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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: September 12th, 2025

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  • My ISP charges $15/mo for gigabit. I don’t really anticipate beating that.

    They charge another $15/mo for a static IP, which they apparently require to allow port forwarding, but if I called annually about it they’d probably catch on. They already know me by name because, despite being several states away, they provide internet access exclusively to my city in my state and I’m apparently the only person here who wants port forwarding.




  • A long time ago, before car keys with buttons were common, I had a car with one key with buttons. They didn’t work well, so I went to the relevant dealership to get another key.

    They charged me $80 and gave me another key, which admittedly did have functional buttons, but in so doing they further broke the original key - the buttons no longer worked at all. They then told me that I should not have expected to pay $80 and come out with more than I’d brought in.

    I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. The first time I went to that dealership, I asked to test drive one of their cars … The salesperson to whom I spoke claimed that they didn’t have any license plates to spare while visibly holding one in his hands.


  • I always thought the library near where I grew up would be a near ideal environment during a zombie apocalypse. It was a repository of knowledge and entertainment, of course; it was in a fairly small city, meaning that while there might be more zombies than in the countryside, there wouldn’t be as many as in a large city - but there would be resources nearby; there was an armory nearby; there was only one relatively-easily-fortified entrance (to my knowledge); and it had a fully enclosed courtyard which, while it ended up being kind of depressing in real life, could give you a garden in a theoretical apocalypse.

    The first and last were most of what I considered when I was a kid.





  • It’s good that you and your wife made it through that experience okay.

    I once rolled my car just due to driving in the snow down a mountain. It wasn’t quite scary like yours - in fact, I remember feeling a detachment as I started sliding towards an obstacle, thinking basically “okay, this is going to happen. I can’t do anything about it. What can I do to minimize the damage?”

    I never ended up hitting the obstacle. The car rolled and I think the material of the roof generated more friction than the tires had, so I stopped sooner.

    The car performed one full rotation, landing on one side, then the roof, then the other side, then back right side up. The interesting thing to me is that I didn’t realize the car was rolling until all the loose objects in the car started, from my perspective, defying gravity, then started obeying it again.

    I came out completely physically unhurt, but one of the loose objects in the car was a jack. I saw it fly straight past my head. That could have been bad.

    As I said, it was snowing and I was on a mountain in Pennsylvania. It was a long time ago and cell phone coverage wasn’t very good, let alone in that area. I ended up walking into the drainage ditch (figuring that the debris there might give my shoes more traction, maybe not the best idea in retrospect, but I neither slipped nor fell) and walking up to knock on the door of the nearest house to call a tow truck. I think it was nine or ten pm.

    I couldn’t really see the resident, but I could see their feet on their recliner and the TV they were watching. The first time I knocked, there was no reaction. I waited a short while and knocked again and saw them reach to turn the TV up.

    I got the message and walked to the next house. They were much more helpful.



  • I’m not trying to be dismissive or critical of those who use a NAS solution. I’ve never used one myself, so maybe it really is amazing; but from your response it sounds just like an NFS (or perhaps samba) server with a web interface? I did try TrueNAS once and it basically seemed like that, but also with convoluted permissions.

    Again, not trying to be dismissive or anything. Just trying to understand.