Lettuce eat lettuce

Always eat your greens!

  • 5 Posts
  • 115 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 12th, 2023

help-circle


  • Ikr. I’ve got two 12 year old towers that have Debian on them. One is a Docker box and the other is just a raw Debian server.

    I installed KDE on both because I like my servers looking a little sexy lol. They run smoother and more stable than any of the Windows machines I support.

    They’ll probably be fine for another 10 years, maybe even longer.




  • If you’re very comfortable with containerization, networking, and security practices, plus you are a pretty decent full stack web dev, sure.

    It’s pretty trivial to set up a separate business internet line from your local ISP. Depending on the volume of traffic, a basic load manager and reverse proxy, combined with strong firewalls and container safety would be sufficient for most SMB needs.

    You don’t need much power to host a basic website. Setting up a local box with a low-impact distro, Docker, and some solid control-plane MGMT software should be plenty to host several dozen SMB websites.

    There are a lot of technical and even legal considerations though. Do these small businesses need a web app on their site? Do they need a storefront? What about member-only content locked securely behind an authentication layer? Does your local ISP have rate limitations? Does your city/state/country have restrictions on offering business services like that? What is your liability if your setup gets hacked and your client’s data is stolen/exposed?

    Ultimately, you have to answer the question: Why shouldn’t those businesses just go with an easy pre-made hosting solution like Squarespace, Wix, etc? Not saying there aren’t good answers to that, but from a business perspective, the businesses will want to know that.

    As with anything in business, ask yourself, what are you able to offer that they can’t get easily somewhere else? I used to work for a tiny MSP that offered in-house data backups. Our clients paid a good chunk of money to have us backup their data to our own servers. I didn’t say anything at the time, but our clients could have gotten much more secure and faster backup services for cheaper using something like Backblaze or Synology’s S2 cloud backups.

    Don’t find yourself unable to clearly and concisely explain to your clients what you can give them that they cannot easily get somewhere else. If it’s purely the principle of the thing, that’s totally valid, but make sure that’s what you’re selling to them, and also what they are looking for.




  • Magic Earth. Organic Maps as a backup. I’ve found that Magic Earth is the happy middle ground of map apps.

    Closed source client, but uses OSM for its map data. European company, so better on the data front.

    I tried using Organic Maps as my main navigation app, but there were slightly too many times where it couldn’t find the address, or the navigation got stuck, etc.

    My IT job requires me to get to places quickly if they need on-site support. I have to be able to depend on my map app to get me there reliably. Magic Earth does that, Organic Maps is very good, and I keep it around to use in case I have issues with Magic Earth, but at least in my region of the country, it just isn’t quite up to snuff.



  • Immutable distros are great for applications where you want uniformity for users and protections against users who are a little too curious for their own good.

    SteamOS is a perfect use case. You don’t want users easily running scripts on their Steam Decks to install god knows what and potentially wreck their systems, then come to Valve looking for a fix.

    Immutable distros solve that issue. Patches and updates for the OS roll out onto effectively identical systems, and if something does break, the update will fail instead of the system. So users will still have a fully functional Steam Deck.

    If you’re not very technical, or you aren’t a power user and packaged apps like Flatpaks are available for all your software, then go for it. I prefer to tinker under the hood with my computers, but I also understand and except the risk that creates.

    Immutable distros are a valuable part of a larger, vibrant Linux ecosystem IMO.


  • Hearing from “both sides” and coming to some compromise/middle ground only works if the following is true:

    1. Both parties are acting in good faith.
    2. The viewpoints expressed are close enough that they don’t require a total departure from one’s current viewpoint.
    3. The disputed topic doesn’t have a obvious or clear correct answer.

    The problem is, at least in the US, none of these are true for right wingers and even many “centrists.”

    You cannot talk to somebody and try to find common ground if they don’t believe in statistical studies by government agencies, they don’t believe in scientific studies by major universities and research institutions, and don’t care about the rights and protections for minority groups.

    The older members of my family are almost all conservatives, MAGA supporters, and fundamentalist Christians.

    They genuinely believe that Evolution is a myth and the Earth was created 6000 years ago. They believe that illegal immigrants are invading this country and that Democrats are secretly allowing them to. They don’t believe humans have any effect on climate change. They don’t think Covid was anything more than a common cold that the government used as an excuse to try to control people. They don’t believe in vaccines.

    I find Lemmy to be very refreshing. I get news from I diverse collection of Leftists sources. Anarchists, statists, weak socialists like the AOC/Bernie types, government studies, independent guerrilla journalists, Communists, Mutualists, Marxists, etc.

    But I have no interest in further “diversifying” by adding right wing “sources.”

    Cookies can taste good with many different ingredients, but no cookie tastes good with horse poop.





  • history | grep command you’re searching for

    That will return all commands you’ve typed that contain that keyword. Helps if you remember part of a command, but can’t remember the specific flags or the proper format.

    If there are common commands that you use over and over, turn them into a Bash script and name the script something descriptive.

    I do that for long commands that I don’t want to type out, like my whole system update workflow: sudo apt update -y && sudo apt upgrade -y && sudo flatpak update -y

    I saved that as a Bash script and called it “update.sh” then I saved it in my home directory. Now whenever I want to do a full system update, I just type ./update.sh and it asks me for my password, then updates my whole system without me having to do anything else. I do this with several different tasks like my remote Ansible server updates.

    Other than that, you can buy/make a linux command cheat sheet with the most common commands. Keep it with you or next to your computer. Look at it whenever you need a refresh.





  • I’m currently learning it. I like the concept, and no other conlang/auxlang has become as widely spoken or treated as seriously as Esperanto. There are actually children who are native speakers, as in Esperanto is their first language, no other conlang can claim that.

    However, as many users here have pointed out, it has problems. It’s very Euro-centric. So while it is easy for romance language speakers to pick up, if you are from a different language family, it’s no picnic.

    There is also the issue of relevance. Esperanto has a fairly active online community, you can pretty easily find Discord servers and forums with several hundred to 1000+ active speakers from all over the world.

    If you are lucky, there are local clubs and groups that meet up in person and speak Esperanto to each other.

    Esperanto has also been shown, at least in children, to aid in learning a second language. Learning Esperanto helps you get used to the process of learning a language in general, and basically gives it to you in easy mode.

    But if your goal to learn a second language is utility, then Esperanto almost certainly isn’t a good choice. For instance, I live in the US, and not in a region that has a high Hispanic population. That being said, I still encounter 3-5 people a month who are Spanish speakers. So even for me, learning to speak conversational Spanish would be much more useful as a second language than Esperanto.

    That’s actually my long term plan, to start with Esperanto because I really struggle with learning languages, even Spanish has been too tough for me. But Esperanto has made it easier so far, and it’s fun.

    Ultimately, Esperanto would have been a far better world language than English, which annoyingly has become the de-facto world language, and I say that as a native English speaker.

    I don’t see anything like Esperanto arising anytime soon, if ever. If you think it’s cool, learn it, you’ll at least learn how to learn a foreign language better and you’ll maybe find some new friends online, can’t complain about that.