I mean, the american dream was always a lie.

Perhaps in the 1950s maybe you could have had it as it was sold to you… as long as you were white, straight, and otherwise toeing the perfectly-normal-nothing-to-see-here line.

But beyond a very, very short period of privilege, it’s always been bullshit.

Maybe planet fitness can put it next to the free donuts?

what does the cid come up as when calling a landline with name&number cid? just ‘wireless’ and number or somesuch like some cell phones, the billing name (like others–what we don’t want. we use a line as a business line), or can you customize the names that show up with the number?

I have no idea, tbh.

I went to try to test, but it turns out I don’t know ANYONE with a landline phone anymore, so uh, I can’t.

I’m still on the trusting-the-banks: I have a lot of money in the largest banks in the US, and if they fail, we’re all fucked: if BoA and Chase and Citibank collapse, we’re all going to back to growing our own food on family plots and you’ll want a donkey and 10 acres more than anything else.

To that end, I’m spending a lot of money on what amounts to chickens, seeds, canned/preserved food, and bullets.

I mean, I may not need 5 years of seeds, and what’s close to a year’s worth of not-great-but-not-starving food stores, and enough ammo to clear out the 100 acre woods, buuuuut if you do need it, better you have it.

The problem is for people who have more than $500 to save somewhere: if I put half my assets in crypto, we’re talking north of $600,000.

I do not trust a bunch of people who think computer-generated monkey pictures are neat with great big piles of money, and until they stop acting like a cross between the stupidest shit you’ve ever heard and a poverty-spec casino, it’s not gonna fucking happen.

So yeah, I still trust the banking system more than I do putting it into even something like ETH or BTC, even if I’m doing self-custody, because I don’t trust a single player that’s involved will do anything other than immediately collapse if it reaches the point where crypto becomes more useful than real money and people start trying to pull usable money out of their portfolios.

If I can’t pay my bills and buy food, then I might as well have just invested in shiny pebbles.

If you’re running HomeAssistant, you can integrate the printer into HA, and have camera streams and full controls.

If you’re not running HA, well, this is not especially useful.

When I was a wee kid, I thought that scene from the Matrix where Morpehus explains that humans destroyed the whole damn planet just to maybe slow down the machines was stupid.

I mean if you block the sun, we’re all going to fucking die, why would you do something that stupid?

Yeah, well, the last few years has shown that actually at least half the people on the planet would be pro-kill-everything, even if that includes themselves.

So really, this take isn’t remotely shocking anymore.

Yeah that’s basically the same conclusion I reached: it’s perfectly cromulent until you run into something you need that it won’t do, and then there’s absolutely no way to make it work, period.

A lot of the final decision was based primarily around the fact that I just was not invovled in what friends and family members were doing, because I had become a pain in the ass to contact and so people just… didn’t.

Oh I wasn’t saying to not, I was just saying make sure you’re aware of what recovery entails since a lot of raid controllers don’t just write bytes to the disk and can, if you don’t have spares, make recovery a pain in the ass.

I’m using MD raid for my boot SSDs and yeah, the install was a complete pain in the ass since the debian installer will let you, but it’s very much in the linux sense of ‘let you’: you can do it, but you’re figuring it out on your own.

Mostly becasuse, well, I don’t like Android.

I’ve tried it repeatedly over quite a number of years, starting with the G1, and every time I’ve used it, my general opinion was ‘this is fine I guess, but I’d rather have an iOS device instead’. Excepting the two OnePlus devices: those were utter shit. One I was pretty sure was going to catch fire, and one that actually did catch fire. No more crap from them, seriously.

Will say the Nexus 9 tablet rates in the S-tier of all the tablets I’ve ever owned, though.

And I’m deep in the Apple ecosystem otherwise: Mac, iPad, Watch, AirPods and so on.

And, of course, I don’t think there’s a wearable smartwatch for android that integrates cellular stuff quite like the iPhone/Watch does in that it’ll share calls and messages on a single number. I know there’s a lot of stand-alone stuff, and a lot of non-cellular stuff, but the last time I looked there wasn’t really a seamless and cheap solution for leaving the phone at home and not losing any of the primary communication aspects of the phone.

Buy multiple drives, setup some sort of raid, setup some sort of backup. Then set up a 2nd backup.

Done.

