That’s false. You can literally not only feel heat from, but you can in fact set things on fire with, a completely monochromatic green laser with a wavelength exactly in the middle of the visible spectrum. No infrared, no ultraviolet. Lots of heat transfer. You could do it with an ultraviolet laser too if you were careful enough and could get around ultraviolet’s tendency to destroy molecular bonds completely before they even have a chance to burn chemically. It’s not just lasers either, any light source is going to deposit energy in the form of heat on anything that light touches. Any light contains a large amount of energy and some of it will get absorbed by anything it interacts with, and that’s still true whether it’s infrared, ultraviolet, somewhere in between, or all the above.

Infrared has a special relationship with heat, yes, because of the distribution of blackbody radiation, but “No” is absolutely the wrong answer here. The right answer is “Yes, but… it’s complicated”.

Tell that to Bosnia. NATO can do whatever it sees fit. It’s an organization that operates entirely by consensus. If they have consensus, they can do it.

Oh absolutely. Smart TVs are completely under the control of the technology and media companies with very little hope for freeing them, except that you can still plug a computer into them to bypass all the “smart” features and just use it as a dumb screen with a smart computer instead. But they always seem to put a few new stumbling blocks in the way of both those options every year. That loophole will eventually get closed, it won’t happen overnight, but they will keep eroding the functionalities and convenience of doing so until few if anyone wants to do that anymore.

Cars are nearly a lost cause too, except where regulations say they must use some standard like OBD2 for “emissions reasons”, although that is obviously a limited scope and manufacturers try to find any ways they can to sabotage it or otherwise avoid it. Appliances and “smart homes”, all the way down to the light bulbs and LEDs, have plenty of proprietary, locked down, unrepairable technology in them too despite reliable open standards being available. The war for total control over our digital devices is in full swing and there’s no area of our lives from large to small that isn’t a battleground. People need to keep prioritizing the freedom of their devices because once they get these technologies and features entrenched it’s going to be very hard to work around them.

I mean, they did it with phones too. Android is just Linux. That was one of the main attractions, for me at least.

At first, many people and groups supplied their own phone OSes. There was a whole thriving community ecosystem. Then they started to make it really hard, locking bootloaders and including critical pieces of hardware that didn’t or couldn’t have open source drivers (look up WinModems for a very early example of this technique, it remains really effective) or otherwise required extremely convoluted methods to access and the phone might function marginally without some of these fully functional, but at least you could still install a custom ROM on it if you were stubborn enough.

But even that wouldn’t last. Nowadays they’ve made it literally impossible to defeat the security on most phones, in the name of keeping hackers and criminals out, but really a big part of their motivation is blocking these pirate OSes that let you actually control the hardware and software in your phone, doing criminally nefarious things like stopping them from downloading ads (the horror!) and preventing them from funneling all your data and activities back to Big Brother (how rude!) and worst of all updating it with modern functionality after they’ve declared it “obsolete”. The goal going forward is to sell you things that you don’t and can’t control, so they can shut them down or make them gradually more and more useless and make you buy new ones forever. They want you to have a subscription for everything including physical objects without realizing that you’ve been forced to subscribe to their regularly-scheduled-disposable-device-replacement-plan for no actual reason.

They’re coming for computers too, or at least they’ll try. They want control of everything we interact with. For profit, mostly, but I wouldn’t rule out other motives. It’s a powerful thing when you have control of everything people see and do.

Magsafe is a really great idea, it’s just a shame Apple came up with it first and I can’t wait for it to be the universal standard for all types of external connectors forevermore. It’s as close as we can get to wireless without being wireless.

Never had a single functional problem with Nextcloud, other than the fact that it’s oppressively slow with the amount of files I’ve shoved into it. Mind you I also don’t use MySQL/MariaDB which I consider a garbage-tier DB. Despite Postgres not being the “Recommended DB” for Nextcloud it works perfectly for me. Maybe that’s the difference.

Nah, I wanted to love NixOS, and granted it seems like a perfect fit for my recommendation, but a bunch of things about it rub me the wrong way. It’s just not for me. I’ve always been most comfortable with Debian and that’s what my setup script is designed for. Lots of apt.

I would need to factory reset the whole server for that, which would be … highly inconvenient for me. It took me quite a long time to get everything working, and I don’t wanna loose my configuration.

This is your actual problem you need to solve. Reinstalling your server should be as convenient as installing a basic OS and running a configuration script. It needs to be reproducible and documented, not some mystery black box of subtle configurations you’ve forgotten about ages ago. A nice, idempotent configuration script is both convenient and a self-documenting system for tracking all the changes you’ve ever implemented on your server.

Once you can do that, adding whatever encryption you want is just a matter of finding the right sequence of commands, testing it (in another docker perhaps) and then running your configuration script to migrate your server into the desired state.

$400 is pretty steep. That is probably more than a lot of the computers this would be plugged into.

I can’t live without my Nextcloud + Email server. Having all my personal files, contacts, email, calendar, and other personal information immediately accessible synced and backed up with a single app on any device or platform I want to use, is a dream come true, and I get to do it without any Big Tech, avoiding their lock-in and privacy invasion and without any fees or limits beyond my own hardware.

