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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: December 25th, 2023

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  • A lot of decent ones have been mentioned so I’ll add a few I didn’t see:

    • Keep your hands off Eizouken: I can’t express my love for this one enough; it’s beautiful, touching, funny, and just one of the most lovely things I’ve ever seen.
    • Bocchi the Rock: very funny, and extremely uncomfortable for introverts but in a good way
    • Delicious in Dungeon: extraordinarily good adaptation of the manga; this one isn’t done yet so who knows but it’s wonderful so far, and Studio Trigger’s animation won’t disappoint
    • BNA: another Studio Trigger, lovely animation. I love how this one almost makes a point several times and then just glances off of it; it’s a bizarre one









  • I have a sit/stand desk and so I spend about half the day in my chair. I use a Steelcase Think; I like how it’s relatively simple but still has a lot of articulation in its armrests, which makes it easy to get decent arm support where you need it. It’s very sturdy and of nice quality. my only complaint is that I wish its back didn’t have an inch of give before it hits the lock point at the furthest forward point, but this is really very minor.

    if you live somewhere that you can go to an office surplus store, I’d super recommend doing that. I picked out this chair after trying a bunch out, and it was much cheaper than MSRP since it was used. they had like 20 different models and perhaps 5 of this one, and I picked out the nicest of the bunch.


  • I walk into my home office, as my company like many went fully remote during COVID and stayed that way. However prior to that I had two options:

    I could bike, it was about 5.5 miles with bike lanes the whole way (until downtown, where the roads were shared but marked for bike traffic). I think it took me about 20 or 30 minutes, but honestly I don’t remember anymore. Going home took longer as it was uphill compared to the way in.

    The other option was I could take public transit; there were both buses and a light rail and I greatly preferred the latter. When I did that, it was a 5 minute walk to the light rail, about a 20 minute ride, and then a 10 minute walk to the office.

    At the time I lived in a decent sized US city, but since going remote I’ve moved somewhere smaller. However I really loved having good public transit, and if I ever had to go into an office again either being able to bike or public transit in is a big requirement for me; I can’t stand car commuting: it’s stressful and wasteful, and has a very negative impact on cities for those that live there.



  • I’ve used rclone with backblaze B2 very successfully. rclone is easy to configure and can encrypt everything locally before uploading, and B2 is dirt cheap and has retention policies so I can easily manage (per storage pool) how long deleted/changed files should be retained. works well.

    also once you get something set up. make sure to test run a restore! a backup solution is only good if you make sure it works :)



  • content id is a wild one that I only discovered a year ago: I had always used my own Chromecast when traveling, and I plugged it into a Roku TV which kept saying “did you know you could watch [content that I was currently watching] on Roku” which really freaked me out, so I looked into it. honestly not sure why they tipped their hand like that: I found the setting and turned it off. otherwise I would’ve been none the wiser.

    creepy af though. the amount of tracking you implicitly accept by using random devices out in the world is staggering. even if you read every privacy policy and opt out of everything (I do) you have no chance.



  • this was such a weird claim, and I never really understood how it could be true specifically for phones, where they aren’t in control of system software. there’s like a gradient of possibility here:

    • Android phones from major manufacturers, and Apple phones: doubt it. those things are too heavily scrutinized, someone would’ve found it, and the companies that make them don’t have the impetus.
    • official “smart” voice devices from Amazon, Google, et al: doubt it, same reasoning as above
    • Android phones from small players, heavily subsidized models, etc.: sure, could be
    • smart TVs from major manufacturers: probably not? medium “maybe”? I bought one of these with a hardware mic switch so I guess that shows my paranoia
    • other smart TVs: I dunno, feels highly likely

    so: I’m careful about what I use so my risk felt pretty low, but I also feel like if this were true security researchers would’ve discovered it. let alone the fact that what they describe is bandwidth and battery intensive (off-device or on-device respectively, I don’t remember what they claimed as I read the 404 media report some weeks back) but it still makes me wonder: what led them to make these claims then? fascinating, pretty scary.


  • agree with all these points. another thing I think about a lot is: I have the benefit of having grown up with the Internet but before social media, and so all of my embarrassing teen content is long gone. can’t imagine having that follow you around for the rest of forever, tied to your real name, looked at by potential employers and being asked to defend it for the rest of your life.


  • I got out of the “surplus hardware” a while ago; way too expensive and noisy to run, so super recommend ditching the poweredge. for home use, I ended up just going with a USB3 JBOD for storage, and a Intel NUC (which I think they don’t make anymore). it runs a ton of virtualized servers under kvm, a virtualized NAS, all without issue because it honestly spends most of its time nearly idle. point is: it’s definitely nice to have it all in one case and with high speed storage but maybe having to find something that can house a ton of drives isn’t a strict need if you aren’t actually going to put a ton of load on it.