I could see California and BC getting together and starting their own country. The entire West coast would just be one, very liberal, nation.

I’m still amazed at climate deniers. You see the evidence year over year, how can you not fucking see it?

10 years ago (or thereabouts) we had snow in my area so severe that most things were shut down. People couldn’t get out of their driveways.

I had to go out after the snowfall and it took more than an hour to dig my car out enough to leave.

Last year, we had maybe two snowfalls, and there was snow on the ground for less than one hour all winter.

The changes year over year are small, but over 10+ years? It’s an entirely different planet. IDK why some people are so blind to that. WTF.

I have such a hard time believing that this brain rot is infecting Canada. I do not doubt anything you’ve said is true, it’s still hard to believe.

I have a lot of thoughts on it, mostly unhappy thoughts.

Two things stand out:

First, I’m having a hard time with the voting turnout numbers. More people showed up to boot Trump out of office (voting for Biden), than every before. If you look at the numbers, the Republicans have gone up and up in vote count, albeit, not by a lot. While the Democratic vote count varies wildly year over year. It tells me that if people, specifically democratic voting people, show up, they win. When they don’t, then the GOP wins. It is clear to me that they didn’t show up.

Clearly, more people believed he was a threat to the country in 2020 and turned up in droves to drive him out, but in 2024 when we needed all of those people to turn up again, and keep him out, they just, didn’t bother. I’m sure, a nontrivial amount of the voters flipped between Dem and Rep… Or vice versa… But the total votes when Biden won, were simply a lot more.

So I’m having trouble reconciling that fewer people turned up to vote and keep the orange one out of office, than the number that showed up to kick him out of office to begin with. I don’t understand why they thought they needed to show up in 2020, but felt that they didn’t need to in 2024. I just don’t get it.

The second thing is centered around project 2025. Holy shit that entire plan is cursed. I feel bad for every American that isn’t a straight white male right now. You’re all going to get fucked over in some way, shape, or form. Even if you are a straight white male, you’re probably still fucked because of all the fucked up things that Trump is going to do to the economy that will benefit his billionaire friends (at your expense). You’ll get fucked slightly less than everyone else, but you’ll still get fucked.

The only solace I have in this, is that Trump is done. He cannot run for a third term. Assuming that he isn’t successful in dismantling the democracy at the heart of what the US is, it will only be four years and they can start the very long journey to repairing all the damage that this clown is about to do.

I have no illusions, that even if America survives his second term, they will be fucked for decades to come.

I made the foolish mistake of thinking things had finally started to make sense when Netflix happened, and I got my hopes up that going legit would be viable.

Oh well

I’ve been back to the high seas for a while.

Before I get into it, I’ll give an honourable mention to the RIAA/music industry, which is largely just putting all of the music on every platform and letting users choose which one they want to use. This is the way, and I’m happy to pay one service to get access to the stuff I actually want to hear.

Back to video/MPAA. Are you all on crack? I saw this coming back when Netflix was the only licensed media game on the internet… I was subscribed and enjoying some shows, the shows then… Went away, they disappeared. After looking into it, the show I was enjoying was pulled when a copyright was revoked by the publisher, so Netflix no longer had the right to distribute the show.

I saw the writing on the wall. That publisher was going to make their own Netflix competitor with their stuff on it, to try to extort more profit from the streaming stuff. Clearly their c-suite thought that people would be willing to pay for just their content separately from Netflix. I saw that writing and noped right the fuck out. Grabbed my tri-point hat and flag from storage and set sail, and I’ve never looked back.

The copyright holding asshats, ruined internet streaming, because everyone wanted to be their own thing. They splintered the entire online streaming thing into a bunch of disparate platforms all with some subset of the media available via streaming. It’s worse than cable, honestly.

IMO, the only good move that’s happened for streaming (but horrible for so many other reasons) was Disney gobbling up all the other media studios and production companies, then putting all their stuff on one service. There’s a few holdouts, but by and large the two biggest players right now are Netflix (the OG) and Disney (+)… So a bunch of good media ended up on D+, and so it’s kind of “the” streaming service… For better or worse (mostly worse, as OP points out).

I’m still firmly on my ship, sailing the high seas. Unless they go the way of music, and allow all shows on every platform and you pick your platform based on your preferences, I’ll stay on this ship. Thanks.