OpenVPN is how I can access it from anywhere in the world, so that gets an honorable mention too.

That’s kind of like seeing a story where a car crashed into someone’s living room and saying “I don’t see the benefit of having houses” even though:

• This is very rare
• Not all sites have equal risk of this happening
• The alternatives you would likely propose have even bigger risks.

It’s possible but not likely or common. Glass is stronger than most people give it credit for. Most “hollywood” glass is actually panes of sugar. You could certainly arrange things so that the gun’s pressure wave has a good chance of stressing and breaking glass, but it would take special preparations and effort and the gun would probably have to be very close to the glass. It’s almost unheard of for it to happen normally unless you specifically shoot at the glass.

Someone like mythbusters could probably test this pretty effectively, but based on my experience around guns and glass, I suspect they’d come to the same conclusion.

A not directly related but still interesting video was done by the slowmo guys on youtube

It’s veeeeery not standard in Canada. I use it on my phone and most people who see it on the lockscreen treat me like I’m an alien, and it’s about a 50/50 mix of people who simply think 24 hour time is weird (but at least recognize it) vs. people who seem genuinely baffled by the digits they see appearing on my phone and don’t even seem to recognize it as a time at all.

A Dockerfile is basically just a script that starts a container image (ranging from standard Linux OS installs like ubuntu or debian or alpine to the very specialized pre-made containers with every piece of software you want already installed and configured and everything unnecessary stripped away) and then does various stuff to it (copies files/dirs from local, runs commands, configures networking). It’s all very straightforward, and if you know how to write a bash script or even just a basic batch file that’s pretty much all its doing, and the end result is a container, which is basically a miniature Linux virtual machine (that is supposed to be “single purpose” but there’s no technical limitation forcing it to be)

The simplest way to create a container is to use a standard OS container as I mentioned and install the software you want exactly as you normally would in that OS, using the OS package manager if you want, following tutorials for that OS or installing manually using the instructions from the software itself. Either way should work fine. Again, it’s basically not much different from having a virtual machine running that OS. You can even start up a root bash prompt and install it that way if you prefer, or even connect over ssh by running an sshd server on it (although that’s totally uneccessary and requires extra work).

For basic Dockerfile syntax, look at other people’s Dockerfiles and realize you probably don’t need 90% of the more complex ones. There are millions of them out there, you should be able to find some simple straightforward ones and just mimic those. Will you run into “gotchas”? Sure you will, Docker is full of them, and when you do your Dockerfile will get a little more complex as you find a way to deal with the problem Docker has created for you. Here’s a pretty simple tutorial example of a Dockerfile that just installs a bunch of packages from Debian and doesn’t even run any specific services, or alternatively here’s a Dockerfile that does nothing but run and configure an ssh server like I mentioned above (again that’s totally unnecessary normally but the point is you can certainly do it if you want to!)

Counter rant: This is why we built encryption and VPNs many years ago. This is a solved problem, but rather than solving it you’d rather just complain ineffectually about it. The solution, the product of years of work of technical people and privacy people, is sitting right there staring you in the face available for you to use as a free service, a paid service, or your own self-hosted service. Use a VPN, that’s what it’s for.

“GL iNet” has a dizzying array of products and some are designed for this (you can find them for sale on the usual scumbags). Surprisingly, for a niche brand you’ve likely never heard of the firmware is surprisingly robust and has a small but loyal community. Expensive, and you might not want to carry an extra piece of hardware to provide a bulletproof VPN connection, but worth it for the security IMO.

No good reason, just historical inertia and resistance to change. People stick to what they’re familiar with, either the imperial system or to common metric units. Making a “metric ton” similar in size to an “imperial ton” arguably helped make it easier for some people to transition to metric.

Megagram is a perfectly cromulent unit, just like “cromulent” is a perfectly cromulent word, but people still don’t use it very often. That’s just how language works. People use the words they prefer, and those words become common. Maybe if you start describing things in megagrams other people will also start doing it and it will become a common part of the language. Language is organic like that, there isn’t anyone making decisions on its behalf, although some people and organizations try.

I don’t think they know about metric prefixes, Pip.

Imagine if the marketing people discovered that they could advertise that it has 19 million uWh (in Doctor Evil voice). Don’t say it too loudly though, someone at Apple might hear.

If you can prove beyond any reasonable doubt that someone is ignorant of facts, and then sure you can call it obvious and good. But when nobody can agree what is reasonable, why is your perspective of good the one everyone must follow? It’s not always obvious. Don’t pretend it is. And things that are reasonable and obvious to you aren’t necessarily reasonable and obvious to others. You aren’t willing to embrace the diversity of human experience and opinion, so you won’t get the benefits of that diversity. Just because someone else has a different idea doesn’t make it wrong. If you think literally every idea that isn’t exactly the same as yours is wrong, then we’re wasting our time here anyway.

So again, why is your path the one we’re picking? Even if I do agree with it, I am not willing to agree to it blindly, I want to know why we’re supposed to follow your advice/instructions/demands. At gunpoint or otherwise. And that’s why I’ll never follow a totalitarian, because totalitarians never have to explain themselves, and generally won’t. I hope you brought enough bullets if that’s your plan.

Godot is looking much better to me today than it did yesterday.