• Back up your data now
• Reseat the cables for the drive
• Run a self test on the drive - smartctl -t long - if it doesn’t pass, then the drive is trash. If it does, then it might limp along a bit longer before catastrophically failing

Not mine, but there is a certain compelling logic to this: https://bruces.medium.com/the-mysterious-visit-of-mr-babbage-by-bruce-sterling-2017-7c941028c4d8

tl;dr - accepted history is that Charles Babbage designed a series of mechanical computers in the mid 1800s, and the underlying theory behind them would go on to influence work a century later when the technology had caught up to the idea, but they were never built. There are a bunch of coincidences and unexplained meetings that suggest that maybe he sold his plans to Italy who then built one of his designs in secret. This is also supported by modern attempts to build a computer from his plans - there was 1 measurement wrong across tens of thousands of parts, and it worked perfectly. Babbage was a skilled engineer but to get all that correct, on the first go, entirely from theory is maybe a bit much

Yup, this - batteries are consumables. They have a service life of ~2-5 years depending on load. If the manual doesn’t tell you how to replace them then it’s basically ewaste already

Depends on what you need:

• As cheap as possible, but actually want a VM: OCI free tier will be way bigger than you will probably need
• Happy paying money but still want to learn about Linux things: I’ve had good experiences with Scaleway
• I just want something I can set up and not think about: don’t use a VPS. Architect your site as a pure-static site, stick it in an S3 bucket. You’ll probably be within the free tier unless you do absolutely bonkers traffic, and once it’s running you can leave it alone for literal years without worrying about patches or upgrades

3D TV

Good thing there hasn’t been any remotely exploitable security bugs in any of the mail system components in the 6 years since Debian 7 went EoL

Looks like it’s an x86_64 kernel though? So this is a VM - it’s not running as a paravirtualised system, it’s having to emulate everything from the CPU up?

If a project is hosted on sourceforge then its a pretty good sign that the developer hasn’t progressed their craft since about 2005, which is a pretty big red flag for anything

I learnt a ton about Linux by fucking up my boot config and being too stubborn to just nuke and pave

Iosevka is my personal favourite, but will need to spend some time scrolling through

Keycloak to provide OIDC, although in hindsight I should have gone with Authelia Authentik

At the rates I’m paying for 4G data, there are very few places in the world where it wouldn’t be cheaper for me to get on a plane and sneakernet that much data

There are very few things more obnoxious than an asshole with unsolicited parenting advice

With Bluetooth you could probably figure out which room a device is in - it’ll get you within a few meters - UWB will help you find which end of the couch it is under, at the cost of only working once you are within a meter or two

https://www.servethehome.com/everything-homelab-node-goes-1u-rackmount-qotom-intel-review/ would probably be a better bet for a router

I moved just about everything to Route53 for registration - I run my own DNS so I don’t need to pay for that, and it’s ~40% cheaper than Gandi for better service.

Now I just need to move my .nz domain (R53 supports .{co,net,org}.nz, but not .nz itself?) and the 2 .xyz domains that are “premium” for some reason so R53 won’t touch

Don’t disagree with you, but yeah - good luck with that

As long as someone is willing and able to maintain it.

It’s open source. All the work is either done by volunteers or by corporate sponsors. If it’s worth it for you to keep a GPU from the 90s running on modern kernels and you can submit patches to keep up with API changes, then no reason to remove it. The problem isn’t that the hardware is old, it’s that people don’t have the time to do the maintenance

For anything that is related to my backup scheme, it’s printed out hard copy, put in an envelope in a fire safe in my house. I can tell you from experience there is nothing more stressful than “oh fuck I need my backups but the key to unlock the backups is in the backups fuck fuck fuck”.

And for future reference, anyone thinking about breaking into my house to get access to my backups just DM me, I’m sure we can come to an arrangement that’s less hassle for both of us

So I pull out my keyboard

And I pull out my Glock

And I dismount your girl

And I mount slash proc

Cos I’ve got your PID

And the bottom line

Is you best not front

Or its kill dash nine