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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • I’ve used a retired desktop for my home server since 1999. It doesn’t have the fancy web-UI management of commercial NAS, but I’m comfortable with command line and config files.

    At some point, I realized I could use its wifi card and hostapd to replace my WAP. That was a bit of an adventure initially finding a card that really supports AP mode and setting up hostapd, but has now allowed me to migrate from 802.11g to n to ac much cheaper than buying whole new devices,

    Recently converted to an N100 with 4x ethernet ports, which let me unplug my little 5-port switch.

    Managing this doesn’t feel like a second job: it’s stable and just works. Automatic updates, with kernel blacklisted; periodically log in, update kernel & reboot. It does give me the opportunity, when I get inspired, for a weekend project, like adding hostapd or a new service, either via docker or bare metal. I like that I have one device doing “NAS,” WAP, and router jobs.



  • Not the person you replied to, but a shoulder plane is kind of specialized tool. The blade goes all the way to the edge of the shoe, which lets you plane right up to square corners, such as a tenon, and the shoe is narrow, which lets you plane into grooves, such as dadoes, where general purpose planes won’t fit. The narrow shoe means you have to pay a lot more attention to keeping the plane square/flat to the surface, and the relatively short shoe means you have to pay a lot more attention to overall flatness of your work piece. If you need to true-up twisted & warped wood, a general-purpose bench plane will be a lot easier.











  • This is one of my pet peeves with containerized services, like why would I want to run three or four instances of mariadb? I get it, from the perspective of the packagers, who want a ‘just works’ solution to distribute, but if I’m trying to run simple services on a 4 GB RPi or a 2 GB VPS, then replicating dbs makes a difference. It took a while, but I did, eventually, get those dockers configured to use a single db backend, but I feel like that completely negated the ‘easy to set up and maintain’ rationale for containers.



  • I think a good part of MAGA are just contrarians: they’re against everything, but especially against anything that seems vaguely mainstream. Trump speaks that language complete with uncomplicated villains and one-sentence solutions. Trump is against his own policies as soon as they’ve taken hold. That’s how he keeps his base - [It] is bad, because of [these] people, but I’ll fix it.

    He can’t commandeer Epstein that way, because every possible Epstein-villain group includes Trump. The disciples who can still support him are stuck with the ‘God works through flawed messenger’ narrative, and that doesn’t work on the contrarians. ‘Flawed messenger’ is for the evangelicals who have an actual agenda and see Trump as a tool to work that agenda.


  • Mid-50s here. Maybe not quite as isolated as you. Stopped working (60 hour weeks) a few years ago; family all 4+ hours away - visit 2ce/year; couple of friends on the other coast I exchange daily-ish emails, but no hang-out-and-watch-the-game people.

    Everyone’s different, and I don’t really feel the emptyness you describe. I read, both print and web. I post on lemmy maybe 1/day, sometimes twice, sometimes not for days, but reading threads here, I think, satisfies my need for interaction, even if it’s just voyeuristically watching other people’s conversation. Video games, all single-player. Youtube cooking channels and a bit of my own cooking - can’t really cook that much for one person. Some wood/craft/metal projects.

    I thought I’d become lonely when I stopped working. Planned to look around for volunteer opportunities, maybe take up a yoga or other fitness-type class, but that loneliness or emptyness just hasn’t hit. I did spend a couple years sort of tapering off contact with the people I used to work with: get coffee on the weekend or consult on some project, but I haven’t even heard from them in years now.

    All that just to say: the people you see flourishing may just have a different experience of social satisfaction than you, and just because you see someone apparently happy in a situation doesn’t mean you can be happy in the same sitch. There’s lots of good advice in this thread, but you can start even smaller. Check in with a neighbor - make up some pretense if you need, like baked too many cookies, harvested too many tomatoes, can’t lift heavy-thing into the right place. If they aren’t complete assholes for that 5 minutes, try something else. If they are, try a different neighbor.

    On the ‘in case of emergency’ thing: the last time I needed a ride to a medical thing, because they won’t discharge you to Uber, my neighbor was right there. Lived next door to him for 20 years, but we exchange, maybe, three sentences in a month. I don’t even know his daughter’s name or the grandkids that visit periodically. I don’t know what I’ll do if/when I start to have medical stuff that needs recovery assistance. Maybe a home health worker. Maybe just hope I can hold out until Medicare will pay for inpatient rehab. But I was happy to see the ‘community pulls together to help its own’ phenomenon in person, even a recluse like me.