I agree, the majority of Americans are decent, not racist or various forms of genophobic, and resisting as best they can. The government and media has merged into a monster. ii looks huge and scary; that’s by design. If you give up hope, they have won.

My two 8 month old, not-quite-kittens anymore have been tag teaming each other going into heat. We have had almost non stop yowling now. We need to wait 2 more weeks for their appointment. It’s a good thing I have earplugs, or would not sleep too well.

Other news, we made them a climbing wall with lots of activities, and they love it. We decided to keep them indoors. I have never done this before, felt pretty bad about it, but they don’t seem to mind too much, and we are determined to keep them from getting too boired.

That’s the problem, it doesn’t snow enough now… I used to be able to XC on trails in my hometown, now the snow is too thin and patchy. The ice is too thn on the lakes to be trustworthy. We get an extra 3 months of stick season, almost no snow season.

Have you considered GrapheneOS? Not an open source phone as you say, but it is at least open source software, running on hardware with published specs. It should be capable of everything you want.

Fuq yeah! I have a fancy Japanese bum-washer, it’s far better than anything in an office, and you don’t have to worry about what sounds or smells you make.

I help out people where I can. Some are great, and grateful. Some break things much worse, or insist that the computer spontaneously deleted their data. You do need to set boundaries, and be candid about your own: “You call yourself a computer guy?” “No, I call myself an embedded software developer, I haven’t touched a Windows box in ten years, other than yours”.

Do realize that a lot of people are genuinely victims of their own tech, these days. There are people who’d probably rather not use a computer, but have no choice.

How does one go about touching more turtles? We have plenty of snapping turtles in the area but I think trying to touch them would be risky.

The company I work for has few fixed holidays, but lots of discretionary time off, and very little direct customer service, so it’s an individual choice. Many people take the week between Christmas and New Years off. I don’t; I’d rather have extra time off when the weather is warmer and I can play outside.

Low key, but enough tradition to feel like an occasion. We had some ethnic food at my mother in law’s and went to the village green to look at the decorations. Small group for dinner, that’s good (for me) actually. The decorations are mostly for kids, and our child is in their 20s now, but still nice.

If anyone says anything is “a surefire way to make money”, they are looking for a Greater Fool on which to unload their position so they can actually make the money.

We have 3 of them: misc kitchen utensils and tools, misc containers, and misc stuff that does not even belong in the kitchen, but ends up there because that’s the only drawers in the house that don’t have clothes in them.

If you want to organize it some, you can build or buy dividers and split it up.

Hooks on the back of the bedroom door.

“Good”, as in " Good morning!", also directed at the cat, who had been sleeping on top of me.

I wake up each day with a beautiful female who loves me. The that she’s a cat does have some effect on the relationship.

Funny that, I did exactly that with that post… I probably run about 50% overall on these.

Sometimes I look at what I’m about to post and decide that nobody really needs to see that.

Sometimes I look at the other comments and decide I don’t want to interact with the whole thing.

Don’t get me wrong: this is endurable, I get along with most of these people OK, individually or in smaller groups. I also don’t want to end up like my other uncle, who is far away, old and essentially alone; I am the only person who talks to him on a regular basis.

So it’s a tradeoff. You can also be amused by everyone else running away from the rightwing uncle, him chasing them around still blathering. The vegans are actually pretty cool.

Compare all this with summer holidays,. Independence Day is big here. Burgers and beer, outside, play sports with the kids, go to the parade and watch the fireworks. No passive agressive matrons checking the guest list.

Immersion does work, but here’s a more enjoyable version:

Take 4 years in school, don’t learn enough to talk to anyone.

Marry a Latino/a.

Go visit their original country with them.

Feel like an idiot.

Practice with your spouse.

Go back and feel less like an idiot.

This has the advantage of getting a hot spouse, and slightly less likely to be killed before you learn enough.

Has anyone here used Mox? It looks interesting, but maybe a little immature.

I have been using modoboa, my installation is fine as far as it goes, but coming up a little short technologically these days, and the upgrade path is total replace. If you have or install Docker on your server, there are poste.io and docker-mailsever,which both look good. Running your mailserver in a container or VM is almost essential, for security, and so you can blow it away and start over if you make a mistake.

Running an email server is not necessarily hard, but it is stressful: if you have other users, even family, they will take it for granted when it works, and complain loudly when it does not. Like any server that others use. But, beyond security, I have a certain stubborn geek machismo about it, it’s a level of sysadmin above basic.

It’s a good way to pay for illicit drugs, weapons, anything really, that you ordered using TOR, or your favorite unattributable communications technique. If you believe there are laws that should not be, that’s good. If you are in favor of those laws, not so much.

Hate to sound ignorant here, what’s BD?

There are more French than English speakers with bad grammar? I find that difficult to believe.