My 72 year old, non techy father in law had a laptop that could not be updated to Windows 11 without modifying the installer to get around Microsoft limitations. I suggested Linux, He decided to just buy a new laptop with Windows 11 on it. About a week later he was complaining about the way Microsoft was forcing him to have an online account and how he wanted to get rid of onedrive. I suggested Linux again and he said why not?

I installed Linux Mint for him and gave him the password. I offered to show him around but he said he would take a look at it and let me know if he has trouble doing anything.

Its been a few months now, and he hasn’t had any problems or even questions. Everything is just working for him.

I also gave my 16 year old daughter a Linux Mint laptop and the password a couple of years ago. She uses it all the time and has never asked for help in figuring out how to do anything.

The distro doesn’t really matter too much, but if you are coming from Windows 7 or 10, Linux Mint will seem very familiar to you.

TIL that Arch users are Pastafarians.

May you be touched by his Noodly appendage!

The meme is talking about sshfs.

For smb, the share would need to be created first.

Sshfs is pretty nice because it will give you access to all of the files that on the server that you have permissions to access.

clearly knows what he is doing

yeah, I know. that why I want to do it.

Yeah, my plan will be to use a domain that I don’t actually use for my email to start with, make sure that I can reliably send and receive mail with it. Then add my normal email domain for sending-only to start, will just need to add it to my spf and dkim records. Once I test with that and verify that I can reliably send mail then I can fully switch things over.

Still trying to decide what do do about full disk encryption.

Thinking that maybe I can host a decryption key on private github repo, have the preboot environment use a local key to download the decryption key to ephemeral storage and use it to unlock the disk. This doesn’t make it truly secure because anyone with access to the boot partition could figure out what is happening and do it manually. but it would make it difficult enough that a bored sysadmin at the vps provider couldn’t just browse me data easily.

I’d really like it better if I could have it send me a push notification to my phone to authorize the unlock. Maybe I can set that up with how ever I decide to host the decryption key.

Toying with the idea of running my own email server. Lots of people say this is a bad idea.

Been doing lots of research. I have a VPS for it already and want to set it up with postfix, dovecot, roundcube, and mariadb.

I don’t want to host locally because I don’t want it to depend on my internet connection and because my ip address will likely change at some point and most residential IPs are blacklisted.

But also don’t want to host it on someone else’s machine unless I can totally encrypt the drive. I have been looking at how to do full drive encryption on a vps hard drive by adding dropbear ssh to the initsys so I can ssh in and enter the decryption password when rebooting.

This also doesn’t seem ideal, because it would require me to be available to do this for every reboot.

So still researching to see what other options there are.

I thought they got rid of the iguana mascot.

I guess they realized that it was the best thing about their brand.

I really like and use fastmail.

Although I have just started to try to completely de-google. Its a bit frustrating that they don’t offer an apk download. I put in a ticket today saying as much.

They seemed to understand,but basically just said that all I can do is to use the browser version.

I’m using aurora store to download their official google play version for now but it feels icky.

They are obviously now the only ones that I am having trouble with but I thought that they might be more willing to help people distance themselves from Gmail and Google, as Gmail is their obvious competition.

breast answer?

Top shelf of a walk in closet that was obscured from view from the door.

Under a futon couch.

On the roof of the house in the angled portion where 2 downward slopes come together.

In the back of a truck in the back yard.

In the middle of a grassy area behind our garage

My parents used to wake me up at 4:30 in the morning to take a cold shower and then spend the next 4 hours doing religious worship. The only time I could read “Horrible secular books” like Mutiny on the Bounty, the three musketeers, and the man in the iron mask was late at night after everyone went to bed. I would stay up till 2:30-3:00am sometimes reading and I knew waking up at 4:30 was just not gonna happen.

Yeah, I got in a bunch of trouble when I came out of my hiding spot the next morning, but sometimes it was worth it.

I feel like you think the terminal is just for installing updates…

The linux terminal is why I use linux.

vim, diff, cat, grep, sed, awk, and sort are so freaking powerful and useful.

+1 for sed command in the wild

diff -y -W 200 file1 file2

Shows a side by side diff of 2 files with enough column width to see most of what I need usually.

I have actually aliased this command as diffy

ctrl-r

searching bash history

du -sh * | sort -h

shows size of all files and dirs in the current dir and sorts them in ascending order so you can easily see the largest files or dirt ant the end of the list

ls -ltr

Shows the most recently modified files at the end of the listing.

If you are going to dual boot and your computer has room for 2 drives. The way I would recommend doing it is to add a second drive for Linux, and disconnect to windows drive from the computer. Do a normal linux install. And then add the windows drive back in. Then you can set one of the drives as the default boot device and if you want to boot to the other just open the Boot options on boot.

This keeps things totally separated and you can even remove one of the drives later if you want to single boot.

TBF, if a potential partner is super excited about something you never heard of, looking into it is a good thing.

Conservatives, and other assholes, are good about hiding their crazy behind seemingly innocent things, like pepe the frog.

Me: Linux Sysadmin

Co-workers: 2 Linux sysadmins with 15+ years of experience.

They pronounce URL as Earl.

I bought a 21 inch 1080p Viewsonic monitor from a thrift store just the other day for $6. I got it just for this use case.

I had a spare for this purpose up until about a month ago when the backlight went out on one of my daily drivers.

Also, a couple of days ago I got a pretty nice steelcase apex 3 keyboard with RGB lights for $5.

Well now I want an old ugly bike. Where do you park yours? 😉

I moved my personal email domain to fastmail. I’ve been very happy with it. I am using the Standard plan at $50 per year.

It’s nice being the customer instead of the product.

They can also host static web sites for no additional cost on this plan. So I canceled my web hosting plan too.