Interesting or useful?

I don’t think I have any really interesting ones, but the most useful one I have for people is “Always On”.

Basically when I see that tag, I can mentally prepare myself and roll my eyes before reading. Basically it’s for people who just do nothing but preach at you regardless of the topic being discussed. It’s…pretty useful.

Hank Hill, apparently.

I don’t use Facebook and use all the ad blockers, but apparently I’m still tracked by IP.

When my SO and I started dating, he hooked to my wifi one day and immediately started getting ads on Facebook for various lawn care products. He’d never had those come up before, lived in an apartment all his adult life, and has never searched for any kind of gardening supplies.

I, on the other hand, do have a lawn that I take care of and frequently shop for various landscaping stuff. But he gets the ads for them.

Literally this.

Twice a year I fill in as DBA when our lady graybeard Oracle DBA takes vacation. This month is one of those times. Yay me.

For my org, it’s just the massive in-house developed line-of-business application that’s tightly coupled to Oracle that keeps us chained to it. It’s technical debt from top to bottom, and has been accumulating steadily since the early 2010s, but no one seems willing to start replacing it.

The new projects typically go with Postgres, MariaDB, or if all else fails, MSSQL. But the Oracle monster in the closet isn’t likely to leave any time soon.

Every time I play Skyrim:

“You are carrying too much to be able to run”

Inventory:

• …
• 30 “Solution of Strength” potions

Me: But I might need those later.

It’s delicious.

I like to mix whipped cream vodka with strawberry-watermelon flavored Mio, and it’s distinctively red. I’m gonna start calling it “Health Potion”.

Ask your doctor if it’s right for you.

Photovoltaic / Solar power installation.

“Solar system” just sounds weird when I say it.

I finally pulled the trigger and bought/installed the PV system I’ve been wanting for 10+ years.

It was a good chunk of upfront money for something I feared would end up being a midlife crisis purchase*. I only have it partially installed (all DIY as time allows) but we’ve been running the whole house from it several days a week and have already seen significant savings on the electric bill (especially since the first week I had it hooked in was a heat wave).

*It’s not not a midlife crisis purchase, lol, but it’s also more useful than a sports car.

Sadly (and similarly anecdotally) yes.

Toggling airplane mode basically “turns off and on again” your phone’s network interfaces, resets the routing table, and, I think, flushes the DNS caches. I don’t have the problem so much with wi-fi unless I roam between my main and guest networks which use different DNS records for some of my self-hosted apps. (e.g. the “internal” DNS record gets resolved on main wifi, gets cached, and then is inaccessible on guest wifi until the cached record expires).

Mainly, I just toggle the cellular data since my primary issue is that sometimes calls/texts stop working without notice.

I try for at least 2 hours a day, excluding sleeping.

Usually that’s in the form of puttering around outside doing yardwork, working on whatever my summer/winter project is, and/or taking the dogs for a walk. It’s difficult in the winter but the other 3 seasons are pretty easy to keep the habit alive

However you choose to spend that offline time, I highly recommend a daily dose of it. Been doing that for a few years now, and my mental health has improved dramatically. The world isn’t nearly as horrible as social media makes it out to be.

Security is pretty minimal, not gonna lie.

There’s a 50 GB LUKS partition that stays locked unless I’m actively using it. It’s got backup copies of my important/critical documents and password manager exports but the rest of it is just media and doesn’t really merit encryption.

All applications have local accounts but I’m not using LDAP or any kind of SSO like I am with my main stack.

At home, I keep the firewall disabled on the interface configured as “WAN” so I can access its services directly via their hostname (I point its wildcard DNS record to its local “WAN” IP) but do enable firewall when I’m using it on an untrusted network. Granted, I have to manually remember to do that, so that’s kind of a security risk if I forget. Generally, though, when I’m using it remotely, it’s using my secondary phone as a USB-tethered uplink so even if I leave its internal services exposed to WAN, the NAT from the phone blocks that. One of my goals, eventually, is to automate some of the firewall rules depending on where I’m using it.

Either the 3rd one or the least important one. Whichever causes me the most inconvenience.

Bonus “Mildly infuriating”:

Ask 4 bullet-point questions in an email, they only answer one of them and ignore the rest.

Definitely does, and it’s a beautiful city, but I never want to drive in it ever again lol.

Had to travel there 3 times for work. The first time I rented a car and immediately regretted it. The second and third times I demanded that management reimburse me for taxis instead of the car rental or I wouldn’t go lol.

Boston. IYKYK.

I hand wash them all with soap and water, but they all seem to lose their ability to shed off what I cook in them.

You need to oil them after washing them (wipe them down with a thin layer of vegetable oil or shortening).

Also, it may be time to reseason them if everything sticks even if you’re pre-heating it before adding the food. See: https://www.foodandwine.com/how-to-reseason-cast-iron-8600860

I let it be, even if the person is still alive. Anyone can “allege” anything against anyone. Plus, if the friend is a devout follower of someone genuinely controversial, then there’s already a good chance I’m not that close to them and would be cutting them out of my life anyway.

This week was nice but we had one last week and one’s forecast for this coming week, though I don’t think it’s going to be as bad as the one we got first week of July.

Glad I got my PV system installed before the first one hit. A/C just feels cooler when it’s free 😎

Heatwaves notwithstanding, still prefer summer. I hate shoveling snow, I hate being cold, I hate that people deal with slick roads every year but still can’t learn to drive (or NOT drive) on them, etc. My only complaints about summer are the humidity and mosquitos.

Ah, yeah, you can have most devices with lithium batteries in your checked baggage, but they have to be off and packed so they’re protected from damage. It’s preferred for those to be carry-on items but isn’t required.

Power banks, vapes, spare batteries, etc are specifically prohibited in checked baggage and must be in your carry-on or on your person.

–https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/lithium-batteries-baggage