Good for you. I’ve been getting rid of a lot of brainrot fodder myself and feel a lot better for it. Also setting up time limits for apps on my phone and a bedtime lockout helps.

Good ol’ GE, such a quirky product line: coffee makers, jet engines, alarm clocks, gatling guns, washing machines, and nuclear power plants.

I’ve had small Debian servers such as a RaspPi or a NUC that I’ve never updated after the initial setup and they were still working perfectly when I finally turned them off to move. If you don’t want to update a Linux system, don’t. Maybe setup auto security updates if it’s going to be exposed to the raw internet and running some open servers.

You really should watch Lower Decks. It’s a lot of fun.

Fantastic, actually. There was this giant weight off of me, I could focus on my self and my space, and I had this sense of freedom that I hadn’t had in years. Yes, the logistics of moving took work and there were intermittent periods where I would be angry or sad about something from the marriage but they were short and just the pain of healing.

As a point of reference, I built a 32TB Synology last year. I took me an afternoon to get it done, plus set up Plex media server, all the arrs and friends, a backup server and a couple other things. Since then maintenance has consisted of remembering to hit the “update containers” button once a month or so. I should probably automate that part but just haven’t bothered yet.

A lot of NAS are capable of hosting containerized services. The Synology DS series, for example, can run everything you’ve mentioned and so much more. For a relatively gentle into check out https://mariushosting.com/

I recently moved, so not as well as at my old house which had solar and a whole house battery. We had several times where we lost grid power for a few days and it was annoying but basically fine. I had to turn off most electronics but we could keep the fridge and other important things going. The oven was gas so and I had a propane grill so cooking was sorted.

Now I’m in a five plex where everything except the water heater is electric and I don’t have my grill. I do have a small camp stove and a few fuel canisters. Mostly importantly I have a big camping battery and solar setup to run our CPAPs and keep the phones charged, plus a weeks worth of camp foods in our emergency bin. So, we’d be ok enough for a week.

EDIT: Water isn’t big of an issue as you might think. In most places, municipal water will continue to work for several days from gravity alone, and often has its own backup power systems or is on a different supply from the city. At the old house we also had a backup 55 gallons in a long term storage drum with treatment tablets and a calendar reminder to swap it out on schedule. I never ended up using the water in an emergency but it’s cheap insurance.

Same here. I’ve never watched broadcast or cable TV since I moved out of the college apartments. But I’ve gone in and out of watching shows, whether they were normal tv shows on dvd, YT series, streaming, or shows from 🏴‍☠️. And I’ve always got my news from the internet or local papers when they still existed.

Sorta. Recipes don’t qualify for copyright protection according to most countries, so there is an incentive in cookbooks to write more than just the recipe so prevent someone from just republishing the book. There is something similar with recipe sites, but it’s really more about the ad views from someone scrolling down since copyright violation on the internet is so common and relatively rarely enforced.

Exact same story here. I had lost evenings before I got mine, now I can enjoy a couple hours to myself after the kids are down.

For years I had about 90 minutes a day of podcast commute time. I did about one audiobook a month and kept up with several podcasts. It was perfect. Now my commute is 10 minutes door to door and while it’s more convenient in a lot of ways I miss my pod sessions.

Vapor locking is an interplay between a mechanical vacuum based fuel pump and carburetors that causes the engine to get starved of gas and stall out. It’s made worse at high altitude and particularly when ascending rapidly like driving up a high altitude pass such as Wolf Creek. If you’ve even needed to pop your ears several times while driving you’ve been in a situation where it could have happened.

Back in the day, the fix when it happened was to stop the engine and wait for air pressure to equalize through the system, which generally took about 30 minutes. Of course, this was on the side of a narrow twisty mountain road and people would sometimes get impatient or not know what was going on and flood their engine in a panic.

It’s pretty rare now due to electric fuels pumps and fuel injection.

For the same reason that everyone used the Knights Templar or Venetian bankers to pass messages and money.

EDIT: And you’re talking only 100 years ago. We had radios, telegraphs and telephones 100 years ago. It was reasonably common knowledge that it was possible to listen in on those even if you weren’t the intended recipient. Heck, part of the plot of The Count of Monte Cristo (1846) involves hacking a telegraph system with a MIM attack to manipulate international financial markets.

Honestly, it’s not as difficult as you might think. People have been using codes and cyphers as long as there has been writing and probably much before then. Explaining the need to keep things secret while communicating to people who are modern enough to have radio? Pretty easy.

Cars that would vapor lock when driving in the mountains.

Ooh! Time to give it another look.

It’s alway weird to me that even though Ubuntu has the largest Linux desktop market share, no one admits to using it.

Anyway, I use Ubuntu because I was doing a lot of ROS development when I last built a machine, and getting ROS running properly on other distros can be a pain.

Looking back… that was right, hmm, 7 out of 8 times. The miss was a very chill place that gave out Dells, but I lost my job because the funding round didn’t come in.

I remember having a few of these for WordPerfect, MS Word for DOS and Lotus 1-2-3.