Linode. I don’t trust the parent company but who can you trust? It’s super easy to setup and like $5 a month for a small scale project that isn’t mission critical.

Note: I would never use it for a paid or really important thing. If you expect your Boy Scout group to have 50,000 users one day, it’s not fit for purpose. It’s more than fine for a little league schedule or whatever.

You can give your info to the registrar and then make it anonymous to whois domain.tld searches so it’s not public. Cloudflare is the registrar I use these days because it’s a one-stop shop and used the company address but, at least in the U.S., they need your info for both credit/debit card processing. (Processing fees are cheaper the more info they provide but usually any address with the same zip code is enough.)

If you have nefarious plans, I don’t have a good recommendation. But if it’s just about privacy, I don’t know if it’s really possible to be completely anonymous anyway. I guess you could use a gift card or something but at least in the U.S., if you own or buy a house, your address is public info already anyway. Shit, city hall will probably give you blueprints of any house.

It’s probably less about making the kernel smaller and more about security and reviewing code. The less code you have to maintain, the fewer vulnerabilities even if it’s old code.

I would doubt almost 20 year-old code is taking up a lot of space or presenting new vulnerabilities. And it’s obviously open source so if anyone needs it, they can always use an older kernel or maintain it. Sometimes, your oldest code is insane. I wish there was a budget for every company and government to pay retirees part time to go back over their oldest code that’s still in use. A lot of retired programmers would do it for fun and nostalgia. And to be horrified something they wrote 20 years ago hasn’t been updated or replaced.

Honestly, this is a nice feature of macOS (or at least iTerm 2; I don’t use the official terminal). I know CTRL-C is used to kill processes and we all have that muscle memory but I usually try to change that on my personal Linux installs because I’ve hit it by mistake before.

I used to use CTRL+INSERT for copy and SHIFT+INSERT for paste but there’s usually no insert key on laptops or even small keyboards. It’s probably time to just adapt.

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I would recommend installing a fairly vanilla Gnome distro (like Fedora or something) and then a KDE version (most major distros have a KDE spin) in a virtual machine. Gnome Boxes is a really easy way to do that. And then just customize the shit out of both of them and see what you like best.

Gnome is more of a macOS-like experience so to me, it feels more trackpad driven (though keyboard shortcuts are plentiful). Install some extensions if you don’t like something. Someone else probably also didn’t like something.

KDE is more like Windows. I’m less familiar with it but it’s on my Steam Deck so I use it a decent amount. It’s more mouse and keyboard driven, as far as I can tell. So, that’s why I think it would be fine to evaluate in a VM.

They’re both high quality, though, so it’s really about what you prefer. I like Gnome, obviously, but I prefer to code on a smallish laptop (for portability/travel reasons) and a dock whereas a lot of people want an elaborate multi-monitor situation and a different interface. Everyone has their own workflow. Both work equally well so it’s just a matter of taste and preference. (Most Linux decisions are like that and people get weirdly angry about it but that’s part of the fun. Choose your own adventure.)

I built a really cool stool once. Both kinds, actually.

On all microblogging platforms, I just follow people and periodically pare it back to something manageable. The sweet spot for me is following 200 or so people where a handful post all the time (and are fun and smart) but most are just friendly people, experts who don’t have poster’s madness (but add a lot when they do post). And some bots here and there for weather or breaking news but I’m very selective there. (I only want breaking news alerts that are actionable like, “A natural disaster happened.” and not 20 posts a day about political drama.)

That strategy has worked for me since the days of Twitter. It ensures there’s content for me to read when I’m playing with my phone but not so much that I’m unable to keep track of it all.

The arrow of time is thought to be based on entropy — things inevitably tend to get less organized over time — and a song played backwards would be just as organized as the same song played forward. It (probably) won’t sound pleasant to human ears but it’s not actually a different song in a physics sense.

Musical notes are just noises our little brains find pleasant. Dogs and cats might not even find them pleasant, much less animals that won’t hang out with us. The entropy that defines the arrow of time operates of much bigger scales. Life has been defined as a fight against entropy but we, too, inevitably decay and become disorganized atoms.

In my experience, Fedora tends to be what a lot of developers settle on after distro hopping. This is by no way universal and RedHat has issues. But at some point, the OS and desktop environment become background noise compared to your own code and IDE. Younger people probably have different preferences — and they should — but you get more experienced and you have your setup. If my laptop dies, I can get back to coding quicker with Fedora than any other distro and it’s almost always stable.

