I’ve heard stories of grad students flat out refusing to work with HF. (Never relevant for me, other than being something very scary.)

Having kids has made random conversations somewhat frequent for me.

Something that I found super interesting learning about amateur (ham) radio was that antennas don’t always work “backwards” as you’d expect. From Maxwell’s equations they obey reciprocity, so it stands to reason (or so I thought) that an antenna that’s good at receiving is also good at transmitting.

But it’s not true! It turns out that the noise floor of the environment — in part due to atmospheric stuff like lightning — is so much higher than the sensitivity of radios (well above thermal/Johnson noise) that an inefficient antenna can be a really good antenna for receiving, in certain circumstances. Namely, if a receive antenna is inefficient but has good directionality, it can be useful…but probably no good for transmission!

It’s not super profound or anything, but I found it pretty interesting.

Remember that RAID and redundancy is not backup.

Try to 3-2-1, or something similar/better, if you can.

I am fairly sloppy here, and I am also very cheap. I have multiple copies in my home for important stuff (mainly Immich), the in use copy being on SSD and a few backups on spinning rust. I have a raspberry pi with an external HDD at family’s place, with a daily rsync+snapshot, for off site backups.

Of course, I’ve never had a catastrophic failure, so who knows how smooth that would be…

I switched to Technitium and I’ve been pretty happy. Seems very robust, and as a bonus was easy to use it to stop DNS leaks (each upstream has a static route through a different Mullvad VPN, and since they’re queried in parallel, a VPN connection can go down without losing any DNS…maybe this is how pihole would have handled it too though).

And of course, wildcards supported no problem.

Maybe take a look at Outline. (Not affiliated, but I host it for myself.)

I also host KitchenOwl, but mostly just as a grocery list.

Nice Dali-esque chair!

The dot-com bubble burst, but…well, it got better.

Of course there were some casualties (famously pets.com), but Microsoft, Cisco, Intel, Amazon…yeah they got their clock cleaned at the time, but long term they were pretty successful.

For all the problems with tech companies, having a chunk of compensation be in the form of RSUs isn’t the worst idea ever. (I know it’s not specific to tech companies, but it’s generally a very prominent aspect of tech company compensation, Netflix notwithstanding.)

At this point, they no longer obey the laws of classical physics, and the resulting quantum phenomena — known as relativistic effects…

This is…not how I would word things. Atomic physics is usually not in a classical (Newtonian) regime, and a quantum treatment is standard.

Adding relativistic effects to the quantum treatment is also standard, but many aspects of e.g. the hydrogen atom are reasonably well described without relativistic effects, though of course relativistic effects do matter.

Nitpicking aside, neat stuff!

I’m really really glad that I get root on my work computer.

Well, smallpox was definitely harmful to humans, and it’s a virus which is different from an animal.

(…and yes, I know that “harmful to humans” often means “good for the planet.”)

This louse was reportedly not harmful to its hosts.

Kinda interested to hear an ethics of science type argument for/against this human-made extinction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teledildonics

Will anything concrete change in your life — will you get kicked out of your home, will you suddenly be financially responsible for things you previously weren’t, etc.?

If it’s any consolation, a lot of us don’t feel like adults, and that’s ok! My kids seem to think I’m a grown up, so I managed to fool them at least.

Just keep learning as you go, and ask questions. We all love talking about things we know/have experience with (just ask the average Lemmy user what Linux distro you should install…), and there’s basically no such thing as “cheating” when it comes to figuring out how to be an adult.

One day at a time!

“Can the US lose in a way that allows the crazies in office to save face in their eyes?” seems an important question to me. Because if the options are the US clearly losing vs. the US clearly losing but nuking Iran so everyone loses…

“…I really don’t want to have to wipe the thing because it’s running a headless OS”

I feel like logging in as root on a headless system and hoping you type the command(s) to restore functionality is a rite of passage.

…or is it about an hour from damn time? I can never remember.

I’ve been pleased with it. Family is very relaxed about projects like this, but yeah it’s low power draw. I don’t think I have anything special set up but the right thing to do for power would be to spin down drive when not in use, as power is dominated by the spinning rust.

Uptime is great. Only hiccups are that it can choke when compiling the ZFS kernel modules, triggered on kernel updates. It’s an rpi 3/1GB RAM (I keep failing at forcing dkms to use only 1 thread, which would probably fix these hiccups 🤷).

That said, it is managed by me, so sometimes errors go unnoticed. I had recent issues where I missed a week of rsync because I switched from pihole to technitium on my home server and forgot to point the remote rpi there. This would all have been fixed with proper cron email setup…I’m clearly not a professional :)

Not the same, but for my Immich backup I have a raspberry pi and an HDD with family (remote).

Backup is rsync, and a simple script to make ZFS snapshots (retaining X daily, Y weekly). Connected via “raw” WireGuard.

Setup works well, although it’s never been needed.