Speaking Spanish. Haven’t needed it in years and my actual grasp of the language is tenuous at this point but every native speaker I interact with says my pronunciation is great. Understanding the differences between English and Spanish phonetics helps a ton in that regard.

Double posting but…

FOSS has problems too. Personality clashes can end or severely set back projects (MMDVM vs M17). If something isn’t fun *coughAccessibilitycough* it doesn’t get done. Projects get abandoned as devs loose interest because interest is the only motivator. Documentation usually sucks because the dev is the one doing the documenting and doesn’t understand that the end user doesn’t have their intuitive grasp of the software they themselves wrote. And 99% of the population doesn’t care a whit about code being open because surprise surprise they’re not software developers and won’t know the difference between = and ==. And no they’re not going to take night classes just to patch some program they use.

I bought my first Pi in (I think) 2014. It’s one of the things that got me into IT. The low price was an important feature, since I was much less reluctant to experiment and take risks with hardware that cost as much as a family meal. But nearly $400 the juice ain’t worth the squeeze.

I guess I’m lucky in that I got a pi 5 back when they were selling at MSRP. I have a couple Pi 4’s, two 3’s (one I can’t find anymore sadly), my original Pi 1 model B, an also lost Pi zero W that I successfully soldered the GPIO pin headers to, and a Pi 400 I bought on a whim.

When people ask me about experimenting with Linux I usually tell them to either emulate it in virtualBox or buy a Raspberry Pi if they want a bare metal experience. It was specifically because the Pi was cheap and thus low risk if something did go wrong.

Currently listening to a random mix of video game remixes on YT at work.

Definitely Zelda. N64 games sold for like $70 new IIRC, and to quote Bubs, “Them’s 1998 dollars!” So as far as I’m concerned a ground-up remake like this is worth it, especially since I didn’t play it on 3DS.

This remix of the default Cisco hold music.

It’s like I don’t even know you anymore.

Would you like to hear a TCP joke?

I would like to hear a TCP joke.

Here is your TCP joke.

I have received your TCP joke. *laughter*.

—-

I’d tell you a UDP joke but I’m afraid you wouldn’t get it.

I really really just want to look at pictures of cats without people bringing up Trump or Musk or Epstein. Yes politics are important and that’s why there are political communities, but even Anne Frank wrote about other stuff in her diary sometimes.

Live off the interest.

No. The net nutritional gain would be zero plus I hate eggs generally

Gulliver’s Travels brings up a similar idea all the way back in the 18th century. I’m too lazy to look up names, but one country has a small population of immortals who are legally declared dead at 80 so they can’t monopolize power.

I feel like this is a good worldbuilding exercise to bring up over on /c/worldbuilding. One of my fictional polities had a wealth cap that funded local municipal improvements. But they always seemed to fund lovely parks conveniently close to the taxed person’s neighborhood and never, say, public transit expansions.

I’m surprised there’s no FOSS alternative that matches the feature set of SecureCRT. It’s the only choice IMO if you have to manage hundreds of devices over ssh. There are kludges on top of PuTTY that try to add things like saved sessions but they still don’t measure up.

“You’ve got the perfect face for radio”… is something I’d say more often if I were the type to insult people…and weren’t also blind and have no idea what people’s faces look like.

IIRC Motorola started out making car radios and the name is motor(car) and the at the time popular -ola suffix for forming product names.

I’m actually moving in the opposite direction. I was (still am really) a massive introvert, then I got really, really, really sick and realized I have zero support if something happens where I can’t take care of myself. I realized at the end of the day humans are a social species and we need some level of human connection to thrive.

I dig giant robots!
You dig giant robots!
We dig giant robots!
Chicks dig giant robots!

Then you get the folks coming out of the woodwork going “herp derp it’s really simple, you just have to buy a domain, then set up all these records, then you line up all eleven chaos crystals on the altar of despair and chant the forbidden words, then you…”

I think saying “It’s really simple” is actually terrible from a pedagogical point of view. It just makes the learner go “Well I guess I’m dumb because I don’t get such a simple concept.” I get people saying this are trying to be reassuring, but it should be remembered that pretty much anything is simple if you do it a million times. I’m sure brain surgery is simple for a brain surgeon, but I’m not a brain surgeon. I think it’s better to say "This is a long process with a lot of moving parts, but let’s take a breath and tackle it one step at a time and we’ll get through it. Sorry not ranting at OP, I just see this attitude all the time in IT and it bugs me.

I career changed into IT years after college, so I was already an adult when I entered my first trembling keystrokes into a blank terminal window. I vividly remember how intimidating it all felt.

Honestly if there’s one service you should be able to self host effortlessly it’s email. Email is basically your identity on the internet, but it’s so, so hard. Yes yes you can spin up an SMTP server pretty simply, but good luck getting anything past your ISP and into literally anyone else’s inbox.

Regarding pets, enjoy the time you have together and save the mourning for when they’re six feet under. I was sad about the aging of my dog, but realized that to her, humans are basically immortal constants of love and comfort. Looking at it that way made me feel a bit better.

Speaking of addictive thought processes, maladaptive daydreaming. I’ve half joked about it over on !worldbuilding@lemmy.world, but it really is addictive. Recently I realized it’s not healthy to reject reality and substitute my own. Even if my reality has mechs and this one doesn’t :(