I’ve thought of this, but don’t have the wherewithal to actually make a project come to fruition.

I’m also not a lawyer, but I’ve read multiple articles on this, and it doesn’t seem like any legal violation. Corporation got lazy, didn’t confirm where 10m in royalties went and under what circumstance, and got burned.

Finally a corp gets scammed by the common man.

I say good on him.

We live in troubled times, the planet is overheating at a rate that it might affect my life more than being more uncomfortable in the summer. And that’s Texas summers at that.

There is an island of plastic refuse in the ocean bigger than some countries.

I saw the home computer come to the living room and the internet be birthed.

If you were to ask if I was jaded as a kid, already? Yeah. Around 7 years old.

It isn’t getting better. Corporations claw for more and more at the expense of the people and the planet.

I hope the younger generations can lead the charge of change, but for me… I don’t have the time or energy to play games most days, let alone change the planet.

And for those who will say, “Aren’t you just part of the problem then?” Sadly yes, I am. I try to make changes when I can, but I fear changing the small environment of my home will not be enough.

I have an analog clock in my man cave. Its very steam punk in design. It is NOT accurate and is ONLY a decoration piece that gets corrected when I can spare the attention. It runs fast, if anyone cares.

Ultimately, my wife liked it, bought it for me, and put it up. Not gonna upset her over something I really don’t care about.

10 was bad. 11 is… awful.

I’m running it on my daily driver / gaming rig to learn its flaws and how to work around them, because work may be moving that direction. My hardware, my license, not like they can stop me.

I’ve never had more problems with any OS than 11 on day to day stability issues. Vista? At least it had direct X 10. 8? Yeah, a total design fuck up, but even supporting it professionally I never had this many problems.

Don’t work in medical IT.

It has been literally life and death before.

I mean, 8 gigs of RAM is overkill depending on what you’re doing.

For general computing sure, but if you build out a device for a specific purpose, you can really cut down on a crap ton of resources including memory.

Unix principle, adopted by Linux. Do one thing and do it well.

Applies to more than just software design.

With a pi hole, you’re basically setting up a DNS server that has built in abilities to stop ads.

What that means is, you can point your router (or any device really) at that DNS server (pi hole) to block ads.

Ublock is good.

Due to remote work constraints, a pi hole doesn’t play nicely with their stuff and I can’t be bothered to figure out a work around. Mostly because it’s my wife’s remote work, and their IT is hesitant to talk with me about it - I get it, I wouldn’t do that at work (I’m in IT).

So I use ublock on Firefox on both my desktop and phone, plus I run through a VPN that blocks ads and malware for everything else. The VPN is a separate use case, but that’s just an added benefit.

Social engineering, arguably, is one of the harder things to learn.

It’s a collection of soft skills, and if you’ve been paying attention to rank and file tech jobs, places are looking for people with soft skills because they’re so impractical to train.

This goes down to your basic help desk tech.

Anyone with an interest in computers can sit down and learn how to analyze and exploit weakness in code. In fact, it’s a fun puzzle. Dealing with other people, let alone establishing oneself as another person and fucking SELLING that character enough to get what you need?

People write off social engineering far too quickly. It’s quick, it’s effective, and if done well, the person you exploited doesn’t even realize they’ve been tricked.

Cost and a personal bias, also I’ve seen more helpful communities amongst Linux and FOSS advocates than trying to deal with a big brand.

I’ve done a lot of IT stuff in my life, even before working in IT.

I’ve seen too many issues from big brands, and its usually caused by the company.

I have a Pi 2 from way back. I’ve thrown so many distros at that thing over time, and without fail I don’t run into any problems I didn’t personally create while learning or through human error.

I understand all too well that those big brands have support for businesses, warranties, etc. It makes them cost effective long term for business. At a personal level I just don’t see the benefits outweighing the negatives.

Again, personal bias. Same core reason I avoid apple products, bias, though I mainly dislike apples cost combined with their closed off, well, everything.

I’ve got enterprise level hardware, rack moubtable all that jazz.

Between the cost of power, and the heat it generates (which uses more AC and thus power) its not feasible to run it.

I’m looking into clustering some raspberry pis for a more power (and heat) efficient hardware as my next project. Barely scratched the surface of research though.

So hey, if anyone has any tips or links, it would be much appreciated.

Not just ISPs, it can be blocked at the enterprise level in a few clicks.

I was temping at a place during the pandemic when my hospitality based IT job shuttered. With their set up, I could just block a country in a couple clicks.

I didn’t do the clicking, but we were getting hit with a DDoS from a nation we had no business in, and it was just blocked in a matter of minutes once the meetings and BS were attended to. Those took hours over days.

I was more thinking it’s to test the waters.

A buck is affordable to most everyone who has the means to access Twitter.

Of course next year it’ll be Twitter++ subscriptions for 20 bucks a month, as they phase out the 1 dollar tier.

I never cared for Twitter, and watching Musk’s spin on it has been hilarious as someone with a long history in corporate IT.

Pre-edit: At the moment I’m refusing to refer to it by a tween edgelords name~ Musk’s name for it.