I was given a pair of HP ProLiant G6 rack servers for free from an IT director I had connections with when he was doing a routine hardware upgrade. Probably saved him some bucks on e-waste disposal costs. I kept one for myself and I gave the other to a like-minded friend.

I had no experience with homelabbing at the time. Was hoping this would be my foot in the door. Unfortunately that was the day I learned that enterprise rack servers from the pre-2010s sound like vacuum cleaners when they run. (They probably still do, I imagine, just maybe to a slightly lesser extent. I'm told enterprise hardware these days isn't so much pursuing incremental leaps in speed and power as much as it is pursuing energy efficiency and noise.) Because of all that noise, I ended up not using it, as I have nowhere I can stick it so it can scream and not bother anyone. Ah well. It was a fun experiment nonetheless and cost me nothing.

I set it up in a LACK rack, which I still have. These days it's just a slightly ugly, deceptively heavy coffee table in my living room. Might as well just toss it out at this point.

My office at work has a number of mildly curious things decorating it. Nothing alarmingly strange, but silly all the same.

Our office is one of the few separated rooms in our building (most of it is a large open room), and it has a typical false ceiling covered in square foam tiles. Evidently, the previous tenant cut holes into several of these tiles to serve as drop points for cables that they had run through the ceiling. Prior to us moving in, they must've taken out all such equipment and, to restore the look of the main space, swapped out all damaged tiles with pristine ones from the ceiling in what would become our office. That means we have all of the ones full of holes. We also happen to be immediately below where the aircon is blown into the building (in short, the duct abruptly ends and vents directly into the cavity above the false ceiling, and no, I do not know why they did this), making our room exceptionally cold, to the point where we sometimes run space heaters in the summer. At one point, we jokingly hypothesized that the cold air was leaking through those holes in the ceiling tiles and making our room too cold, so as a joke solution, we crudely plugged the holes by stuffing them with random trash we happened to have lying around. That being, loose plastic bags from the gas station and grocery store, and some bulk toilet paper packaging wrap. Due to some of the bags being a burnt orange color, we came to refer to these eyesores as our "Halloween decorations". For over a year, we had several people enter the office, ask about the bags in the ceiling, and become bewildered at our assertion that they were Halloween decorations, particularly because it was June.

Our office has a tall, narrow window looking out into the main room next to the doorway. We usually have this decorated with those cheap gel letters designed to stick to windows and spell out generic phrases that you can pick up at dollar stores. We amuse ourselves trying to come up with clever anagrams with the available letters. Currently, we have a set that is intended to spell out, "hello spring", but is arranged to read, "no girls -- help".

On the wall in a cheap picture frame from Walmart is a printout of some of the dumbest code we've found in our repository (we're software developers), to forever enshrine it in infamy. Sometimes when deep in thought about a complex problem, we ritualistically gaze upon it in hopes of receiving a blessing of inspiration.

My coworker, with whom I share my office, has a very small mirror frame photograph standing on his desk, perhaps about 8cm tall by 5 cm wide. It portrays an image of Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung (this one, specifically). He refuses to elaborate why. Hiding behind the tiny print is another nearly identical tiny print of the same image, except he has photoshopped it to give both of them fatter bellies and put a large, cartoonish dent in each of their heads. At random intervals, he swaps the two prints when no one is watching to gaslight people who visit his desk.

Honestly? Still haven't found one.

The communities I've found are all fine, but I haven't found any that are a tailor match for me. Every one so far has either been not quite my cup or a ghost town.

I'm mostly sticking to All and interacting with posts I like as I see them, with no real care given to what community they are from. Individual communities don't have much for me, but all of Lemmy combined holds my interest decently well.

I don't get boxers either. It's just going commando with an extra step. The sole thing you stand to gain (support) is nonexistent with boxers. I don't know why people bother.

I feel like I've invited everyone in my family to go on a great, grand vacation away and I'm the only one who's packed.

From their perspective, you're the fringe idealist who wants to move to a strange, remote place because of nebulous political ideology they neither understand nor wish to understand. And you are proposing that they uproot all of their preexisting social connections, support infrastructure, comfort, and familiarity to come live with you out in the middle of your scary, unfamiliar dystopia. Or, at least, force them to book a redeye flight and stay at a suspect hotel every time they want to visit you.

And honestly, you really are the fringe idealist here. Look at where you are posting this. Look at how few of us there are. Look at how many hoops you needed to jump through to set up what you have now. I certainly don't think you're wrong to champion privacy-focused ideals, but it absolutely is, strictly speaking in a populist context, extremely weird. It is weird to want to understand computerized tech, to know what it actually does, and to make bold, against-the-grain choices based on that knowledge. This is the unfortunate reality, and you have to make your peace with it.

