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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • University is ok if you’re starting at zero and don’t even know what’s out there. It’s for exposing students to a a breadth of topics and some rationale of why things are as they are, but not necessarily for plugging them into a production environment.

    Nothing beats having your own real world project, either for motivation or exposure to cutting edge methods. Universities have tried to replicate that with things like ‘problem based learning,’ and they probably hope that students will be inspired by one or two of the classes to start their own out-of-class project, but school and work are fundamentally different ways of learning with fundamentally different goals.


  • The Android app should still be fine. I’d expect Apple’s move to be followed by a lot of creators adding a “Don’t use the iOS Patreon app” to their profiles.

    I mean, apps that are just the website are a bad idea in the first place, but this specific problem is entirely contained to the iOS app. If some people prefer an app to a bookmark, that’s on them.





  • The politicians made sure to exempt themselves from all the consumer protection, anti-fraud laws. They live in bubbles where their own political agendas are too important for limitations.

    But I suspect, because my brand new phone number gets a lot of political spam, that 1) a lot of people can’t live with it and change their numbers to escape or 2) a lot of it is recycled burner-phones, previously used to launder donations to fit legal donation limits. But it’s given me a personal rule to never make a donation from my real phone or allow my real phone to become associated with any political process.


  • I came to MySQL and Apache because they were the backend for other services I wanted to start,. Later, when I wanted to build my own, I already had Apache running, so why would I add nginx? I did let other services add sqlite, but have (in most cases) figured out how to switch those to MySQL.

    All of that has been running for 20 years. I’m sure it would be good for my dementia-risk to learn how to start ngnix and migrate all those services, but it’s far more attractive not to mess with what works.



  • pihole, in front of my own DNS, because it’s easier to have them to domain filtering.

    mythtv/kodi, because I’d rather buy DVDs than stream; rather stream than pirate; but still like to watch the local news.

    LAMP stack, because I like watching some local sensor data, including fitness equipment, and it’s a convenient place to keep recipes and links to things I buy regularly but rarely (like furnace filters).

    Homeassistant, because they already have interfaces to some sensors that I didn’t want to sort out, and it’s useful to have some lights on timers.

    I also host, internally, a fake version of quicken.com, because it lets me update stock quotes in Quicken2012 and has saved me having to upgrade or learn a new platform.





  • It’s even easier with digital broadcast. I finally had to give up my PCI tuner, because who puts PCI slots on a modern mobo? $25 will get you a USB TV tuner capable of getting all the OTA and cable channels. I used to get, like, 7 analog OTA channels - ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, and a regional independent - but I get 30 digital. All the majors have added 3-5 channels of SD reruns or other filler. I mean, it’s mostly shit, and the only thing I actually watch is local news, but for a one-time $25 cost, it’s a great supplement to streaming.

    My biggest problem with MythTV is it doesn’t interface with streaming, so I use Kodi on the frontend to source from mythtv, netflix, hbo, or whatever.