I don’t know about videos but having a look at the OSI model is a good way to start. It covers the abstract framework for packetizing data including things like the distinction between hardware and software, envelope, encryption, application layer stuff, the whole shebang. The cool thing is by going hardware, network, application you can see where responsibility are and it helps you understand where things can go wrong.

If you are interested there are plenty of CCNA style courses available on the internet, licit and otherwise, and they go into more depth, and the same applies to RHCE/RHCSA material. The training for certifications like that covers what you want to know but also puts it in context, and again licit and otherwise sources are available.

I did a whole stack of servers using SNMP based monitoring years ago and it was amazing. I could see loads, memory stats, NIC utilisation, disk space, and all sorts of other things. I tried Cacti and Icinga and settled on the latter but they are all fairly similar. Once you are generating the data you van do whatever you like with it, so monitoring load attributable to which actual executable is definitely manageable. It is also handy for getting notifications for something being down, losing stability, or just being out if whack.

Revengers, resemble!

My understanding is you make fewer but more replicable mistakes. If you use a wire you have to trace it, keep the length consistent for timing reasons, use very consistent soldering technique, and ultimately you have a hard time tracing issues. With a homemade PCB you generally do get what you ask for in terms of circuitry. Traces are the right length, right thickness, right spacing, and if not then the whole board is similarly impacted, so it is obviously broken or not broken. If you mess up your design then you have a problem, but if you did the process right and you have a valid design then it works.

That all said, homemade PCB is a large time sink and modern PCB manufacture is so cheap and fast it doesn’t make sense to do at home for the most part. You can literally get a complex board faster by ordering it from halfway around the world and having it posted than making it yourself. I would say it is a good learning exercise, not a good manufacturing or prototyping practice.

Yeah, meds are not the solution to all problems. Some meds can at some times be useful for some people, but it is not appropriate to just blanket the population with benzodiazapines and consider the population to be mentally healthier. All sort of other stuff like improving social connection, reducing working hours, building skills, and so on can do a lot more to reduce anxiety and depression, but where is the funding for a local community garden or woodworking class?

Australian healthcare is actually pretty amazing. I had endocarditis last year and had two collapsed lungs with my blood oxygen plummeting and no clear reason for the infection. The bacteria ate one of my heart valves so my heart had to do 4 pumps to have the effect of one, pushing my heart rate up to around 140 bpm while sleeping. I was flown from my regional town to the best hospital for the job and had an emergency valve replacement. I was up and walking 2 days later and I was flown home a couple of weeks later. I now take Warfarin and will for the rest of my life, along with a beta blocker. My biggest healthcare costs involved with this whole thing is my monthly medication cost of about $30 from 5 prescriptions including ADHD medications.

That all said, mental health care is not as good here as it used to be nor as it should be. We had a conservative government for 12 years and they absolutely gutted the mental health care system. They cut funding for extremely effective programs and did some real harm to vulnerable people (if interested look up robodebt). So yes, mental health is not great here. It is way better than in the US or in the UK but it is not in line with best practice research.

The fact that we can do better does not eliminate how we we do. I didn’t die from something that should have killed me, and this is the second time I have had a really major injury that required surgeries and so on. Well, third technically. Still, I have never paid a cent at the time of use for any medical care and I have paid for the medical care of others with my taxes. Am I coming out ahead of my costs? I hope not to be honest. I hope I have contributed more than I have cost the system because I care what happens to other people. I hope I have paid my way but I will be sure to honestly file my taxes every year knowing the system I am paying in to is the same one that has saved my life. Again. Man I am stupid.

Something worth noting is that this is yet another example of how the patriarchy hurts people. She felt that her image on Instagram was so important that she took risks which ultimately lead to her death. She doesn’t have to be an idiot to have this happen, I’ve done tonnes of stupid dangerous stuff in my life and I’m fairly sure everyone else here can think of a few things that could have gone wrong.

The algorithm of something like Instagram is built around enhancing use of the platform. This is the same fundamental motivation as tobacco companies or gambling companies. Your continued use of the product is essential, even if it is harmful to your health. So they design their product to enhance it’s addictiveness and market to people who are vulnerable, say younger women for example, and boom, revenue.

Meta has a meaningful hand in this type of situation. The same goes for all the other attention economy companies. Their product doesn’t have to be harmful but it is way more profitable if harm is not a consideration.

Working for a VoIP company in the early 2010s I rm -rf’d the /bin/ directory. As root. On a production server. On site.

I ended up booting from my phone (android app for iso booting) then manually coppied over the files from another machine. Chrooted and some stuff was broken but rebuilding from the package manager reinstalled everything that was missing. Got the system back up in around 40 mins after that colossal screw up. Good fun and a great learning experience. Honestly, my manager should not have had me doing anything on a root shell with no training.

In the early days the data was fairly clear. We have a new virus which could be of natural origin or lab origin, but the early spread data basically showed two different strains at first jump to humans, suggesting a fairly large number of infected animals in the same area around Wuhan. This is much more consistent with a natural spillover than a lab leak because the differences would take time to accumulate. If you have a virus in a new host it adapts to that host rapidly and changes, so if two separate animals of different species were both infected that would make two different strains with two different spillovers into humans and it happening at almost the same time is not crazy, both animals may have been in the same place and gotten infected at similar times.

If it were a lab origin it would be identical virus when it jumped over to humans. It would also have been better adapted to humans and not had as much change in humans in the first few months.

So is it possible it was a lab leak? Yes. Is it more likely than a natural spillover? No, not more likely. Possible, but no specific evidence that makes it reasonable to conclude either than we know for sure what happened or that it was a lab leak. The correct answer here is we don’t know for sure now but regardless of what happened this time we know another event will happen in time and natural spillovers are just as dangerous as lab leaks. We need to have a One Health approach, taking care of humans and also the natural environment and the interplay between them. Having humans living on the edge of wild areas is a recipe for disaster.

For the software side I would recommend Linux Mint as a great simple starter distro with good support and a nice community. The overall design paradigm is about maintaining familiarity while also making sane defaults and simplifying processes. Because it is Ubuntu based it is also easy to get documentation and support because what works for Ubuntu also works for Mint.

For hardware it really depends on your budget and locality as well as use case. Laptops vary much more country to country than you may think, so it may be worth thinking about what is local to you. For example, I live in Australia so System76 is a bad choice here, same with SlimBook (I think that is the name, European KDE laptop that advertises with that French(?) YouTuber, they don’t ship here.

Also, when looking at laptops the RAM configuration is important. If you have two RAM slots but only one RAM stick you will have really slow memory access. This will bottleneck for both the CPU and GPU if you are using both at the same time, say during gaming or doing AI work. Swapping out the single stick for a matching pair or just adding one more stick that matches what it already has will let both ports work together, making everything faster. Also when I say matching I mean in terms of size and speed. If you put 3200MHz and 2400MHz in the system at the same time the 3200MHz won’t just down tune to match, they will both go slower as far as I am aware. Best to match not only the speed but if possible the brand and ideally model, there are lots of little differences between RAM sticks and honestly it has never been worth the trouble in my experience to have mismatched sticks, I just replace with a matching pair.

It looks like it is downsampling the video or streaming after converting to another codec. Some codecs are fine for decoding on the server but the app may not support them so the server converts them. Some files are of higher quality than what the server is configured to deliver so it downsamples to stream it.

Check the configuration and look for anything to do with codecs, hardware decoding, streaming quality, and so on. It may also be on the app, so if you can access a different interface then test that to narrow down the issue.