The Brave Little Toaster. I loved that movie cause what little kid doesn’t want to watch a bunch of singing appliances? It’s actually a really good movie but the themes about existential crisis and the need for purpose are way over a kids head. Also, the clown scene gave me nightmares.

Bringing back Gnutella.

“When dealing with people, remember that you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion. Bristling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity.”

– Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People

Too expensive and unhealthy to be an “every day” luxury but I do love a good scotch and a cigar to unwind.

In my case:

If you’re falling in love with someone who’s “perfect”, you’re probably falling in love with someone who has an undiagnosed mental illness and is very good at pretending to be the person she thinks you want her to be, for a while.

She will spend the next 6 years making your life very, very miserable.

This is one advantage Gnutella had/has over torrents. Kind of like a federated content library. Too bad low quality content and malware were such a huge problem.

Like a geriatric Chihuahua.

Double edged sword. Jon would make a great President. But, I also bet he would be miserable doing the job and I would really hate to do that do him.

Some water systems have an insane amount of leaks. One house I lived in, the water and sewer plants were owned by the HOA. They estimated that they lost 75% of the water to leaks.

Agreed. I don’t understand why internet access gets treated as some sort of luxury when it is impossible to function as part of society without it.

Trying to force ISP’s to police their user’s internet traffic, as a means to stop piracy, is phenomenally stupid. All they’ve managed to do is make the internet worse for the average user while forcing a dramatic increase in the sophistication of piracy technology.

Hell, I would argue that the state and quality of pirated media is in some ways the best it’s ever been and the recording and film industries have indirectly contributed to that. Talk about irony.

Ah man. I grew up in an Evangelical Christian family, specifically Independent Fundamental Baptist. The most conservative of conservative Christians. The kind of Baptists who think Southern Baptists are “liberal”. I remember when I had my first girlfriend in High school and my parents thought I might maybe possibly have had sex one time. I had not. At least not at that point. They Flipped. Their. Shit.

During WWII the United States government rounded up tens of thousands of people, including many US citizens, and put them in internment camps because they looked sort of similar to the people who bombed pearl harbor. Why? Because fear is a powerful drug and when people are afraid, logic tends to go out the window, if there was any logic to begin with. If you pay attention to conservative rhetoric, you’ll notice that much of it is intended to stoke fear, while inserting themselves as the solution. They do it because it works.

Way out in the Arkansas Delta, in a soybean field 50 miles from anywhere, there is a memorial where one of these internment camps stood. If you aren’t looking for it, you’d probably drive right by it unnoticed. All around the camp there are these little voice boxes that you push a button on and it explains what you’re looking at. The voice providing the narration is none other than George Takei who was held there with his family as a child. Spend a little time at a place like this and it will quickly disabuse you of the notion that America has always rejected fanaticism.

“I’m going to get so much done today.” or “If I clean the house, it’s going to stay that way for more than ten minutes.” are just some of the lies I tell myself to help me stay motivated

I left Reddit because of their shenanigans. The Tiktok crowd deciding Reddit was cool was what guaranteed I would never go back. Now if anyone asks me if I use social media, I just say “No”.

We all need someone to look up to. Eventually YOU become the person that people look up to, especially if you have kids. I think about that often and it’s sobering because it’s a huge responsibility.

An ideas guy with all kinds of ideas.

…most of which are complete shit.

Oh, I wouldn’t if I could avoid it. The “fun” of tinkering with IT stuff in my very limited spare time vaporized many years ago. If I could pay for services that did exactly what I wanted, respected my privacy, and valued my business while charging a fair price, I would stop self-hosting tomorrow. But that’s not usually how it works.

Self hosting isn’t super high maintenance once you get everything set up but it still takes up probably 10-12 hours per month on average and I would not mind having that time back.

This is a pretty good summary. In enterprise networking, it’s common to have the ‘DMZ’, the network for servers exposed to the internet, firewalled off from the rest of the system.

If you have a webserver, you would need two sets of ports open, often on two separate firewalls. On the WAN firewall, you would open ports 80/443 pointing to the webserver. On the system firewall, between the DMZ and LAN, you would open specific ports between the webserver and whatever internal resources it needs; a database server for example.

This helps limit the damage if a malicious actor hacks into your webserver by making sure they don’t also have unrestricted access to other parts of your system. It’s called a layered security approach.

However, someone self hosting may not have the expertise or even the hardware to set up their system like this. A VPS for public facing services, as long as it’s configured properly, can be a good alternative. It also helps if you have a dynamic WAN IP address and/or are behind CG-NAT.

Edit: maybe good to mention that securing your local network behind a VPN, even one hosted on your local network, is more secure than allowing public facing services. Yes, it means you still have to open a port. But that’s useless to a malicious actor without the encryption keys. Whereas, if you have a webserver exposed publicly, malicious actors already have some level of access to your system. More than they would if that service didn’t exist anyway. That’s not inherently bad. It comes with the territory when you’re hosting public services. It is more more risky though. And, if the exposed server is compromised, it can potentially open up the rest of your system to compromise as well. Like the original commenter said, it’s about managing risk and different network configurations have different levels of risk.

“Hey Siri. How do I mark text messages as spam?”