You beat me to it. There’s something particularly effective about someone who basically never swears dropping a single “fuck” into a sentence and I get the same feeling here.

Good for you on overcoming Rand’s bullshit worldview. And, yeah, Threads is still terrifying all these years later. That, and When The Wind Blows.

By the time I’m fifty I expect I’ll wake up with sun beaming through the window and I’ll smile, stretch, lean over to the bedside table and just go full-on Hungry, Hungry Hippos.

Why would you think that?

SLAM “If I do upgrade to Business, will I be able to recline my seat without interrupting the person behind’s meal?” SLAM “And is The Grand Budapest Hotel still available onboard or do I need to download it first, goddamnit?”

Oh, yeah, my Home Assistant setup is fucking monstrous but also, crucially, self-hosted. Why the fuck do I want my thermostat and radiators to be talking via a datacentre in another country?

I only buy my plane tickets at the airport on the day of travel with handfuls of cash pulled from a carrier bag while wearing a blood-stained shirt. I punctuate that start of every sentence by slamming my first on the desk and the end of the sentence with “goddamnit”.

Personally I prefer the full range of motion offered by analogue.

The News. Repulsive, unbelievable main characters; insane plots; waay too many subplots; you can’t understand a story without reading the fucking Wiki or going two knuckles deep on a forum to get the backstory or just picking up on the mode esoteric hints; this whole annoying multi-platform thing where you only fully understand a story if you watch it on six different platforms (I had enough of that shit with the Matrix twenty-five years ago, thanks).

To be honest, I used to have an ISP with dynamic addresses and it wasn’t a huge deal. The address only changed every month or two. I used afraid.org’s dynamic DNS service to get a dynamic address that followed the changes and created CNAME records for my real domain pointing at that. The actual connection was fucking awful but the dynamic IPs never caused any problems.

As for services: Nextcloud is well worth looking into for file sync and photo backup, especially if you’ve already got a file server running.

I find IKEA’s ZigBee bulbs to be rock solid as well and they’re significantly cheaper. And another +1 for Home Assistant with Adaptive Lighting here.

The fundamental difference between religion/spirituality and science/reason, as far as I’m concerned is this: religion demands that you accept something as an indisputable truth and that questioning it is not only discouraged but forbidden and will be met with an arbitrarily horrific punishment (eternal damnation, etc), with what the specific something is dependent on the teacher, their interpretations and their intentions. As a mental framework, I don’t think it’s healthy for either individuals or societies to unquestioningly accept - or be made to accept - that any ideas are defacto sacred.

As it happens, I’ve just finished setting up a system exactly like this for a completely off-grid setup. I needed a Raspberry Pi running Home Assistant to be completely self-contained to monitor an adjacent, larger system that is only powered up intermittently (close enough that the two systems have a common ground).

Short version: the Raspberry Pi and the Huawei LTE router I’m using for connectivity draw a steady 9W between them (there’s a lot of monitoring going on). I went with an old pair of 80W panels in very suboptimal positioning, a simple MPPT charge controller and a 110Ah deep cycle leisure battery which costs about €45, €30 and €120 respectively. The system has been running a few months now and the battery had never, ever dropped below 12.4V. The Pi uses WireGuard to connect to my VPS so Home Assistant can be accessed with a web browser since the network I’m using on-site doesn’t do public IP addresses.

Sony WF-C700N. I’ve had my pair for a long time and I wore them on an Interrailing holiday, which included two days of cross-country hiking in Finnmark. In Northern Norway. In February. Not -40°C, admittedly, but below -20°C. They worked a treat and both have big, clicky physical buttons that are easy to use even through a hat, a thick scarf and gloves.

Something, something, neighbour’s lawn, sprinkler, something.

Please don’t work yourself into living a lie, the longer it lasts the harder it is both to maintain and unravel. My drinking buddies still think I’m the Vice President of Northern Macedonia’s body double. I mean, they’ve had three elections since then.

Understandable. Have a great day.

Have the replicator print a replicator that auto-prints identical copies of itself as often as it can so you can cause the collapse of reality without having to be involved.

Hell, have the replicator print a replicator without the 24-hour cooldown to hurry things along a little

Outsourced IT provider here:

90% of businesses have basically zero IT security. Leaked passwords in regular use and no process or verification for password resets. As soon as someone complains that 2FA or password rotation is difficult it gets dropped. Virtually all company data is stored on USB keys, plaintext hard drives and on staff’s personal home devices.

The reason they’re not constantly having their data stolen is because no-one cares about the companies either.