I actually bought that one. I don’t recommend. Buggy as all get out and most of the functionality requires their proprietary hub. Cool concept though, shame it didn’t work very well.

Go to bed early if possible. Coffee if I can’t and then try to stay away from other humans till I can be less of an asshole.

If I’m shifting my schedule, I’ll try and aim for 9 -10 hours in bed until my body adapts, then it’s back to the 6 to 7 I usually get.

You’re not wrong about schools, but also it’s not hard to get into the trades. I’m in the trucking industry so easiest example for me, but any of the big trucking companies will (usually) train you with the only cost being to work for them for a set period of time. Others will reimburse your trucking school costs. I make $70k. Could make more, but I like sleeping at home.

My father in law was a Boilermaker and the union offered on the job training. He was making in the $100k+ range before he passed.

May not be able to get a head start in the trades while in high school anymore, but it’s not difficult to join them. All of the trades are short on bodies to do the work, and as a result, are often quite happy to teach you.

Decisions are made by those that show up. If you didn’t vote, you don’t get to bitch when the results aren’t what you wanted.

My personal website is just a static website, built using Hugo and served using Caddy. Originally it was hosted on a Digital Ocean VPS but now it’s hosted from my home.

My needs were simple enough that even that much is probably overkill though. Honestly I just wanted something that I could understand completely how it works and be able to update it easily as life went on.

Depend on what I’m doing and where I am. At work, I’m usually using my iPad more than anything and note taking is usually work related. For that I use an app called GoodNotes (basically a PDF annotator. Think pen and paper, but digital.). If I’m at home, I usually type the notes into a markdown file using a text editor. Todo lists and shopping lists are usually done in Reminders on my iPhone.

I took apart a broken Ryobi leaf blower (RY40402) to see if it would be cheaper to fix it rather than buy a new one. Easier to disassemble than I was expecting. At least until I got to the actual problem, the burned out motor. The motor was fused to the housing assembly, requiring the replacement of the housing assembly, motor, and blower fan. In the end it would cost the same to replace the leaf blower with a newer, more powerful version as to repair the broken one.

It’s a classified military installation. Those that know for sure don’t talk and those that are talking are probably talking out their ass.

It is known that it has historically been used as a test and research location for highly experimental stealth aircraft. They probably do EM sensitive research and testing there now, but I suspect that the really interesting stuff is happening elsewhere due to how well known and watched it has become. It’s probably more of a decoy than anything else at this point.

Long ago, I remember hearing rumors about a more secretive base a bit west of Groom Lake and south of the Cheyenne Mountain complex. If true, that’s probably where the really secret stuff is happening now. No clue what happens there.

I know your pain. I had the same problem in 2013.

Everyone said it was a horrible time to buy a house, “The rates/prices are too high, wait a bit” but I also couldn’t afford to get an apartment that wasn’t a roach motel for less than $1k per month, so I bought a house anyways. Now I’m laughing with my $750 USD mortgage while the idiots who kept telling me it was a horrid time to buy a house are bitching about their apartment leases that keep going up each year and paying out 1.5k to 2k per month in rent.

Renting really only makes sense if you know you are going to be moving a good distance frequently over the next several years. If you have a steady job you are planning on staying at for a while, better to buy. You can always rent it out if life changes your plans for you.

Set a time frame by which you want to move in, and a budget roughly 2 times but not more than 4 times your annual gross income and see what you can find for that in that time frame.

When my wife and I bought our house I was making roughly $50k a year, so we were looking at the $100k-$150k price point but wound up finding our home at $90K. Not a palace by any stretch and it needed a new roof, but it’s been a great house. Basing our budget off just my income and aiming for the lower side of 2-4x income has allowed us to stay in our home even when me or my wife was out of work for a bit.

Look and see if there are any programs for first time home buyers in your area also. I forget exactly what program we qualified for but we were able to get our mortgage for $0 down at the added expense of mortgage insurance. It cost me more per month (and over all) than it would have if I had had the traditional 20% down but TANSTAFL.

Make sure you get a fixed rate mortgage though and not an adjustable rate one. I’ve a sneaking suspicion that rates may wind up going back up in a few years and such a roller coaster has cost more than one person I know their home.

I’ve been diving into Fallout lately. Love the world building. Definitely wouldn’t mind a 5th installment. May wait a few years after they release it for them to fix the worst of the bugs before playing it though. Bethesda may make great games, but damn they a buggy mess.

My servers (an old desktop overstuffed with drives and an old dell laptop), networking gear and a 50 gal aquarium all run on the same outlet. As long as the aquarium heater is off, the outlet pulls about 200 watts. The aquarium heater spikes that to 400 watts when it kicks in.

Might check out Paperless-ngx. I know it has full text search. It OCRs everything you put in it. Not sure about integrating it with Wordpress though.

Why do you need it to be in a Wordpress page? I can’t quite see what you’re trying to accomplish.

You can certainly build a box for for use as a router, but you don’t need to.

If your not planning to build out anything public facing and aren’t going to run ipv6 internally, you can use any router to block all inbound ports and run everything over wire guard or tailscale.

There are a million and one ways to self host services. First question needs to be, what do you want to do and why. That will dictate the how.

Take your pick. All of them have been pretty bad. Worst though might go to Star Wars, Star Trek, Matrix fandoms.

I had no clue that was a thing. Sorry.

Before I discovered VLC (some 20 years ago) I used to use mplayer. Not sure if it’s still being maintained though. It could display video using text output, frambuffer as well as via an x window.

https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search-operators/

Most of the operators in the working list also work in other search engines including YouTube’s internal search engine.

As bad as the Democrats fundraising tactics are, the Republicans were even worse. At one point during the 2020 election my phone was buzzing for 10 minutes straight with some 70% being Republican fundraising messages. Democrats maxed out at 20 messages in one day,but then I do live in a state that’s not going blue anytime soon.

I usually get mine from either Bandcamp or Amazon. No DRM from either when downloading, though buying music from Amazon gets difficult if you have an Amazon music subscription.

You might like this YouTube channel:

https://youtube.com/@edisonmotors

Canadian trucker with a mindset like your friends dad, but also is building trucks that is in my opinion the way forward for the trucking industry. Got to bounce, load to move.