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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: October 5th, 2023

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  • Every apartment I’ve ever lived in requires renters insurance. It’s so cheap that I’d argue it’s a good idea to have regardless of whether required by the building. So many things are out of your control (floods, fire, weather damage, etc) and it’s good to know that with the insurance you’d at least he able to get new stuff to maintain a similar living situation.


  • These things are a pain to use. Especially the cheap ones require more force than you’d expect and occasionally get stuck. They make a good clean cut but it’s so slow and awkward that if you were wanting to do vandalism they’re impractical relative to a reciprocating saw or better yet portable band saw.

    I also wouldn’t underestimate the power of spray paint, even though it’s simple to fix it’s still expensive when the contract specifics all the maintenance must be done by flock themselves.


  • Houston is too sprawled, even within Texas DFW has the bigger metropolitan population. It’s just that DFW has some lines drawn in it separating the cities while in Houston they’re all considered the same city.

    That being said culturally it’s definitely not DFW or Chicago. I think Miami is the clear 4th from its city size and unique culture, though I also can see the arguments for DC and SF.


  • 4" screen and 16MB flash is a joke. Ebooks are small, but not that small. Considering how many used, end of life Kindles there are out there stuck on old easily jailbroken firmware, I don’t see why anyone would ever choose this as an alternative. The software for jailbroken Kindles is incredibly mature and at the point of “just works”. E-ink technology hasn’t progressed much in the past ten years, so you really don’t miss out on anything by buying a $30 used one.

    Edit: just realized it has micro SD support. So my storage concerns are invalid. It’s still incredibly clunky looking though, a 1cm thick device with only a 4" screen sure is something. My eyes probably couldn’t handle it even with the largest font.




  • There’s plenty of long form AI content lately too. Wikipedia articles make for great YouTube videos, and there’s no shortage of them. I’ve run into several channels lately where it took me about 30 seconds to realize something was off, and checking the channel’s history you can usually tell by finding older videos which actually have a person in them who is clearly very different than the narrator in the newer videos, or by just not having any older videos at all.



  • You can go far below $300 with very little practical performance compromise, but I wouldn’t even look on Amazon with memory prices being what they are lately. Get an old DDR3 era Optiplex desktop on eBay, throw a $25 Quadro P400 in it for transcoding, and transfer your existing SSDs over. Tons of eBay listings have 2-4 day shipping. With DDR3 you can easily get 16GB of RAM for like $30 if it doesn’t have enough already. Avoiding DDR4/DDR5 will save a ton of money so it’s essential to buy used.

    The SSDs and hard drives for the array are by far the most expensive part. I’ve been using an underclocked and undervolted Ryzen 1700 in my server for 6 years now and have zero complaints around CPU performance. I did eventually need more than 16GB of RAM last year, but the only outright failures I’ve had are on the various component’s fans.




  • If you’re not frequently home it’s nice to have a camera feed to make sure everything is okay. I use ESPHome with super cheap ESP32 camera modules personally. The ESP32 cameras have access to the local network only, reaching the internet only via my home assistant installation which I’m in control of. They don’t have any capability to record on their own and unless I’ve enabled the alarm no amount of motion can trigger them to record.

    I once caught management entering my apartment unannounced while I was out of town as a result of them. I had a very angry call with the leasing office over that.



  • If this is really as straightforward as it sounds then I’d consider this the best case scenario. Google could have gone full Apple style lockdown or even just have implemented this flow on a per app basis, but needing to wait 24hr one time to enable unverified app installation isn’t a bad idea from a security perspective. It prevents a bad actor with temporary access from being able to do much while not getting in the way of us power users after the initial 24hr period.

    My bigger problem is how Google is leveraging their monopoly to implement this single-handedly and only for themselves. If they had instead gone through AOSP this perhaps could have been implemented in a better way to allow other parties than just Google to be the verifier, and that 24hr waiting period could be applied to any verifier that is not the phone’s default. I’d argue this would be an equally reasonable security measure considering how many scams are out there preying on those who aren’t technologically savvy, yet would maintain transparency.



  • The prices for tech on Taobao in China and in the US are nearly identical for the vast majority of tech items. So much is excluded from the tariffs that it’s silly they even exist on paper. There are indeed some newer items only available there, but they’re rarely on the affordable end of pricing.

    Laptops and computer hardware in particular surprise me. I was hoping to get a new Huawei or Xiaomi laptop the last time I was in China since I got my parents a Huawei I’ve been jealous of in the US several years before they were banned. Absolutely nothing I could find on Taobao or in store was comparable value even to computers from Dell/HP/Lenovo.


  • I can’t say I’ve had a great time with audio in either personally, though it’s indeed much easier to fix audio problems in Linux. But just yesterday pipewire must have hung or crashed preventing all browser based video playback entirely, which due to the symptoms not appearing audio related was quite annoying to debug. I still have no idea what caused it in order to avoid it happening again in the future.



  • These attacks are more around the encryption and all require a fully malicious server. It sounds like Bitwarden is taking these seriously and personally I’d still strongly prefer it to any closed source solution where there could be many more unknown but undiscovered security concerns.

    Using a local solution is always most secure, but imo you should first ask yourself if you trust your own security practices and whether you have sufficient hardware redundancy to be actually better. I managed to lose the private key to some Bitcoin about a decade ago due to trying to be clever with encryption and local redundant copies.

    Further, with the prevalence of 2FA even if their server was somehow fully compromised as long as you use a different authenticator app than Bitwarden you’re not at major risk anyways. With how poorly the average person manages their password security this hurdle alone is likely enough to stop all but attacks targeted specifically at you as an individual.