4grams

Oh, I agree, nothing wrong with mint. I just like the fact that the LMDE version is Debian based and works with everything I’ve thrown it at.

Figure proof of they ever decide to switch away from Ubuntu and mainline LMDE. Probably won’t happen, but makes me feel better anyway :).

Seconding LMDE. It’s Debian based rather than Ubuntu so no canonical to un-f. It’s my favorite distro. LMDE for desktop, vanilla Debian for servers.

LMDE for future proofing and stability. Sort of a comedy option, but it’s my distro of choice. As easy as Mint, as stable as Debian. I just don’t trust Ubuntu and since it’s a Debian based distro, why not take one more step…

I’m in the same boat. I love that it makes self hosting easier for me. It does what I need and even gives me a small extra measure of security. I admit, I use it because I’m lazy, I could do it without Cloudflare and do for some services. So, I figure if it truly becomes urgent or intolerable I can drop it from the stack.

which is a nonconformist

Thank you for this, it puts it in terms that make a lot of sense. This really helps explain a phenomenon I see so often. I know a few folks who are certainly not pro-trump, but are very anti-political. I’ve been told that I need to shut up, and things would be fine once the next election rolls around.

These folks might not like what’s happening, but they are fine conforming to it.

Maybe it’s a me problem, but I think it’s going to take a little more work than the bare minimum.

I like ‘sloppers’ as a term for the morons distrubing and consuming the shit that the clankers are excreting.

He deserves a goddamned posthumous award. There will never a death more ‘billionaire’ than this. I mean this is cartoon level, over the top, absurdist level perfection.

I mean tell me, if you just saw the headline “Man dies after swallowing a bee at a Polo match” that your reaction is anything but “I wonder which billionaire that was.”

This is a great write up, not only in content, but also in spirit and tone. An enjoyable read beginning to end and inspires me to try more stuff.

I have a google voice number for that. Most things no longer accept it though.

I had delusions of trying to keep track of which address is sold by who which is why I did the hide my email addresses. But I’ve always kept separate personal and spam accounts. This was my attempt at combining to a single account.

https://xkcd.com/927/

Illogical meat brain that thinks odd numbers are more random that even I guess.

Don’t get me wrong, there are systems that work. I built up a very successful smart card based system many years ago after a failed audit. I initially hated the idea but in the end we built a crazy secure environment that was very easy to use and maintain. That project is long since obsolete but after doing that one, over a decade ago, I figured things were headed in the right direction.

I think I’m extra sensitive right now because my aging mom has made the issue acute. She’s not the same as she was a few years ago and helping her with all her online accounts has become a nightmare. It’s just too complicated for many folks.

Yeah, I’m up to 40 hide my addresses for that same reason. Figure if the password sucks, at least the email can be unique and obscure.

I call that a feature.

This shit pisses me off so bad. I had an identity theft a few years back, took ages to undo, and my credit score is still impacted by it. At the time I moved to a password manager and all my passwords are 31 characters of garbage. I’ve got several, highly sensitive accounts that my passwords don’t work for, in fact one a bank, until fairly recently, had repurposed a phone number field in the DB so passwords were limited to 10 characters numeric only (I managed to get one of their IT folks on the horn to explain why the password was so awful).

I cannot believe we live in 2025 and we still haven’t figured out passwords.

Very limited so far. I don’t have much near me but there has been enough sproradic connectivity that I pick up the occasional chatter in the default channel and have about 145 nodes it’s aware of.

Mostly been my son and I playing around. He wants to get his neighborhood friends involved :).

I’m building services out for my family as things enshittify. Moved the family over to an immich instance, run a family blog on Wordpress (working on rolling my own since it’s over complicated and with all the Wordpress shenanigans…), plex (lifetime account, works for now). I have a number of self-built projects as well, a “momboard” like system that is integrated with my Wordpress blog for access and control, a pi based backup server that lives at my friends house and nails a VPN connection to my router and I’m playing with Meshtastic as an offline communication system for my kids scout troop when we’re camping without cell signal. Lots of home automation with home assistant as well.

I host it all on Debian servers, raspberry pi’s and esp32 devices (Meshtastic and home automation). I used to run kubernoodles but it was more complicated than needed and for my use case, docker, ansible and bash scripts manage it all just fine.