Mine is several years old by now, I doubt that the firmware on that has all the options enabled. And also I live in a pretty rural area, there’s no open networks around.

But something LG has achieved with this, I’m going to look for other brands when I’m on a market for new TV. Which I hope will be many years in the future, maybe there’s a change on products while waiting and something better is available by then.

My LG TV is blocked from my network and always has been. However, the andriod tv connected to it is a different thing, so it’s more or less lost cause anyways and I haven’t had enough incentive to block the android box from the rest of network since it’d need some tweaking so that casting and other occasionally used features still work. And even if I’d block the android tv box there’s still our cellphones gathering all the data, so I’m pretty much just running things on hopium that EU offers at least some protection on my data.

There’s a better way. Here in Finland it’s pretty common that you can just call/text your boss that you have a common cold and you can be on a sick leave for few days (3 days is pretty common limit) just self-diagnosing it. With longer sickness you’ll need a doctors note, but at least on my company with common cold and other minor stuff it’s taken care of either over text chat or via a call with a doctor.

Obviously if the doctor thinks the whatever you have requires more in depth examination they can schedule a meeting, but for seasonal flu and stuff like that it’s pretty rare you need to see a doctor in person at all. And of course they’ll follow the numbers, so that if you call in sick every monday or whatever the rules are more strict and examinations are done more frequently, but for vast majority a few days laying in bed with a fever isn’t any kind of issue.

Very interesting piece of history. Thank you!

You are obviously correct on that but we could also grab pitchforks about the term ‘sideloading’. Everyone knows what ‘installing’ is and ‘sideloading’ (in this context) is just a bullshit term to make it feel like something mysterious and/or dangerous. Installing software from play store is no different than installing from f-droid.

True, but today it doesn’t really work anymore as traditional search engines aren’t as good as before and also everything is filled with AI slop so they are even worse.

LLMs are actually pretty good on searches like this: Eyes of an Angel. Also seems to be known as “The Tender”.

Another recommendation for storagebox from here. Cheapest option I’ve found and they are pretty reliable. I use proxmox backup server to sync my VMs there (encrypted of course).

There’s plenty more reasons than filesystem corruption to use clean shutdown and even just plain UPS without any status information to the host. I haven’t seen a full drive corruption due to power loss ever. Various levels of corruption, yes, but not ‘all the data is gone’ scenario due to filesystem being broken. But I have seen multiple hard drives which have died on host shutdown without any warning (no smart errors or such), after power loss they just refused to start again.

Just today we had multiple short (~30 second) power outages and without UPS that would’ve put considerable strain on my hardware. Gladly those are pretty rare and those were well short enough that my UPS kept the system running, without one that would’ve meant that my hypervisor would’ve crashed and that would’ve resulted on several unclean reboots for the VMs.

Also, back to filesystems, with selfhosting, some kind of hypervisor is often in the picture, so the drive activity is generally much higher than with single workstation and corruption on a single file or some part of filesystem is way more likely. Total data loss is pretty unlikely, but a corrupted VM image can be a pretty big deal, regardless if it’s filesystem or single file which is the main issue.

there’s no standardized mechanism for forcing applications to save

On Linux (and I guess BSD and other *nix variants) there is. SIGTERM is exactly for that situation. Sure, programs can choose to ignore it, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen at least any FOSS software which wouldn’t respect that. Of course the program might crash and cause loss of data, but the mechanism is there.

You’re of course generally correct about modern filesystems being more resilient to power loss, but they’re not immune to problems and also you’ve omitted a large chunk of other reasons why people like to have UPS on their system, with or without monitoring them.

For me personally the hardware is least interesting part of running a homelab. I’d happily run everything on VPS if there was no constraints on money or bandwidth (among other things). But as the limitations are there running things on my hardware is a necessary evil and for that an UPS or two are practically must to have to prolong life span of hardware and prevent data losses. Of course that’s just one box to check on the stack, but when planning for a home server setup for anything I’d say it’s a pretty vital part for the whole setup.

But in the real world it doesn’t really matter if it’s the whole filesystem or an idividual file which is corrupted. Either way the data is compromised and nitpicking that the filesystem is actually just fine doesn’t make any difference.

Modern filesystems can corrupt as well with unclean shutdown. They are just less likely to do so. My server stores photos of our life over couple of decades with other nearly irreplaceable data so having the UPS and clean shutdown on power loss gives at least some confidence that the files stay where they are.

Of course I also run backups of the data, but it’s another layer on data safety setup.

Heat exchangers and/or heat pumps to move energy to water and then pump that to district heating network which then takes care of heating of all kinds of buildings.

Just to add to your points, all of those are already a thing in colder climates. Google DC in Finland is one example. When it’s heavily below zero half of the year it’s just not possible to run open loop systems and there’s plenty of use for the excess heat. Some DCs just donate the waste heat to municipal heating. PR obviously plays role in that, but that’s easy way to get rid of the heat and datacenters don’t need to manage the heating network and fluctuations on demand, so they also benefit from someone who’ll just take the heat away from their ‘hands’. Also sound is automatically better managed since you need decent insulation on the buildings to avoid condensation and other problems which come when temperature differences are pretty huge between inside and outside of the building.

My brain reads those as ‘thee’, or however that old English should be written (thee, thou, thy…), so the image is that someone pretty pompous Englishman from 1700s with a powdered wig found fediverse.

Plus I tested those on duck.ai just for fun and it has absolutely no trouble of reading the thorns, so it only makes reading harder for other humans, specially for us whose native language isn’t English.

I’ve been using refurbished business laptops, thinkpads spesifically, for at least a decade. Both for business and for personal use. They just work and at least in here you can get pretty good deals from companies which re-sell previously leased machines. For some I’ve upgraded RAM and/or storage drive, but that 300-400€ gets you something far better than a new Acer from grocery store aisle. And reputable vendors even offer some kind of warranty even on used machines.

Other brands might work just fine too, but as I’ve had thinkpads since the brand was owned by IBM I’ve just stuck with them. T, W and X series are all pretty solid. And there’s a reason why you don’t see Acer or other consumer brands on refurbished market.

didn’t he break into a network closet and patch directly into their servers?

No. He placed a computer in a unlocked network closet and used that to download a bunch of data from JSTOR (which he had acces to, and a lot of the data is public domain anyways) and kinda-sorta caused DDoS attack against the service. Prosecution then slapped him with a shitload of federal charges which (in my opinion) were largely at least massively exaggerated if not straight made up. Threat of 50 year jail sentence and million(s) in fines then pushed him to take his own life.

Wikipedia has pretty detailed info about him and the whole case.

Meh. As long as it’s a local only field on /etc/passwd or whatever I don’t really care. Actually I’d be for it if browsers and other internet-thingies could send rough idea of users age to the services. Not actual age, but something like child/teen/adult -scale. That would make it super simple to reputable services to block underaged users and parents could set that to their kids accounts as they see fit.

But obviously the surveillance tool “they” are building is something totally different where the age is actually verified via some online service. For that I’m strictly against and if that becomes mandatory on Debian or whatever distro I’ll start my own with blackjack and hookers if nothing else is available.

this community is dominated by the systemd fanboys

Hey now. There’s dozens of us who had that thing force fed for us. I’ve been on Debian for decades, so even if I don’t really like systemd it’s the lesser evil than switching a distro to something without it.

Absolutely. And 1980s was about 20 years ago.

I came to say excactly that.