Shit, I’m even grateful for when you all tell me off.

Oh fuck off!

Just kidding! I haven’t seen any of your posts here (mostly because I sort by all) but yeah the people in this sub are top tier.

A few weeks ago I came here to ask about building my own computer and which parts to get because it had been years since I’ve done so and everyone was nice about it.

They don’t need to be a techie. Just someone who can click a button.

I am remembering Julian Assuage has/had a payload that was distributed via BitTorrent. The file was encrypted with a private key and his public key was posted either as a file in the package or on the site where the magnet file was downloaded.

Before he was arrested, he encouraged everyone to download the file and sit on it and to keep seeding it. He said in the event of his untimely death, the password would be released for everyone to decrypt.

That would be another option but you sort of need the notoriety to make this work.

I’ve actually given this a lot of thought over the years. The biggest issue for me is all my AWS services that no one in my family knows about.

So the idea would be to, at minimum, let my family know what services are being used.

Unfortunately there isn’t a turn-key solution. I’ve seen a number of well-meaning solutions and some that are quite novel but they all suffer from the same problems: how do you deal with false positives and how do you verify your deadness.

I imagine that the problem is similar to the Yellowstone trash can problem, in that any solution to mitigate one will make it harder on the other.

The best solution I’ve found is to have a two-person solution, similar to launching a nuke. You have automation that tests if you are active that emails a close friend or relative to verify you are indeed dead.

Ideally there would be more than one person on this list a confirmation from two people would kick off all of the automations you code.

This exactly. NAS+RAID gives you a backup of your local media. It can account for one of your three copies and one of your storage mediums. But you still need something off site.

So assuming you had a copy on your computer proper, it could work. Better than no backups.

I wish there was a good way to store a backup of my media. I recently suffered a terrible hard drive issue. I lost a terabyte of media. Fortunately, the pirate ship has saved me and has me rethinking some of my backup methodologies.

Outside of periodically backing up onto an external hard drive, I haven’t been able to find a reasonably priced online backup solution that isn’t going to fuck me when I have to pull data out. Egress fees are killer.

Privacy: I have blinds on my windows. I control whether they are open or closed, but they aren’t secure. You could break a window and look inside if you really wanted to.

Security: my glass storm door has a lock. But privacy is only there when I close the front door.

There is overlap between these two concepts but one does not imply the other.

Jesus fucking mother of Christ.

Ok, I’m going to skip my indignation.

I’m not an app developer or a wheel chair person. That said, we need some info to help you better.

• What phone? Android or iOS?
• link to the app (and a link it’s APK or whatever iPhones equivalent to an APK would be)
• instructions on how you register, e.g. is registration tied to your phone, the wheelchair, or both?

Here is some general hacking advice:

• check online for your wheelchairs “provider” manual. I “hacked” my CPAP machine a few years back. My doctor forgot to turn on heated tubing and the setting was hidden behind a “provider” menu. Chances are good that there will be a similar manual for your wheelchair.
• if you haven’t already, search for the make and model of your wheelchair and see if there are forums or discussion boards
• typically, physical access is the best access. Depending on how your phone communicates with the chair, you might able to spy on the signals that it uses. My guess is Bluetooth. It probably is encrypted but medical devices are notoriously easy skimpy on their tech security. Might be worth a try
• If you have the tools and the knowledge, consider taking apart the wheelchair to access the physical components. Information like the processor, chip set, etc will make it easier to understand how it works. While you might expect custom boards and software, more and more devices are going the Raspberry Pi or Pico route because they are cheaper to manufacturer than to do a whole custom board. If it’s a run of the mill consumer board, you have a lot more attack vectors.

Often settings like these are based on PKI(Public Key Infrastructure), meaning that the program on your wheelchair likely knows the public key for the company and will test any input to change the settings will require the private key. Again, generally speaking.

But also generally speaking, medical equipment, especially consumer equipment, has to deal with the lowest common denominator, meaning people who don’t have apps, who don’t know what a smart phone is, etc. Because of that, my hunch is that the setting is in plain text and you just need to change it.

