NaibofTabr

OK, so you want to install Linux on an old laptop after wiping the hard drive.

Sure, you would have root control for that OS. Make sure that there is no BIOS/UEFI password set before you start, or that you have the password.

Do not use the root account for regular use, especially if you will be connecting this laptop to the Internet. Log in as a normal user account and escalate your privilege as needed.

I also highly recommend gparted for editing the hard drive partitions before you install the OS. Don’t install goarted, just run it live from a USB drive.

Do you know which Linux distribution you want to install?

gimme some heat!

There are definitely at least 9 circles of emacs filled with tormented souls.

er, what exactly do you mean by “from the scratch”? and what exactly constitutes “my own system”? are you planning on designing your own logic circuits, manufacturing your own chips, and then writing your own firmware to run them?

You mean you want cheese, cheese, cheese, Spam and cheese without the Spam?

Please increase our user count so we can get more VC funding!

TIL giving a shit makes you gay.

Well, how about a little Red Leicester?

Plus a bit where a kid found a big pod in the forest, got really excited, brought it back to the village, and rolled it down a hill against another kid’s pod while shouting “Now this is pod racing!”

One player gave me two middle fingers for that. I regret nothing.

Four hours wasted on a side story just to deliver a terrible joke is how you win D&D.

Perfect explanation.

Thank you, I try. It’s always tricky to keep network infrastructure explanations concise and readable - the Internet is such a complicated mess.

People like paying for convenience.

Well, I would simplify that to people like convenience. Infrastructure of any type is basically someone else solving convenience problems for you. People don’t really like paying, but they will if it’s the most convenient option.

Syncthing is doing this for you for free, I assume mostly because the developers wanted the infrastructure to work that way and didn’t want it to be dependent on DNS, and decided to make it available to users at large. It’s very convenient, but it also obscures a lot of the technical side of network services which can make learning harder.

This kind of thing shows why tech giants are giants and why selfhosted is a niche.

There’s also always the “why reinvent the wheel?” question, and consider that the guy who is selling wheels works on making wheels as a full-time occupation and has been doing so long enough to build a business on it, whereas you are a hobbyist. There are things that guy knows about wheelmaking that would take you ten years to learn, and he also has a properly equipped workshop for it - you have some YouTube videos, your garage and a handful of tools from Harbor Freight.

Sometimes there is good reason to do so (e.g. privacy from cloud service data gathering) but this is a real balancing act between cost (time and money, both up-front and long-term), risk (privacy exposure, data loss, failure tolerance), and convenience. If you’re going to do something yourself, you should have a specific answer to the question, and probably do a little cost-benefit checking.

But if I’m reading the materials correctly, I’ll need to set up a domain and pay some upfront costs to make my library accessible outside my home.

Why is that?

So when your mobile device is on the public internet it can’t reach directly into your private home network. The IP addresses of the servers on your private network are not routable outside of it, so your mobile device can’t talk to them directly. From the perspective of the public internet, the only piece of your private network that is visible is your ISP gateway device.

When you try to reach your Syncthing service from the public internet, none of the routers know where your private Syncthing instance is or how to reach it. To solve this, the Syncthing developers provide discovery servers on the public internet which contain the directions for the Syncthing app on your device to find your Syncthing service on your private network (assuming you have registered your Syncthing server with the discovery service).

This is a whole level of network infrastructure that is just being done for you to make using Syncthing more convenient. It saves you from having to deal with the details of network routing across network boundaries.

Funkwhale does not provide an equivalent service. To reach your Funkwhale service on your private network from the public internet you have to solve the cross-boundary routing problem for yourself. The most reliable way to do this is to use the DNS infrastructure that already exists on the public internet, which means getting a domain name and linking it to your ISP gateway address.

If your ISP gateway had a static address you could skip this and configure whatever app accesses your Funkwhale service to always point to your ISP gateway address, but residential IP addresses are typically dynamic, so you can’t rely on it being the same long-term. Setting up DynamicDNS solves this problem by updating a DNS record any time your ISP gateway address changes.

There are several DynDNS providers listed at the bottom of that last article, some of which provide domain names. Some of them are free services (like afraid.org) but those typically have some strings attached (afraid.org requires you to log in regularly to confirm that your address is still active, otherwise it will be disabled).

Uh huh, nice wearable oven. casts heat metal

Granpa always wants excitement
He’ll try anything new
So he made some homemade bungie cords
He would’ve been eighty-two!

Oh yes, I’m aware. I still think it’s funny enough to share with players who haven’t heard it before.

Everyone in the PRC supports the CCP.

It’s because the ruling party is so good that everyone loves them unconditionally, of course.

It’s like people are saying “mayonnaise is great because you can add it to any meal”, which is technically true, but meanwhile salt is right there being ignored on the shelf.

I think you’re misinterpreting this discussion.

This is not something unique to dnd! In fact, DND is not even especially good at this!

Of course creativity and flexibility are not exclusive to D&D. This discussion is not about D&D vs. other RPG systems, it’s about the explicit permissiveness of D&D. Basically, some people consider the rules to be permissive (e.g. everything not explicitly forbidden is allowed) whereas others consider the rules to be restrictive (everything not explicitly allowed is forbidden).

My point is that the permissive interpretation is better for gameplay, and I think that argument would apply to any gaming system in general.

A free action that grants a skill check to get +2 to hit on your next attack as a reward for missing is wildly disproportionate. There are feats worse than that. If this is a thing people can do why would literally everyone playing not be constantly chewing up the floor in every encounter?

Ok, yes I can see the potential problems but I think they’re easy to handle by just carrying out the action to its logical outcome - which is that the player just ate a handful of gravel. Now if they’re a dwarf maybe that’s not an issue, but also a dwarf eating gravel might not be any more intimidating than a human eating popcorn. On the other hand if they’re an elf or a human or something, well even if they pass a constitution save to not immediately start puking, they’re getting broken teeth, a mouthful of rock dust, and future digestion problems.

Sure, they can take an action that is technically possible within the game world, but actions have consequences. The gravel didn’t just disappear because they succeeded on the intimidation roll.

Broadly speaking objects that are worn or held are exempted from automatic manipulation by spells and effects, though this is usually called out in the description of the effect.

I agree this one’s more of a stretch, I’d say specifically because Mage Hand Legerdemain has specific rules about worn/carried objects that can be manipulated, which implies that anything not defined there cannot be manipulated.

The fact that the DM presumably set a DC for the intimidate check is also not the part here that’s in question.

OK, which part is?

Oh, yes that does change the meaning.