The vast majority of TVs nowadays have really just become manufactured e-waste, mainly due to the piss poor computers they have running the “smart” features. Have a look at your local thrift store or Goodwill. You might find something there for a discount that will last a bit.

Nowadays, I probably wouldn’t buy a new TV. Too much malware preinstalled even if their smart features aren’t under powered. I would look instead at digital displays or larger computer monitors. It will bump the price back up to what TVs used to cost when I was younger, but at least your paying with cash instead of your privacy. Will probably last a bit longer to boot.

They still hold use up RAM even when the service is idle. I started with PIs for my home server. RAM usage was the reason I wound up switching to x86

At one point we called them USB chargers. Nowadays, though, I just call them e-waste. Every thing I’ve bought for the last few years has been USB-C, and chargers for those usually come with a 10w type A port.

I’ve only ever deleted one comment I’ve made. I was having a bad day, I was being overly pissy and inflammatory, and the comment didn’t add anything to the conversation. If I had been the mod of that community, I would have deleted it and possibly banned myself. Since they didn’t, I did. Once I came to my senses.

For the most part, though, I’m happy to leave my stupidity up for the future to see.

It’s been done before. ChromeBooks comes to mind, but there have been others. Usually winds up killing the outfit that tries it.

As far as I know Chromebooks only survive because of the educational market. Locked down devices are preferable in schools.

I won’t buy one, but I could see such systems becoming dominant in another 20 years or so.

Fetlife is the only one I can think of.

An irrelevant practice perhaps. Once you have the media and have stripped any DRM trackers aren’t generally a worry anymore, at least not from the media files. Other software on your system may be another question entirely.

Might ask around in [email protected] as to best practices, as they are generally pretty privacy oriented by necessity.

One piece of advice, backup that flash drive. Flash drives are not reliable storage.

Beyond that, I’m doing much the same thing for much the same reason. I’m a couple of terabytes ahead of you, though.

I wound up putting everything on a NAS and setting up remote access through Tailscale.

Can’t speak for your household, but ours is already there, by necessity. Shit’s gotten too damned expensive. At this point we’re buying only what we actually need with an eye on how to make it last as long as possible. And me and my wife make $140k combined.

There are things I can deal with and there are things I can not. I’m not about to waste precious resources worrying about things I can’t affect. I do my part when opportunity presents, but winter is coming, and Me and Mine are not yet prepared.

If you think you can change what is coming, then by all means, but I’ve got more pressing concerns at present.

That’s fine. My filters will just continue sending them to /dev/null.

First I’ve heard of that one. Nice. Looks like the same setup that Github Pages uses too, so should be easy to transfer the site if needed.

You have more control, beyond that… It’s not. Better to fully self host it, but not everyone has the capability or interest in developing the capability to do that.

Linktree is just a static site with a list of links. You could do the exact same thing using Hugo as a site builder and GitHub Pages for free hosting. All it would cost you is a custom domain name if you wanted one. Not sure activitypub brings anything useful to the table here.

I don’t generally read them to the minute very often. For the most part, 5 min increments are close enough for what I need, most of the time. If I do need a more precise time, I’m usually already closely watching the clock and it’s just addition (was 1341 when I started this, now it’s 1345.).

If I need to get the precise time, cold, than it’s as simple as: closest 5 min tick, then add or subtract minute ticks till you get to the minute hand

Eventually you get to the point where it’s not something you consciously think about. You just look at the clock and then pattern recognition takes over and you just know what time it is.

Meh, I don’t say anything online I wouldn’t say to your face, so the folks that know me would just be “Ya, that tracks.”

Might wind up on a few more government lists though.

Oh well. Winter is coming.

I tend to use a paper towel with a little bit of canola oil, after hand washing it lightly with soap and water.

My cast iron won’t win beauty pageants, but they are functional equipment, not wall decorations.

[email protected]

[email protected]

[email protected]

Scifi short stories are the only reason I go to Reddit anymore.

From what I’ve noticed, “not figuring it out” is often either a question of fine motor coordination or poor ear training.

Other times it’s outlandish expectations from yourself. Your not going to be playing "Money for Nothing " by Dire Straits for a while, but something along the lines of “Three Little Birds” by Bob Marley is probably achievable within your first week.

Fine motor control is mostly just a matter of practice. Use a metronome and start SLOW.

Ear training in this context is being able to map a sound in your head to a finger position on your instrument. Again practice, pick a simple melody and try to find that melody on your instrument.

As for what instrument. What do you want to play? You could get any instrument in the world, but it doesn’t matter if you don’t want to play that instrument.

I mostly play and teach guitar, you can easily get a reasonable instrument in the $300-$600 range. Sometimes cheaper.

Serviceable keyboards can be had for about $150.

I self host a lot of different things, some public (like my Nextcloud instance) and others are only on my home network (like paperless). Basically, if I know I’m going to allow non-techy folks to access the service I’ll consider making it public, otherwise it stays on my VPN.

Setting them up was mostly just downloading their docker-compose.yaml adjusting a few variables to suit my needs and then running docker compose up -d to bring them online.

For the most part, maintaining the service consists of making backups and just pulling the new containers when it’s time to update (docker compose pull && docker compose up -d).

As for hardware, mostly it’s just old desktops I’ve repurposed into servers. I don’t generally use VPSs unless it’s something I really don’t want to go down if my home internet goes out. Right now, nothing I have is running on a VPS, but the last service would have been my Matrix server. When I couldn’t get any of my friends and family onboard with it I shut it down and started using a public Matrix server instead.