I’m coming off of two years (and change) of daily, debilitating pain. I’m just now starting to get used to moving around on the regular again, and trying to get back into a shape that isn’t “round.” As a consequence of this, I also don’t have a job. During those two years, I spent more than seven months collecting doctor’s reports and paperwork to get coverage for the medications prescribed… In Canada! The stuff that was covered here would have absolutely bankrupted me in the US. (Yes, I got declined.)

No comment.

Whoever that guy is that does weird knife Wednesdays. He rocks.

Posting a selfie of himself holding a burger and a pop next to the “No food, no drinks, no photographs” sign in the secure datacenter?

A whole team called in sick on the same day, went camping, posted pics to Facebook, shared the pics at work the next week in front of the boss.

Not similar, but my old job sucked, hated my boss, hated many of my co-workers, and despised the company. I took a package out and am back at school, and don’t regret it for one minute. Fear of the unknown is how bad bosses keep good employees.

I checked, it’s still there! (It doesn’t append, it overwrites, so no, I just have a file with the current date and time accurate to within two minutes.)

I did the hackiest, lamest thing back in the day… I had my client write the current date and time to a file on the share every two minutes as a Cron job… Kept it working for months! I saw it on a forum somewhere, tried it, and… Shocked Pikachu face I don’t know if I ever disabled that Cron job! Haha!

I ran a mediawiki for almost exactly that for a while on a really old computer that was collecting dust. Eventually I turned it into a VM. I still have it somewhere… You could totally host that on linode or digital ocean.

There are a lot of problems, but there are a lot of things we aren’t worrying about now, either. AIDS was killing millions, and there was no treatment. The Satanic Panic. People were exposed to lead and asbestos everywhere. Duck and cover drills in schools for when the nukes went off. I mean, we’re all scrambling to figure out how to stop climate disasters, but then they were scrambling to stop some nutter on either side from pushing a button and ending the world! Where I come from, they still took kids away from their parents for the crime of being Aboriginal! Things change.

I choose to be optimistic. All through the twentieth century, overpopulation and mass famine were looming spectres, and better crops, phosphate fertilizers, falling birthdates all led to us not really being that worried about that. Read Stand on Zanzibar.

Crime rates are down all over the world.

The inequality? 1920’s. The FTC and the EU are (finally, IMO) taking big tech to task for their monopolistic behaviour. It’s moving slow, but there is starting to be the political will to address the challenges.

Things go in cycles.

I am in school, and make heavy use of Teams and Office, and do just fine in Linux! 365 on the web, Libre Office, and Teams in a Flatpak. My instructors can’t wrap their heads around it. I’m the only one in my program! (IT, no less.)

I have dyndns, have since they were 10$ a year, and I’ve gradually realized that my ISP changes my IP on average less than once a year…

I have it working with LaCP’d 4gb networking for the transfers. Five nodes. I agree though, It’s a beast on RAM.

I have tried a couple of Proxmox clusters, one with overkill specs and one with little Mini PCs. Proxmox does eat up a fair amount of memory, but I have used it with Ceph for live migrations. Its really useful to me to be able to power off a machine, work on it, then bring it back up, and have no interruptions in my services. That said, my Mini PCs always seemed to be hurting for RAM. So that’s my pros and cons.

I own the remake, and I actually had a fan site for it… And got to interview John Freaking Carpenter for that fan site, as he did the music for Sentinel Returns. It was exactly as awesome as it sounds.

Sentinel… From waaay back. Like, Commodore 64 age. I think it would be a perfect VR game, too.

WildStar got done dirty… It hit at the wrong time, but was so much fun. I could never get any friends to play with me. Le sigh.

You mean I didn’t need to spend years and thousands of dollars learning Linux and servers? Oh man! Oh wait, I’m getting ads in Windows on the start menu. Yeah, I’m happy.

There’s a series of Lemmy posts called the Linux upskill challenge that goes step by step through setting up and using Linux. I tried self hosting and jumping straight in too, and it sucked.

What worked for me:

1. Start using open source versions of stuff, like switching from Chrome to Firefox, Office to Libre Office.
2. Set up Virtual Box, and practice running server apps on Linux on virtual machines, until you’ve done a few Linux VMs and gotten used to the interfaces and commands.
3. Dual boot a laptop or desktop, one by one getting your daily use apps working in Linux.
4. Distro hop a bit. I never thought I’d land on Fedora, but here I am.
5. Get used to running and configuring servers from the command line.
6. Host some stuff with VMs and get used to the networking and bridging and stuff.
7. Containers!

I’m still in the middle of 6+7. Not super comfy with Docker quite yet, but getting there. I really do love having my stuff self-hosted though. Well worth the effort.

What I know: https://raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/A_guide_to_mdadm No need to do hardware raid, mdadm is great. I got an HBA card off of art of server on eBay, and have ungodly amounts of disk. Also, am ungodly power bill… You can stick regular SATA drives into a SAS Bay, but not SAS drives into a SATA bay. Some HP equipment is bitchy about non -HP drives, cards, etc. I saw a fair amount of “Do RAID 6!” But I found on my hardware that RAID 5 and a hot standby was moderately faster. Try not to mix drive sizes, it messes things up and wastes space. Have fun!

I have two old usb2 4tb drives attached, and the only issue I run into is a bit of delay at the start of a video in jellyfin. My jellyfin is running in a container in the Nuc though, not natively, and it’s a Celeron from a while back, so…