Well, sort of. ACA plan carriers are private, but the advanced premium subsidies are provided by the tax payer. There are totally private companies that act as healthcare “navigators” essentially helping people navigate their ACA benefits. Those firms receive a payout on a per-sign up basis in most cases. I’ve applied both directly and with one of those firms, and it did make things significantly easier. I have no doubt there are sketchy ones that sign people up for services they’re not eligible for or make people up entirely. It’s no different from fraud medical device companies that collect the money from medicare for “selling” someone a mobility scooter or the like, but there’s no scooter and sometimes no person. Fraud does happen.

But it’s a distraction to the biggest fraud which is that private plans are funded by the US government in the first place. We have socialized healthcare already in the USA, just in the most painful, cruel, ass backwards, inefficient way possible.

I have two instances running debian on a lenovo think-something-or-other mini pc and a no name mini pc. Both are set for auto-login, and both fire up plex-htpc by default. I use a $10 remote I got off amazon that is “normal” on one side, with qwerty on the back. It also has a button you press to enable/disable a mouse cursor that you tip the remote around to control. Works well enough, and an old wireless mouse/keyboard stays tucked away if I ever need to do any real work on the system.

There were some annoying audio issues with Debian I fixed by nuking/reinstalling, but other than that it works pretty well as long as you know/are willing to learn how to write some scripts to auto-start some things. Plex-HTPC is 95% of what I use, the other 5% is using the browser to launch an owncast page that I stream… my bird-feeder… to for friends and family when they can’t access… my bird-feeder… in their market. It’s worth mentioning plex has DVR options if you’re willing to go that route.

Tl;Dr: Base regular setup of your choice as others are recommending, $10 remote off amazon, some scripting for start-up and some shortcuts on the desktop. I do recommend paying a bit more for a remote where the keyboard is backlit.

I know the names, but only that they’re F1 drivers because the ads for that are everywhere. Couldnt tell you who they race for.

My dumbass thought they meant “public figures”.

Mini discs! They never really took hold in the US but I had one and LOVED it. Rewritible media, but better quality than cassette. Sony made a killer player that only somehow sipped a single AAA battery, which was a big deal for a kid.

All hail MD.

Despite doing an awful lot with ESP32s, Home assistant, and a bunch of LoRa stuff, I know very little about BLE. Would it be possible for folks to voluntarily add their MAC to a data base on gitlab, and have a ESP32 program that:

1. Spammed out whatever the max reasonable number of random entries from that database is
2. Updated it every-time it was on a specified WiFi So that every time I drove by one of these, not only do I look like a spacehulk of TPS, headphones, cars and cellphones, but I’m specifically helping someone appear somewhere not their location as well?

Another fun eye/brain fact: There are two “outputs” for each eye. One goes to your occipital lobe, in the back, and really processes the image (“That’s a cup, it <holds liquid> <is firm with a medium weight>…” etc) and one goes to your brain stem, which processes movement.

It’s possible to have the connection to the occipital lob severed, but not to the brain stem. It’s a condition called blindsight. The result is that if you showed someone a cup, they wouldn’t be “see” it; they wouldn’t know what it is and wouldn’t register you were showing them anything at all… but if you tossed it to them they could catch it.

It’s sobering (pardon the pun). As a rule any industry that can advertise help programs, or “responsible use” only exists because of the lives it ruins. They know that, financially, those that keep it going can’t and won’t stop regardless of what is said.

You do you, but what you’re describing is when the gear does the most. Most accidents are close to home. Gear does help in crazy accidents, but for a low speed collision its the difference between being sore and permenant life changing injury/brain damage.

There is no garuntee a crash kills you. It’s not death you need to worry about.

I thought the meta-narrative around data structure and patterns (Enoch Root) against the Indiana Jones-esque adventures was absolutely amazing.

When I was a kid, my hometown was ~5-10 miles from one of the U.S. Great Lakes. I road my bike to the library one day, checked out some books, and set up outside in an old disused train station that had been converted into a sort of park. That parts relevant because of the piled up mound of rocks that made the track foundation meeting the grass.

As I read, I noticed a bird landed pretty close to me, I was thrilled to be watching them! But then I noticed it seemed to be limping, it’s wing was broken. There was a vet not to far, so I went into my backpack for a sweatshirt, and figured I might be able to safely wrap him up, and take him to the vet, who probably knew the number of a wildlife rehabilitation center or something.

As I approached with my sweatshirt though, it took off! Must not have been that hurt after all… I kept reading. The bird showed up again, it must not have been able to fly to far! I tried again, again it took off… repeat for hours until eventually, having made very little progress on my book, I went home.

… It was around a decade later I learned about the “broken wing display”. He was probably as confused as I was.

The collar does have BLE but I thought that would be a violation of my sisters privacy and I don’t want her to feel unwelcome.

Ii use esphome to flash the firmware on his shockcollar. Now when he barks the shock collar on my sister goes off and she gets him a treat.

Frankly you shouldn’t stop with just IoT devices. My sister wouldn’t listen to the HA so she’s not allowed over. It was a bit of a fight in the family but the dog listens so it got to stay and I think that’s totally reasonable.

A wall of ivy would be nice. Maybe make some planters that straddle the wall. If you need to “bribe” your wall neighbor there you could offer to have some hang over on their side to if they’re interested.

I JUST put together that the moto partnership means “buying a phone loaded with gOS” not “moto is working with gOS to ensure it runs smoothly on their hardware”. I was excited before but that is awesome

Had the “dadjokebot” jump in a tread about not having children in a subreddit for folks with a genetic disorder. The novelty of those bots wore out in 2013.

Get into Lora (meshtastic/core). When I settle into bed I check to see if my solar powered nodes made any friends or if the heltec I keep in the car pinged anything cool.

I did a meetup a few weeks ago and its a cool smattering of younger folks and HAM folks who go wayyyyy back.

People talk about it being useful in an emergency, and sure, but mostly it’s just cool.

Do you have tasker on grapheneOS?

LongFast for shitposts babyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy