Up front cost and maintenance time is the one that really gets you as things age and software packages get retired or require systemic updates that break other things in the system. Containerization helps a lot but isn’t perfect.

I used to run opnsense on a Xeon blade in my old C6100. It worked well enough but was a waste. Now it’s just a stock ER605 without the Omada controller.

I’ve been running mine for over 20 years. It’s certainly got more difficult, especially to be able to reliably communicate with Gmail-hosted servers and outlook.com addresses, but SPF, DMARC, and DKIM are all pretty straightforward to set up. Tightening the encryption/hash algorithms you accept and “anonymizing” your server greetings takes some finesse as well, but I definitely prefer it this way.

I avoid the entire webmail and spam filtering aspects, smtp(s) and imap(s) only.

I find that is very rare. It was kind of popular for a few years but thankfully that’s gone away for the most part.

Like I tell my children, allowing yourself to act in such a way is harmful to yourself. It’s not going to make you an evil person or something, but that kind of behaviour is corrosive to your soul. How you think shapes how you behave, and your behaviour trains your future self. Be good to yourself. It’s not about the clanker; it’s about you.

Wonder if this coffee maker is running Java…

Absolutely. I refuse to rely on cloud anything after being bitten too many times: company gets purchased, unstable pricing or service changes/discontinuation, data trapped in someone else’s server, internet or service instability… 100% self hosted is the safer, saner, more predictable option.

Automatic code formatting, and failing a PR due to an automatic formatter is lazy and wrong. Code formatting should be a (strong) set of guidelines, but never a hard and fast rule. Every code base ends up with some section that is visually easier to understand but breaks the formatting check.

I will concede that tabs can be a bit too wide when you end up nesting a bunch of stuff

Nope, that’s a code smell; if your code is veering off into the rhubarb because you’re nesting like crazy then that’s a signal to break up your function. 8 char tabs help you code better.

Except when some chucklehead used two character intents. This is why tabs are superior; if you want to be squinty, be squinty. The rest of us get 8 char intents that make the logic easy to see.

I rather liked stackoverflow, and was fairly popular in the electronics one. I never found it overly rude, but there absolutely were certain individuals who were.

I mourn its inevitable passing; I haven’t found anything that worked as well as it did, and the fact that you can get the data dumps is awesome.

I’m 50, and on my computer an awful lot. I use Reddit/Lemmy/X/Mastodon but that is about it social media wise. No Facebook/Insta/Tiktok/etc. I also haven’t had cable/satellite TV in 25+ years, so perhaps not typical for someone my age.

My dad is almost 80 and has zero interest in social media/tv. He’ll watch the occasional YouTube video about something sciencey or about whatever project he’s working on, and might catch a movie on my plex server or a DVD from his small collection once a month or two.

I do see others my age (or his) glued to social media, but from my very limited data set I don’t think it’s some age related brain rot that will get us all.

yep and I/O isn’t terrible to add. A CP2112 USB <–> I2C module is like $5 on amazon (and way less on AliExpress) and gets you an I2C port and a few GPIO all controllable through Python or libusb. The FT232H or CH347 modules are similar and offer SPI as well.

Heh, on my iPhone it wants to open an NFC reading app for the sea otter geo: link

Then why give the assignment in the first place? I’ve actually started declining to interview if a programming assignment is required. I’m a senior embedded systems engineer; if I can’t give you the confidence that I know what I’m doing in a standard interview (whiteboard problem solving is fine) then it’s unlikely I’ll be able to get the job anyway.

I use tab complete a lot to find a file/path. would cd /foo/some<tab>/more<tab>/desti<tab> get you there any easier?

That’s the gotcha. It’s exactly how the judge should have ruled, but that’s what common sense would say, and contract law doesn’t require the contract to adhere to any kind of common sense.

It’s the kind of hole in a contract I’d have expected any competent contract attorney to catch, but perhaps the farmer didn’t use one, which is unfortunate.

And don’t forget to hallucinate often

I wish I could upvote this more than once.

I tried bluesky. It feels too curated and for lack of a better term, politically correct. I don’t engage with the morons on Twitter, but I find that even today the interactions are far more real and less “polished”.

I’m also on mastodon but I’ve had a real tough time finding my crowd there which is odd, but I think it’s because it’s too fragmented. My lemmy instance is awesome and I really enjoy using it, but it too suffers not having the same crowd as Reddit. Reddit won’t have that problem for too much longer though, judging how intent they are at burning down their empire for a little bump in stock price.

I think it comes down to choice; on Twitter I can simply ignore/block the morons. On bluesky it feels so much more “behave or we’ll ban you” and I’m not cool with that. That’s exactly how Twitter was feeling right before Musk took it over. He screwed a lot of it up but it’s come back in some surprising ways, which is why I think most people have stayed. It’s just not that bad, and you have (mostly enough) control over what you see.

And I’m a 30 year veteran EE who designs a lot of high speed and RF gear. There is zero chance ferrous metal rods to repair the headphones as described would have any meaningful impact on the Bluetooth connection.

You’re technically correct that metal in the vicinity could possibly have some measurable impact on the 2.4GHz radio, but your theoretical scenario is a practical absurdity.