All drives from all manufacturers are going to fail at more or less the same rate (see: backblaze’s stats) and trying to buy a specific thing to avoid the death which is coming for all drives is, mostly, futile: at the absolute best you might see a single specific model to avoid, but that doesn’t mean entire product lines are bad.

I’m using some WD red drives which are pushing 8 years old, and some Seagate exos drives which are pushing 4, and so far no issues on any of the 7 drives.

Make sure, if you use hardware RAID, you know what happens if your controller dies.

Is the data in a format you can access it easily? Do you need a specific raid controller to be able to read it in the future? How are you going to get a new controller if you need it?

That’s a big reason why people nudge you to software raid: if you’re using md and doing a mirror, then that’ll work on any damn drive controller on earth that linux can talk to, and you don’t need to worry about how you’re getting your data back if a controller dies on you.

Well knowing Elon, he’s probably paying minimum wage and also forcing the guy to clean his toilets and bring him tendies.

And complaining the entire time about how the tendies doesn’t have enough honey mustard.

I’m using their T-Mobile rebrand, and it’s just as good as T-Mobile ever was, excepting you don’t get any 5G access.

Though, tbh, I don’t care, since I’m paying $5 a month for 500 minutes, 500 texts, and 500mb of data. 5G would be a total waste since, I mean, even the 4G stuff can eat all my data allocation in like 30 seconds anyways.

I’m not sure where this “wants single-file variants” comes from.

I was having issues with pirated audiobooks stopping playback, being unable to resume playback, and losing playback status and location all the damn time, though this was a while ago.

The suggestion was to take these random audiobooks and condense them into one file, instead of the 15 tracks per disk, 20 disks per book mess they were, and sure enough that completely fixed the problem.

If it’s no longer an issue, cool, but for a while playback from books in lots and lots and lots of parts was flaky as fuck.

I still strongly dislike a lot of the dynamics around them.

They’re still privacy nightmares, they’re still running black-box software that’s not auditable and doing who the fuck knows what in the basebands, and they’re still covered in sensors running apps that are trying to scrape every byte of that data to profile you and sell that data to anyone who asks.

But, ultimately, I was spending too much time trying to stand on a principle that wasn’t really doing anything (I still use computers, and the websites of most of the apps I was using before, and still having a huge amount of data ingested since I didn’t live in a cabin in the woods) other than making my own life more complicated and causing shit like missing invites to things because my phone just didn’t get the SMS, or resorted the arrival order, or failed to download a MMS message or whatever whereas everyone on a modern phone was like, fine.

So I won’t say I’m all-in, or that I like them, or that I’ve even changed my mind that they’re little spy rectangles that are making us all stupid, but uh, too much in modern life is making the assumption you have one to completely unplug without losing an awful lot.

It’s just endless little things:

• How do you do TOTP 2fa on a dumb phone? You really can’t.
• I have to keep two copies of my media library, because the smart devices can play flac, and the dumb devices can’t
• I also have to keep two copies of my audiobook library: the smart devices play from audiobookshelf, which wants single-file variants, and the dumb devices need to be split into small chunks
• Zero access to any of the home automation stuff on the dumb devices
• Dumb phones are limited to SMS and MMS, and that dramatically impacts your integration with people on smart devices using iMessage or RCS, and you’re basically that guy with the shit that’s fucking everything up for everyone else
• Calendar sync? Nope.
• Contact sync? Also nope.
• E-mail? Good luck with that - if you’re expecting something important, carry your laptop.
• Wifi hotspot? Not on the phone I had, so nevermind about carrying your laptop, won’t do you any good.
• Voice mail? Sure, but good lord is ye olde dial-a-thing-and-hit-7-wait-no-8-damnit-i-mean-6 voicemail shit. Visual voicemail is 10000% less horrible

Edit: Also:

• T9 texting. I kinda got okay again at it but would not say it’s preferred anymore

And on and on and on. None of those are dealbreakers on their own, but it’s always something that either you can’t do, or can’t quite do right, or is actively a problem for everyone else you’re interacting with and you just… end up with so many little annoyances you’re not sure doing this makes any sense.

Hah was coming here to say basically this: if you’re always tired after sleeping, go get a sleep study. If you do have sleep apnea, absolutely nothing short of medical intervention will make a meaningful difference, and it’s an easy place to start.

Seriously, when did The Verge get a paywall?

Wokelax, Wokeachu, Wokevee, Wokemander…