other server that replicated (federated) with your instance would have all the same articles unless they were marked as a “local only” group.

This is all very early in the internet, but i feel like this is the kind of thing that will save us in the end. Federated services, newsgroups, personal websites, and forums can free us from the shackles of Corp owned platforms. It’s amazing how relevant it still is for a technology spun up in the early 80s. Wikipedia has a great article on usenet that everyone on a fediverse platform should read to help understand how we got here and how quirky and weird and fun the old internet used to be (and hopefully can be again)

If you still have the original hardware, a flash cart might be worth looking into