In the end, a computer is a tool and being skilled with an old tool can be better than being new to a more modern tool. I still use the same brand/type power drill that I used in high school/college when I worked construction in the summers. (Dewalt and I’d rather the old 18v but they switched to 20v. I have an adapter to charge either battery, though, so it’s fine.)

I’m only speaking for myself but I’m not sure I’d want my BlueSky and Mastodon feeds mixing. I tried it with Skybridge and a third party Mastodon app and the vibe shift felt weird. I’m all for people making bridges for those who want it but I don’t mind having two apps that I use to follow two different cultures.

On Mastodon, I followed a lot of developers and activists and it’s usually kind of serious discussions. On BlueSky, I followed shitposters and people who don’t take posting too seriously. Twitter refugees. People like that. And that works great for me. Sometimes, I want one and sometimes I want the other.

Back in the olden days when Twitter wasn’t fash, I made lists and that worked fine. Like, I had a list for activists, a list for weather alerts, local government announcements, etc. My main feed was for people making jokes. So, it can be one app. But I’ll be ok if it’s two apps. (It’d be nice to have a Tweetdeck thing — there’s blue.deck and Mastodon equivalents — that can view it all, especially during major events.)

Elon is probably mad it launched on an Ariane 5 and it went so perfectly, we’ll get an extra decade of science out of it.

The Ariane 5 really was a reliable rocket. It had some failures early on, like basically all rockets, but then it had 82 successful launches in a row and then one partial failure before having another long perfect streak.

Obviously, more expensive than modern reusable rockets but JWST was important enough of a payload, that I’m glad NASA/ESA chose Ariane. (Plus, given JWST’s delays, I imagine when that decision was made, SpaceX was still iterating and having occasional explosions.)

I wonder what the final nail in the coffin will be for MOND. It seems like there’s new observations every few months supporting Lambda-CDM (even if it’s obviously not complete) over MOND. At some point, MOND is just a clever idea that was worth exploring and didn’t pan out.

Why do they need half that data for a derivative of a distro? Fuck off. I don’t care if someone collects the model number of my GPU or whatever but that sounds like personally identifiable tracking data, not basic “telemetry” data to set development priorities or whatever.

You think open source project maintainers should move to different countries because of temporary sanctions? What if they have a wife with a job and kids in school? Or delicate Lego collections that are impossible to pack? Or a side-piece?

Take issue with the sanctions if you want but don’t take issue with people who don’t want to move their family, LEGO collections, and side-pieces.

These things go in cycles. I remember when “Fedora Core” — they dropped the “Core” part of the name — was the cool new distro. I remember when Ubuntu was the cool new distro. Just ignore it and play around with distros until you find one you like.

In my opinion, new users should use a very popular distro so they have documentation and message boards. After a few years, you get your legs under you. At that point, start distro hopping using weird desktop environments. Then, someday, you get a lot of experience and use a very popular distro because software is a tool and you don’t care. (If something has buzz, I throw it in a VM and go “Huh, that’s interesting.”)

It’s sort of like how the target audience for Nike Air Monarchs is people buying their first pair of Nike Airs and dads who aren’t trying to hear the word “colorway” and just want some shoes.

You should ping CERN or Fermilab about this. Or maybe the Event Horizon Telescope team but I think they used sneakernet to image the M87 black hole.

Anyway, my answer is probably just a SQL backup like everyone else.

Do bagels count as cake based on calorie count or bread based on texture/flavor or doughnuts based on shape?

When the pandemic happened, there were people who didn’t know how to make the easiest meals. I was shocked. So, my rule on recipes is that nothing is too basic.

It’s usually just to take a small amount of delicious oil or fat — whatever you have on hand — and saute diced onions with diced bell pepper (or local equivalent) until the onions are slightly transparent. Keep going if you want the onions start being brown and have a sweet flavor. That brown is just the natural sugars coming out of the onion and is what “caramelizes” means. Caramel is sugar. And then add garlic and/or ginger and whatever spices you like.

If you want to, add meat. If you don’t, do not. (Often, that very oil step is done from browning meat and not wasting the fat.)

If you want soup, add a lot of liquid and whatever and cook it slowly. If you want paella, jambalaya, jollof, biryani, or equivalent — every culture has a rice dish — use the rice recipe on the bag as if it were water. (Use stock if you have any but water works fine.)

There are dishes that are different. Like fried rice and French Toast use old rice and toast respectively. Baking is a science. But anyone can make a pot of delicious with a few ingredients and it’s a 10 minute, one pot meal.