You also have to remember that the people setting this up are often in doctors offices, which means it must be easy to do because time is of the essence. The doctor would not recommend their product if it takes more than a few minutes to set up.

I’m sorry I can’t give you better more specific advice but hopefully you can figure this out.

Obligatory: https://youtube.com/watch?v=T0fAznO1wA8

I typically code a lot of back-end and processor intensive workloads. The issue I have with i5s is that they don’t seem to be as “snappy” as i7s. I’ve worked with both for good long periods of time. When I had an i5 laptop, I had to off-load a good majority of my development to the cloud because I couldn’t do containers and listen to music and run two monitors at the same time. I never had the same issue with i7 processors, even on a laptop.

Oooh, I had not considered that but thank you for the recommendation. The only thing I don’t like about these PCs is that they all have RGB lighting. I really don’t need this and I don’t get their appeal.

Are CUDAs something that I can select within pcpartpicker? Or is this like a cloud thing?

With the conversations I’m having here, I’m leaning in the direction of integrated video (assuming I can get one with display port) and a discrete card just for AI work.

I use VirtualBox for VMs. I’m assuming there are instructions on how to give the card to the VM? My cursory google search came up with dubious results.

I just checked the specs for the M.2 NVMe drive that I pulled from an old laptop. It’s read speed is 3000mbs so it looks like I’m good there. Thanks for the heads up though.

I know that this is the self-hosted community but I very much agree. The way I run my desktop is that I can, in most cases, lose my primary hard drive and I’ll survive. It won’t be pretty and I might have a few local repos that I haven’t synced in a while but overall, it ain’t bad.

Now, that doesn’t mean I don’t want my primary hard drive restored if I can do it. I’ve been lucky enough to be able to restore them from the drive. But if I can’t, the most I lose is some config files, which I should start to version control but I get lazy.

I can’t back up my media. It’s just too big. But yar.

My greatest fear is losing my porn collection. 😅 But not enough to RAID.

I actually did. And the quantum twin that succeeded is now solving global warming.

I am the twin that didn’t succeed.

And if you want to join the “I use arch btw” crowd…

I may be a linux nerd and pedantic, but not that pedantic. 😅 I’ve looked into Linux Mint and not opposed to an distro switch. I’ve been very happy with Ubuntu over the years. My first distro was slackware, then Fedora. Settled in Ubuntu and haven’t turned back.

if CUDA should be part of your calculus or not.

Probably not, if my cursory google search is correct. But happy to be convinced otherwise.

Though another nicety for my latest builds, is multi-gig nics (though 2.5Gb was my ceiling, since you’ll also need the network gear to utilize it)

I’ve had the benefit of laying my own CAT-5e in my house. Given the distances, CAT-6 was going to cost twice as much with a negligible increase in bandwidth. That said, I’m restricted by the narrowest straw, which is wifi (when streaming media to my phone) and ISP (which taps out at around 300mb/s). My current PC has 1gb/s card and I’ve only occasionally had issues.

I use newegg for its reviews of items, specifically so I can search for the term “linux” in any given product’s reviews.

Oh that’s a good tip!

I was really hoping to cannibalize the 32 GBs of DDR3 RAM but I couldn’t find a MoBo that supports it anymore. Then I saw DDR5 is the latest!

I don’t really do any gaming. If I wasn’t going to tinker with AI, I’d just need a card for dual DisplayPort output. I can support HDMI but…I prefer DP

I’ve gone back and forth on whether I need RAID locally. Giving up at least a third of your storage capacity (assuming RAID 5) for the off-chance that your hard drive dies in 3-4 years seems like a high price to pay. I had two drives fail in the lifespan of my current desktop. And I had enough warning from SMART that I could peel off the data before the drives bricked. I know I got lucky, but still…

Two GPUs? Is that a thing? How does that work on a desktop? Honestly, if it wasn’t for my curiosity into AI, I’d just go with the onboard video though given my need for specific resolutions, I find comfort in having a dedicated card.

I’ve been using ubuntu exclusively for 10 some years and don’t use snap at all. tbh, not even sure what snap is.

If it’s not apt, then I don’t use it.

is that really a concern? 2 cables vs. pushing a card into the mobo?