Wxterior lights turn on and off with sunrise and set. It’s been running on a raspberry pi b for ages with Misterhouse. I’d like to change it over to something newer, but I automated it because I have other things to do.

I used to download school menus and expose it to my phone as an ical feed, but no longer need that. It still runs. I should shut it off some day…

I have an old one, maybe they were manufactured differently. The main part is a hard plastic. I never noticed a plastic taste, but it could also be the rubber/silicone plunger stopper that imparts a taste. They do now sell a glass one, but I’ve heard that it’s overpriced.

I know people who also swear by their French press. From what I know, regardless of the brew method, the grind is the most important factor, followed by the water quality and temperature.

An Aeropress. I bought it when work removed the free coffee and was super surprised at how good it tasted vs what they were serving. Later, I found a bean hand grinder that fits right inside the Aeropress plunger and now I take it on work trips, vacation and camping.

It’s not fully inclusive for $20 because you need a cup, some way to procure and heat water and beans but still, it’s served me well.

I keep my seedbox in the planter at the coffee shop down the road with free WiFi.

I couldn’t afford one of those fancy 2-cassette boomboxes, so I had my friend bring his tape deck and we put them real close together in the quietest room of the house and recorded that way. Having several siblings meant that there were no quiet places, so we used the empty garage when my parents were at work. The audio was autrocious, tons of echo and static, but I played that tape thin until it snapped.

Several countries require proof of ID to purchase a SIM card.

This worked well for me when I could see the screw and it’s orientation was the same as me viewing it. If I was turning it and it was rotated 90° away from me, I’d get it wrong. In physics class, we studied electromagnetic forces and I learned about the right hand rule which for some odd reason works better for me than righy-tighty. The Wikipedia article is long and the TL;DR is that if you use your right hand and turn in the direction of your fingers, the screw will move in the direction of your thumb.

Of course lefties are SOL as are folks without thumbs.

My mantra is “plan to be hacked”. Whether this is a good backup strategy, a read-only VM, good monitoring or serious firewall rules.

Do you remember the smell of a fresh box of crayons?

It doesn’t make sense to me that I don’t like drinking water. When I lived in the desert, I would drink it all the time, but it’s a habit that I’ve fallen out of. Strangely, I went back to the desert on a trip and immediately resumed drinking water again.

For me, I don’t like the taste. I can taste the chlorine and fluroride and other stuff in the water. I have an RO system with carbon filter and then I need to have it near freezing. Even then, I need to put stuff in it like berries, cucumber or mint. I don’t drink pop, sports drinks or other stuff like that. I do drink tea and coffee.

Yeah, my doctor told me that I’m dehydrated, so I’m trying.

It sounds like somebody needs to spend more time watching documentaries on the mating habits of freshwater fish!

Are you referring to the AI search results? If so, I’ve fallen into a similar strategy. I’ll search for something, usuaply how to do something then read the AI result. If it’s what I’m looking for, then I’ll click through to the referenced articles. The AI result is usually too vague. Part of my problem is probably bad searching skills on my part. I’ll often find what I’m looking for way down the first page or sometimes the second page of results. The AI cuts through that searching page after page or tells me that I need to change my search terms.

I suppose that makes perfect sense. A corporation is an accountability sink for owners, board members and executives, so why not also make AI accountable?

I was thinking more along the lines of the “human in the loop” model for AI where one human is responsible for all the stuff that AI gets wrong despite it physically not being possible to review every line of code an AI produces.

I was thinking about this the other day and don’t think it would happen any time soon. The people who put the CEO in charge (usually the board members) want someone who will make decisions (that the board has a say in) but also someone to hold accountable for when those decisions don’t realize profits.

AI is unaccountable in any real sense of the word.

I’m right there with you. I’ll try running again the day that I see a runner smiling while running.

Completely off topic… I saw a comedian in Arizona (USA) who said that his family was so poor that the family car didn’t have air conditioning installed. They didn’t want anybody to know that they were poor, so they would drive around with the windows rolled up.

It’s a VGA connection and, yes, my primary concern is resource usage. I’m running 2-3 VMs on it so that I can easily migrate the VM around.

I had plain old top and it was boring. I did not know how many alternatives there were.

I’ll also have to check out cmatrix.

This is an excellent idea!

Generally, no. On some cases where I’m extending the code or compiling it for some special case that I have, I will read the code. For example, I modified a web project to use LDAP instead of a local user file. In that case, I had to read the code to understand it. In cases where I’m recompiling the code, my pipeline will run some basic vulnerability scans automatically.

I would not consider either of these a comprehensive audit, but it’s something.

Additionally, on any of my server deployments, I have firewall rules which would catch “calls to home”. I’ve seen a few apps calling home, getting blocked but no adverse effects. The only one I can remember is Traefik, which I flipped a config value to not do that.