I donate about $5/month to a bunch of nonprofits that I benefit from.

• Debian project
• openbsd project
• wikimedia foundation
• EFF
• Internet Archive

My career wouldn’t exist without these folks, so it’s the least I can do.

I choose not to think about it or include it in my mental threat model, the same way I choose to not worry about thermonuclear warheads.

If there’s some exploitable backdoor and Intel gets owned, we’re all boned and there’s nothing we can really do about it. I don’t have anti-ballistic-missile systems, and I also don’t have the capability to make an entire hardware/firmware/os from scratch.

So instead focus on the things you can control and are more likely to happen. Don’t plan for doomsday, plan for every day.

The problem is that this also applies within a radius around a “port of entry”. So everybody that lives within about 100 miles of the coast, an airport, or a rail line that crosses a border — which is probably about 80+% of any country.

Cardiff, Wales. One of the few places in the world that felt like a Real City while also having its own distinct culture and feel. Every other city I’ve been to feels like the same sort of dull corpo-district monoculture.

Old Montreal also has a bit of this, but only the central city areas, the outside periphery quickly devolves back into the “this could be anywhere in North America (version francaise)”

I wish I was the right kind of creative, greedy, and dull to come up with this kind of crap. I could scam so many bald billionaires.

If it’s cheap, sure.

When you fly on Air Canada there’s a unmutable ad for the Alberta oil sands right after the safety announcement before takeoff. It’s surreal enough, but it’ll be so much worse when they start doing this kind of shit too.

I don’t need artificial intelligence in my terminal. Do you know how many times some troll has posted about “rm -fr /” on Reddit and other shitty forums, which then gets gobbled up and laundered by LLMs? Not letting that anywhere near my prod servers with valuable data.

I wouldn’t put a lot of trust in Telegram. Not only is their cryptography off by default, it’s a bespoke hand-rolled non-standard algorithm that might not work as well as they say. Oh, and it’s been potentially backdoored by the FSB (Russia’s CIA) for six years.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/telegram-reportedly-ordered-to-share-encryption-keys-with-fsb/

It’s crazy how the US gov basically handed him a monopoly on EV charging infrastructure, something Rockefeller could have only dreamed of, and the guy throws it away less than two weeks later in some ketamine fuelled stupor. Then has to backtrack at the cost of reputation, confidence, and sentiment. Truly another great stable genius.

I did it back in 2020 when we all had nothing better to do. Got as far as installing X11 and Openbox, and halfway through setting up the toolchain for Firefox.

It was fun - the kind of fun digging a big hole is. It’s not for everybody, but I sort of enjoyed it.

A decent solution is to install shairport-sync on the Pi and advertise the service over multicast dns (Apple bonjour protocol). This effectively creates an AirPlay device on the network that’s usable from any iDevice. This had a very high “wife approval factor” when I did something similar at home.

https://docbot.onetwoseven.one/linux/airplay/

It’s unlikely but not impossible. I’ve been using PM with a custom domain for about five years now, and never thought too hard about leaving.

In an ideal world, a company like ProtonMail would be cooperatively owned by the workers and paying users, sort of like a credit union.

Pragmatically, they’ve done fine stewardship of the service for the last decade or so they’ve been around. A big part of it is that their value proposition depends on stability and trust. But it could be better.

The bastards can never take away your shell script full of arcane and unreadable curl commands parsed by incomprehensible awk scripts!

In my opinion it points to a more dangerous thing, “continuous delivery” software mindset seeping into safety critical systems.

It’s fine, good even, that web developers can push updates to “prod” in minutes. But imagine if some dork could push largely untested control system updates to your car’s ECU… it’s one thing for a website site to get a couple errors, but it’s a very bad thing if it makes your steering wheel stop working.

Unfinished products make more money, and it’s high time a consumer protection law clamped down on this.

Going to go against the grain a little here and say, why bother? If you already have a background in Linux, that will get you further in your career much faster. My education was 100% windows/cisco, but I haven’t touched either in the better part of a decade since I’ve been working with mostly “web stuff” where Linux dominates.

Invest the time you would spend slogging through learning Active Directory and grinding MCSE into something useful like Docker, ansible, bash, infra-as-code, etc. It’s more fun, and it’ll make you way more money!!

I guess this is the next chapter in the endless middle-east war. The British & French got exactly what they wanted when they drew up those borders. It’s truly tragic how many people are going to die in the next decade because of religious and nationalistic despots and their egos.

Canada- my standard breakfast is oatmeal with homo milk and 2 spoonfuls of maple syrup or brown sugar, depending on the season. I try to get the maple syrup from the Amish/Menno dudes out in the country.

Breakfast cereal is a scam invented by a psychotic incel, but oatmeal is cheap and a good source of fibre.

I’ve been using Thunderbird with the OWL and TBSync plugins for exchange for years with good results. Obviously some things won’t work (teams integration, provisioned signatures, mail merge, etc) but it’s good enough that I only need proper outlook/OWA less than once a month.

Another option is “installing” the webapp as a PWA. I tried that for a bit but found notifications to be unreliable.

It’s fine. RAID is not a backup. I’ve been running simple mirrors for many years and never lost data because I have multiple backups. Focus on offsite and resilient backups, not how many drives can fail in your primary storage device.