I won’t help every time, but if someone asks and I’m feeling generous, I usually stop and talk for a few mins and hand them $10-20, no strings attached. I’m not the ethics police and if they buy insulin or liquor doesn’t matter to me as much as them getting the impression that they aren’t invisible and people want to see them prosper. It’s too easy to see myself in their situation for me to be an asshole about it. Most of us are only an accident or bad decision away from homelessness and poverty.

I know it’s not a perfect resemblance, but I see it.

Interesting username. Are you a fellow student of Internet Comment Etiquette?

I know at least some of my containers use Postgres. Glad to know I inadvertently might have made it easier on myself. I’ll have to look into the users for the db and db containers. I’m a bit lost on that. I know my db has a username and pass I set in the docker compose file and that the process is running with a particular GID UID or whatever. Is that what your talking about?

I miss this from cloud hosting. It’s helpful to be able to save, clone, or do whatever with the current machine state and easily just flash back to where you were if you mess something up. Might be too much to set up for my current homelab though. My server does have btrfs snapshots of everything directly in grub which has let me roll back a few big screwups here and there.

I’ve replaced the battery on my laptop twice. Didn’t recognize the brand (might have been Dentsing or something like that) but it outperformed the stock battery in it’s flattening state and maybe even when it was new! I watched it pretty closely for a while though and I’d NEVER buy a battery off temu.

If there is a donation button and its a project, media item, service, etc that I use enough that I would buy it, I often donate. The amount depends on how badly they need the help. If I they try to steer me to recurring donations I don’t donate at all (having the option as an opt-in is okay).

I’m a Buddhist/Atheist. There is far less to fight about here than between Christians/Atheist. I’m sure I’m a “bad” Buddhist too because I take the philosophical bits that make sense to me and leave all the deities and supernatural stuff alone, but Buddhists don’t seem to mind and most atheists don’t either.

As a former evangelical Christian, who also dabbled in atheism, antitheism, etc, I settled into something that’s probably closest to Zen Buddhism mixed with atheism. I’ve been on dates with people, many of them I probably never knew their religion, but the gung-ho Christians and the Mormons showed their incompatibility very quickly. Funnily enough, ex-catholics dig me and I like them. :-)

I don’t see myself dating someone who is theocratic, doesn’t believe abortion should be allowed, or wants me to go to their church with them. I sometimes tell the story of the time I was figuring myself out and ended up going on a date with a girl who didn’t believe in dinosaurs. I call her dinosaur girl. I wish her well, but man did I dodge a bullet!

Nowadays I run a dual 4k monitor setup with the left centered in my FoV and the right one alternating between portrait and landscape. My laptop usually sits under the primary or to the bottom left. I connect over thunderbolt so I can easily swap out my work and personal laptop on the dock. Effectively I get 3 screens: my main focus, my distraction, and my comms on the built in display. If I’m gaming on the desktop I toggle the left monitor to another input. I used to have more screens but things are a lot more ergonomic now.

I do feel like I could switch to right monitor dominant, bit I think it would not be ideal considering sloppily moving the mouse to the top left on the primary would cause the mouse to jump to the secondary screen whereas on a left monitor dominant layout it would hit the border. You could offset the displays slightly to catch the mouse, but it’s not worth it.

People are surprised that I can jodel a bit. My geeky high-schools self worked hard to build this skill.

On the bright side…

…snacks?

I’m snobby about plastic. I think all water stored in plastic tastes like plastic and it’s gross. Flavored with 100% real microplastics. Water tastes best out of glass, but it’s expensive due to inadequate recycling infrastructure here, and it’s heavy.

That was my first thought. How do you keep it cold enough to run in a place like Arizona, Spain, or Mexico? It also reminded me of my Windows Mobile days before I had a smartphone when someone on a Windows Mobile forum took a Dell Axim x51v and built a dock for it that exposed all the ports so he could use it with an external display as an infotainment/nav system. He called it the Aximizer. An old android phone with a micro-hdmi port might be the modern equivilant.

https://youtu.be/ELANGsiaq5M

I hate how everyone follows the social marketing playbook now. There’s so little community building and genuine connection with constituents. Everything is optimized by some social media marketing guru types with a masters degree in being an asshole.

I work with enough foreigners that I almost HAVE to do this since I rarely see them face to face and have no real indicators aside from their name. If your name is 20 characters long and 18 of them are consonants, I’m gonna use “they” at work, just to avoid any undue offense. So far, if someone had a problem with me it was because of my employer, not my own words or behavior.

One $5 donation buys you a decade of nagging donation emails and a bunch of capitulating spineless politicians.

Regularly, sometimes in a teasing fun way, other times seriously and sincerely. I know she benefits from the positive reinforcement and I appreciate it when it’s reversed and I’m being complimented as well. I agree with the other commenter who said they do this for everyone in their life. If you have something nice to say and sincerely mean it, why hold back?

Bike rides are the only thing that made cardio fun for me. The varied environments and the thrill of exploring massage my brain and I end up not noticing how much it sucks to bike straight up the side of a mountain. Also the alternating grind of ascending and thrilling adrenaline rush of descending keeps things fresh.

I put away my phone in the opposite pocket from my keys. When I retrieve it, I always pull it out of the same pocket as my keys. Not sure what that’s all about.

A torrent swarm of all the government and court documents that parasites like Lexus Nexus paywall. There is no excuse to not have access to government info online and free. If I understand correctly, some states even have the state statutes (aka laws) hidden behind such paywalls.