I’m just this guy, you know?

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • OK fine, we are mid-neocolonial. Accepted.

    Do we have any reason to believe there’s giant blocks of pure, rare metals on the moon or asteroids?

    So far there’s no evidence to the contrary. Speculative interest says “keep digging, there’s bound to be one out there” among the rocky asteroids. Heck, even “comet water might” bring a price, given trends.

    There’s no brown people on the moon you can give a dictator weapons to in exchange for keeping the people selling their labor and resources for peanuts.

    If you think the next wave of neocolonialism wouldn’t consider indentured servitude and/or conscription, well… I guess we shall see. You don’t need indigenous people, just poors.

    Edit: …when you can just turn off their air.



  • More, shelter.

    There’s no atmosphere to attenuate hard radiation, so rock overhead is the next best thing.

    There’s no gravity to contain an atmosphere, and domes are expensive and time consuming to build. Meanwhile the crews are exposed to radiation.

    There’s nothing but regolith on the surface of the moon-- finely powdered rock of unknown (and likely poor) assay for vital ores and minerals useful to bootstrap a colony.

    A cave provides shelter, more assay-ably dense ore resources, potentially water in the form of subsurface ice, and potentially a vitrable (melted, glassified rock) cavity to contain a viable, pressurized atmosphere on the quick.

    A cave on the moon is a find. Given the potential for neocolonialism in the next decade or three, it’s a boon for whatever program discovers one.

    edit: typos




  • I used to selfhost more, but honestly it started to feel like a job, and it was getting exhausting (maybe also irritating) to keep up with patches & updates across all of my services. I made decisions about risks to compromise and data loss from breaches and system failures. In the end, In decided my time was more valuable so now I pay someone to incur those risks for me.

    For my outward facing stuff, I used to selfhost my own DNS domains, email + IMAP, web services, and an XMPP service for friends and family. Most of that I’ve moved off to paid private hosting. Now I maintain my DNS through Porkbun, email through MXroute, and we use Signal instead of XMPP. I still host and manage my own websites but am considering moving to a ghost.org account, or perhaps just host my blogs on a droplet at DO. My needs are modest and it’s all just personal stuff. I learned what I wanted, and I’m content to be someone else’s customer now.

    At home, I still maintain my custom router/firewall services, Unifi wireless controller, Pihole + unbound recursive resolver, Wireguard, Jellyfin, homeassistant, Frigate NVR, and a couple of ADS-B feeders. Since it’s all on my home LAN and for my and my wife’s personal use, I can afford to let things be down a day or two til I get around to fixing it.

    Still need to do better on my backup strategies, but it’s getting there.








  • You could source a pair of gigabit media converters and a length of fiber on Amazon for about $100. Just use the media converters to extend the Ethernet port from where the Internet hands off in your house over to your office. You can affix the fiber along baseboards and up over door frames with adhesive cleats and zip ties, or those nylon staples on a nail they use to tack down coax cable.

    If you’re willing to spend a little more on the fiber for a custom color, you can probably even order the fiber in a more neutral color than SMF yellow to blend into the trim better.



  • I happen to have LMDE installed on a Lenovo Thinkpad Carbon X1 (Gen 3) tablet. It has a stylus that takes a AAAA (yes, quad-A) battery. Its an i5 or i7 Intel processor, and has a 3k Wacom sensor display. I’ve played with Inkscape on it and I think it fits the bill nicely, but it’s also discontinued.

    Cinnamon was the only DE with DPI scaling that worked worth a damn, and also had good native support for screen autorotation and onscreen keyboard.

    I need to completely wipe and reinstall the system now because I configured my slices too small, and for some reason decided not to put root in an LVM like a sane person would have (it was 2017 tho. Different times…)

    Anyhoo, if you can come by one through the refurb market, I think it comes closest to your spec, saving the no-battery stylus.