Hi! Spammers often dupe a real number for a bit, then change it up. My wife’s office was the spammer’s number for a day. They got a day of getting hundreds of “I’m reporting you to the police” and “go eff yourselves” calls, and then the spammer’s moved on. The receptionist got a gift card from management for dealing with it.

The Cyberiad, by Stanislaw Lem. Haven’t read it since I was a kid, but remember it was awesome.

I had a coworker with no hands. I noticed right away. I did fail to notice he also had no feet for about a year though. I probably shouldn’t have blurted out “You have no feet?” Really loud when I finally did notice. He did a really good “Holy cow, where’s my feet go?!” though.

My immediate supervisor at work knows how bad I get earworms, and does Baby Shark whenever I annoy him. It’s in there now, thanks to this.

Yeah, I know enough too, but I worry about the sneaky details I don’t know.

So, word of caution. Be careful. I tried using Copilot to open a connection for a single port between two LANs on my network in pfsense, as I didn’t know pfsense. It happily recommended opening 0.0.0.0/0 on the first LAN’s gateway address. It worked!.. By opening everything on the whole network up to anything at all. The problem with AI: you can only use it if you already know enough to catch its horrible screw ups.

I sync my podcasts hourly with Nextcloud and poddersync, so when my servers go down, my phone beeps at me.

OpenSCAD and my (crappy) 3-D Printer: a phone case! Whoo!

I put solar on my roof, bought some HBA cards from Art of server on eBay and file bays from an ecycler in town, and started shucking old drives from a dumpster that always has a bunch of PVRs in it. My power bill is nuts but I have a lot of DDR3 and spinning rust!

What irritates the ever loving crap out of me is that all the search engines have gotten so bad that you have to use AI to get the answers now… And…! AI scrapers are so hard on bandwidth and servers housing that all the old how-to tech blogs by actual smart people have packed their bags and left. I used to find loads of great self hosting guides by doing a Google search for “Proxmox npm setup guide” and clicking one of the top three results. Now: sponsored, slop, slop, shilling paid product, old Reddit post, etc.

I use e-ink whenever I’m not doing work. Easier on the eyes.

Not an expert, but the way I understand it is that, instead of b and d looking the same, and p and q looking the same, all rightward facing loops are italicized, and all leftward facing loops are left very round, so a brain that has trouble with mirroring images won’t get confused. They also use serifs, so a capital I and a small L aren’t similar.

I just had two 4TBs eat it on me simultaneously… I lost the entirety of a bunch of utterly replaceable stuff, thank God.

Nextcloud! It was it’s own box, then a VM.

An ungodly mess of cables, planks, threaded rod, and old, used servers! My very own Proxmox Cluster! I have spent years tweaking and changing it, but I’ve had some services up (not, like, continuously) for 13 years now. The original server was an i7-950, and now I’m on dual Xeon Silver on my newest box.

“Potentially.” I snorted at this. “AI” is just VR, NFT, crypto. A scam to keep big tech from having to compete.

I had it forever, but it doesn’t work on later Android versions. I bought the paid version too.

I miss the Awoo videos. Puppies howling, Huskies going mental.

I am writing this on my Bluefox NX1… Android 15, 8gb ram, 128 GB storage. 4" on the diagonal, about three days battery. Crappy sound, crappy camera, finicky keyboard but autocorrect is a thing. Bluetooth earbuds and I don’t care about the camera most days. Dual SIM, 135$. Been using it exclusively for almost a year now.

In my case, I use a locally hosted stable diffusion setup, so it’s not even running 99.9% of the time. Turn it on, ask for the thing, turn it off again. Fans are spinning for a minute. A single session of any AAA game is worse.