I really do think your option is binary here. Join 'em, or cut 'em. Once you've shot your shot to convince someone to be more consciencious of their privacy and to take action to better secure it, and they frustratingly decline, that's it. They are not coming with you. Further pressing the issue will just drive a wedge between the two of you. At that point, the choice is yours. What's stronger, your willingness to stay conected, or your principles? Are you so rigidly disciplined that you're willling to cut ties (at least, through these channels) just to keep it? If so, I guess that's just a reflection of how much your principles really mean to you. If not, well, it's SMS/RCS and Google Docs for you.

Obviously it depends on the specific kind of support and the hotline I am calling, but if it's a complex issue, and the support hotline is a national toll free number that's clearly outsourced to whatever crummy T1 support call center, I don't even bother with details. It just confuses them, and I know they have a script that management will fillet them over not following even if they know what to do. Just mash A through the script and save the effort for T2 and higher.

Who knows. Sometimes that T1 script catches things you missed. It's designed to weed out the simple stuff, after all. When you directly leapt to more advanced troubleshooting, sometimes you leave an obvious step behind.

I always start off by telling them "I know what I'm talking about, I work in IT, let's skip the basics, I've tried it all already." but they sometimes still don't listen.

They don't listen because, unfortunately, for every one person telling the truth, there's probably at least three people who don't have an iota of a clue about their system but lie about it because they think claiming they're an expert is a cheat code to getting better support. Ruins it for the rest of us.

If only shibboleet actually worked...

Humans have best retina stimulation in blue light, not green light.

The real reason I suspect the light happens to be green is that green phosphor is relatively inexpensive.

Blue light could be disruptive to circadian rhythm while green light is somewhat less so, but I guarantee this was not part of the calculus here. It is just being thrifty. Circadian rhythm benefits are just a happy accident.

The replacement for the JavaScript Date API is on the cusp of finalization.

They just got an RFC proposal approved by the IETF for an extension to the way datetime strings should be serialized that adds support for non-Gregorian calendar systems. That seems to have been the last round of red tape holding them back. Now it's just a handful of bugfix PRs to merge and browsers can begin shipping implementations unflagged.

You can watch the progress here if you find it interesting. In the meantime, there is a polyfill out now if you want to get started with it.

I keep my 160GB iPod Classic on life support.

I think the clickwheel design is, in my view, the single best one-thumb no-looking-required input scheme for an MP3 player I think anyone has ever made. Plug it into, say, my car stereo AUX port and I can pick it up with a free hand to control volume, select tracks, and even navigate mostly by memory without having to look at the thing. I can just tell where I am based on the feel of the control. Infinitely better than a featureless flat slab of a touch screen that gives you no sensory feedback.

I like its solid build quality. Full metal chassis with that sexy anodized aluminum finish. I miss that. Despite having a spinning disk hard drive, it never skips, and I've never had read or write issues. Though I'd probably try to mod it over to some kind of flash NAND storage someday. There's also a USB-C mod available that I'd like to do someday, since Apple 30-pin connectors are an endangered species now, and even then, carrying around an outdated proprietary cable for only one device is something I'm eager to never need to do again.

I'm also pretty heavily conditioned to not have tens of gigabytes of music stored on my phone eating up all the precious space. But that's mostly a holdover from my previous phone, which had a 32 GB onboard memory limit and no SD card expansion slot. I guess now that I have a proper memory expandable phone and, and now that half terabyte microSD cards are relatively inexpensive, that's no longer a huge concern...

Also, Rhythmbox can sync to it. Maybe other software too. So I don't even need iTunes to use it.

When it comes to closed-source software developed opaquely by for-profit corporations, particularly the huge, monolithic ones like Microsoft, I generally have the attitude that, if I do discover a problem:

1. They won't take my detailed report
2. If they do take my report, it goes straight into a shredder bin (or a massive queue where low priority problems go to die, which may as well be the same thing)
3. If they do read my report, then it's likely something they already are aware of
4. If they don't know about it somehow, the issue is probably so low-priority and niche that it wouldn't escape the backlog anyway

Probably not nearly as bleak as I make it out. But when you can't see the process, how can you tell?

With open source projects, these things can all still happen, but at least the process is more transparent. You can see exactly where your issue is, and what's been done to it so far, if anything. Other users can discover and vouch for your problem. And if the dev team takes pull requests, and you are willing, able, and permitted to contribute, you can make the fix yourself.