Cardiff, Wales. One of the few places in the world that felt like a Real City while also having its own distinct culture and feel. Every other city I’ve been to feels like the same sort of dull corpo-district monoculture.

Old Montreal also has a bit of this, but only the central city areas, the outside periphery quickly devolves back into the “this could be anywhere in North America (version francaise)”

When you fly on Air Canada there’s a unmutable ad for the Alberta oil sands right after the safety announcement before takeoff. It’s surreal enough, but it’ll be so much worse when they start doing this kind of shit too.

I don’t need artificial intelligence in my terminal. Do you know how many times some troll has posted about “rm -fr /” on Reddit and other shitty forums, which then gets gobbled up and laundered by LLMs? Not letting that anywhere near my prod servers with valuable data.

I believe it’s called a “stupidcharger” in this context

Gonna paint this on my roof to break some spy satellites

This appears to be some Philly folklore with no real source other than a silly Onion article from the 90s. It’s possible the Onion was spoofing a real thing that happened, or somebody just made it all up. It’s very funny either way.

https://www.theonion.com/sinn-fein-leaders-demand-year-round-shamrock-shake-avai-1819564253

Americans will do anything but build townhouses

This was my setup from about four years ago. Other than moving suricata elsewhere, it’s largely the same. Worth a shot if it’s something you’re into!

https://nbailey.ca/post/linux-firewall-ids/

OpenBSD is also great, I’m just more familiar with the Linux tools. All the required tools are in the base image, and they have a great official guide:

https://www.openbsd.org/faq/pf/example1.html

Yep. Firewall, routing, dhcp, dns, everything you’d expect from a gateway device. Plain Debian (or really any distro) can do it all. With a 1gbps bi-directional connection fully saturated it will run at about 10% cpu on my very crappy low power Celeron CPU.

Plus, there’s no web UI full of janky and insecure CGI scripts to exploit, and software updates are forever (well, until x64 is deprecated, so basically forever).

IPtables on Debian because I like my life to be boring and unchanging.

For about a year I was running a full out of band IPS on my network. My core switch was set up with port mirroring to spit out a copy of all traffic on one port so that my Suricata server could analyze it. Then, this was fed into ElasticSearch and a bunch of big data crap looked for anomalies.

It was cool. Basically useless because all it did was complain about the same IP crawler bots as my nginx logs. But fun to setup and ultimately good for my career lol.

Not an arch user, but it’s possible they moved dbus to a user scoped unit now. Might be possible to start it like this (or something similar)

systemctl —user start dbus.service

Eight years ago I could afford a one bedroom apartment by not having a car. That is not possible anymore. My $650 bachelor pad is now $1400 and wages have only slightly gone up. There’s now a generational divide between people in their late 20s and early 20s.

I mean it is possible to run your own authoritative nameservers on a server you own with a static IP. It’s a pretty irresponsible thing to self host, but it is possible :)

You’re absolutely correct. All automakers have abandoned small cheap cars because they don’t actually cost that much less to manufacture than massive tank-cars.

Imaginary example to illustrate this:

Car A: small hatchback with basic cloth seats, 50KWh battery, standard satnav/stereo system. With $2000 of materials, $10,000 of manufacturing and labour, and a sale price of $20,000, for a profit of $8000.

Car B: SUV shaped faux-luxury car with leather seats, 80KWh battery, the same stereo, and fake wood and chrome covered plastic all over it. $3000 raw materials, $15,000 of manufacturing and labour, but it sells for $65,000, this automaker gets a profit of $47,000!

It’s easy to see why they’re doing this. By making their cars enormous and expensive but with long financing terms they can create “mandatory luxury”.

The biggest reason they’ve been tightly coupled historically has been event notifications and invitations. It’s a lot easier for one email client to both create the event in the calendar, and send the event metadata (.ics file) to the invitees.

Nowadays, it’s honestly much simpler to have them entirely separate, at least for personal use. My partner and I use a shared NextCloud calendar which works well on both iOS and Android using CalDAV. Much simpler than Google/microsoft/icloud’s sharing options.

Bingo. If my boss asked for my piss I’d go straight to HR. Americans put up with so much insane stuff when it comes to work.

You can use pretty much any camera with ZoneMinder as long as it supports ONVIF or RTSP and has the right connectivity and power inputs for you. I did something similar with some cheap TP-link cameras with pretty good results. With motion activated recording, I have just shy of 12 month of recordings stored on a 500G SSD.

https://nbailey.ca/post/nvr/

High speed rail. It’s phenomenal. Want to go somewhere far away? Without HSR you’re doing an exhausting drive, a day-long ride in slow trains, going through horrible airports and paying for taxis on both ends. With HSR you go directly between city centres stress free and arrive with plenty of spoons to walk around. It’s a game changer.

Associated Press, Reuters, sometimes BBC and CBC. Most other news sources are just repackaged AP newswires with some commentary added.