“Trump would have nuked it for us!”

Because I didn’t know it existed until now. :) I’ll have to look into that, thanks.

One evening our dog ran off into a ravine by our house. It was getting dark, so I grabbed a flash light and headed down to try to find him. A few minutes in, and I’m near the creek, with higher land to the sides and in front of me. I saw something move and played the flashlight around…at least 8 pairs of eyes staring back at me.

Part of the neighborhood’s cat colony (they’ve been TNR’d). It was a little unnerving to see that many eyes watching me like that.

Didn’t find the dog; he showed up at home about an hour later, happy as can be.

This is a tough one. The problem with local only backups is, what if there’s a fire?

I use Amazon Glacier to store my pictures. It’s $0.0036 / GB per month, so I pay less than $2/month for ~535 GB of storage that I’m using right now. There is also a cost for downloading, but if I need it, I’m going to be happy to pay it (and the costs aren’t crazy). Uploads are free.

(The other problem with Glacier is that it’s not really an end-user-friendly experience, nor is it something easily automated. I use SimpleAmazonGlacierUploader, a Java program someone wrote, to do it. You can also upload to S3 and have it archive things to Glacier automatically - I’ve never tried this but it should work.)

I considered getting my brother or a friend to build two storage servers (with RAID5 or something) that we’d each keep at home, and just sync to each other. Good if you have a friend or family member willing to do it (or at least host your offsite box). Down sides: Cost to build it, time to build and maintain it, cost to replace things that break, plus cost for electricity. I’ve been using Glacier for many years, so by now maybe I would have spent less on that theoretical backup system, but I also did not have to worry about it.

I started playing with Linux in the late 90s while I was in grad school. Slackware 3.x. I think I might have tried one or two others, but since I was somewhat familiar with Unix, Slackware was the easiest for me to learn.

I got them via CD ROMs; I’m pretty sure they came with a book on Linux (I think it included several distributions on CDs). I don’t think I have that book any more; I likely got rid of it long ago as it was badly out of date. But my memory is that it was published by Que, a publisher that I had good experience with on other topics. (dBase III, for example) I’m pretty sure it was this one…leave it to Amazon to still have it.

I recall recompiling kernel because it was “so much faster” (I cringe at myself now for thinking that - it probably wasn’t even true on my Pentium 133 machines). I also remember spending time trying to get X-windows configured, but I was successful. I think I was using fvwm95 window manager, a Windows-like experience. I started using Linux essentially full time pretty quickly.

A few times I got frustrated with Linux and tried to switch back to Windows, but the headaches of Windows always quickly drove me back to Linux. Linux is not perfect, but Windows is even worse.

I wonder what the wifi access in the school is like?

Page 3: Wireless infrastructure at all buildings, in 2015.

I have no idea why I remember mine, 520009. Haven’t used ICQ in many years; I didn’t know it was still up.

Isn’t it about time to fire up your space laser?

I have an old S9 right here on my desk. I cracked the screen, and took it to one of those screen replacement places, and he asked if I had insurance. I told him I didn’t, and he said, wellllllll it’s going to be a lot more expensive than you think to replace this screen.

That wraparound screen they had was basically also the frame of the phone - you’re not so much replacing the screen as you are moving the rest of the components to a new phone body. I wasn’t sold on value of that wraparound screen in the first place; this didn’t improve my opinion of it.

We put a plastic screen protector on it and a new case, and I used it for a few months until we were ready to upgrade phones.

This is fascinating. I’m reminded of a Mormon guy I (barely) knew that was murdered. If he didn’t have the chance to complete his ordinances, well, I guess no kingdom for him - through no fault of his own. Does he get a pass or is he screwed into lousy second heaven for all eternity?

The story: He was murdered by another Mormon guy over a woman. Murderer thought the woman was his last chance to find love and decided he was serious about it. It’s likely he murdered another guy the woman was dating a year or two before, but that case was ruled a suicide and closed - by the time the known murder occurred, all evidence had been destroyed.

Some kind of miracle, I know. Actually I got more messages, but many of them were either spam or never even made it to a date.

Welcome to the Dull Side.

Yeah…when I got the first IDE drive, it was like, “Wait, I don’t need to low level format it?”

“Oh what a mess we weave when we amiss interleave!”

Back when I was in online dating (I got married in 2010, so it has been a very long time), this is how it seemed to work in the hetero arena:

• Women (by which I mean, legitimate accounts from women who were actually looking for dates): Get 1,000,000 messages, approximately 999,900 of which are dick pics.
• Men: See 1,000,000 ads, of which about 3 are legitimate people looking for dates.

So, both could be true in relation to the image.

I remember a guy once telling me that basically you have to respond to EVERY AD and hope something sticks. I never did that, and I felt bad for what the women must have had to deal with when I heard that. I had very limited success - dates with, at most, two or three women, and none of those really went anywhere. I ended up marrying someone from work instead.

Anyone else remember having to set interleave on an RLL hard drive? “First you have to low-level format…”

Most cars I’ve used with it won’t lock until you put it in drive or start moving at a certain speed; I assume that’s because of incidents like this one.

Yep, we had a cat that would always go for the sink. Eventually I tried putting the water fountain away from the food, and she mostly stopped getting water in the sink.

Before I learned this, I had another cat while I still had a fish tank…I’d get home and find him on top of the fish tank, drinking the water coming out of the filter. The lid on that tank was not very solid, and I was SURE he’d fall in at some point, with disastrous results, so I got him a fountain water dish, and that stopped his fish tank escapades.

Is there a perception that arts are more likely to have gay and lesbian people? Dumbass would do anything to hurt them.

Nice work. I’ve replaced sisal rope on a few cat towers and scratching posts, but haven’t built one myself. Now you have me thinking…

I can’t find the exact quote right now, but I saw in another article he said something like, “If they don’t pay for advertisements, X will be gone. How sad!”

It seems Musk thinks he’s tending another Mona Lisa or some other world cultural artifact that society would hate to lose. Not some website that’s fairly easily recreated by, say, a bunch of hobbyists.