Hey, don’t point it out! People are blissfully ignorant of how much they are owned. Don’t try to educate them.

• corporations, probably.

Mine are.

One thing that was recommended to me by someone a while ago, is that, unless you need it for something specific, mount your media in Plex as read only.

Plex has functions where you can delete content from the library from their UI. If you need that for some reason, obviously don’t make it read only. If you’re hoarding the data, and therefore never delete it, or use an external system for deleting files, then RO all the way.

The only caveat to this is if you’re using a local disk on the Plex system, which then shares out the drive/folder for adding new content, in which case, you’re screwed. It has to be rw so the OS can add/remove data.

In my case, as I think may be common (or at least, not rare), my back end data for Plex Media is on a NAS, so it’s easy to simply have the system running Plex, mount that network share as RO, and you’re done. The data on the NAS can be accessed and managed by other systems RW, direct to the NAS.

Since Plex is exposed to the internet, if anyone with sufficient rights is compromised, in theory, an attacker could delete the entire contents of your media folder with it. If you limit RW access to internal systems only, then that risk can be effectively mitigated.

Depends on the UPS. Many cheap offline UPS units don’t. Anything line interactive or online will.

APC makes low end offline UPS units, which are cheap garbage.

They also make line interactive and online ups units, which are decidedly not completely garbage.

I pick up line interactive APC units from used locations like eBay, and go buy off label replacement batteries. Haven’t had any problems with them so far.

To date, over the last ~10 years of running a homelab, I have used mainly SMT 1500 units, one was a rack mount. I’ve recently upgraded to an SMX2000. I’ve replaced batteries, but never a UPS, and never any server components due to power issues. I’ve run servers ranging from a Dell PE 2950, to a full c6100 chassis, plus several networking devices, including firewalls, routers and PoE switches. Not a single power related issue with any of them.

Fair enough. Local admin is generally not something that I would want to restrict from people, especially those that are, or at least, should be, more knowledge than most.

I’ll fight for that right for people most of the time.

Some users I would say should not have it, but generally developers are not those people. You know the ones.

I try to be understanding with my software brethren. We’re different sides to the whole. Ying and yang, so to speak.

That said, I’ve gotten some brain-dead requests from you developer types.

I’m not saying all of you are the problem, but there’s definitely some of you that need to learn how things work.

As IT/network/security, using a well known port for something that’s not what is supposed to run on that port, is inviting all kinds of problems.

Especially the very well known ones, like ftp, ssh, SMTP, http, HTTPS, etc (to name a few). People make it their mission to find and exploit open FTP systems. I opened up FTP on a system once to the internet as kind of a honeypot, and within a week or so, there was someone uploading data to it.

No bueno. Don’t use well known ports for things unless the thing that well known port is known for, is what you want to do.

Traitor.

Can we ask the question?

… Why are people getting violent at a fucking grocery chain?

Are the customers disgruntled because it’s too expensive?

Are the employees disgruntled because you treat them like wage slaves?

What’s going on at Loblaws?

I used to work grocery before I graduated college, and for the most part, my time there was positive. Granted, that was many years ago, so I have to wonder wtf happened? A nontrivial number of years for me were spent working at a Loblaws subsidiary store. I had not experienced, nor heard of anyone else experiencing violence from a customer. It just didn’t happen.

So what in the glory hole of corporate greed, happened?

Also, why the fuck are body cams needed? Most of their stores have security cameras out the ass. What the fuck could they possibly be hoping to capture by making the employees, who are already on the security cameras, wear additional recording equipment?

Sounds like bullshit to me. This excuse for the extra camera is just blowing smoke up the ass of the civilians to make them think it’s for their protection, when they just want to monitor their employees and what they’re up to when they’re not in front of a camera.

IMO, this is about control.

You’re right. I should try harder to be stupid if I’m going to impersonate the Don.

You know, there’s good people on both sides. People with a lot of value and good ideas. It reminds me of my businesses, so many good people. There’s a lot of good people in this world. You know what else is good? Watermelon. It’s a melon… Made… From water. How incredible. It’s delicious. How do they do that?

• Trump, probably.

Ipmi is your friend.

Is that the same database my user couldn’t connect to today?