It would be a more meaningful discussion if the government wasn’t controlled so much by large corporations and oligarchs.

I have self hosted my email since 2006. I gave up on self hosting outgoing mail in 2021, but I still keep the server up for incoming mail, and still set up throwaway accounts on there.

The hard part of hosting email is getting Google and Microsoft to accept outgoing mail. Tons of businesses that do not have visibly outlook .com or gmail .com addresses are still hosted by those servers.

I had SPF, DKIM, and a static datacenter IP address with no reputation problems. I still couldn’t get through to Microsoft, not even in people’s junk mail directory, until they manually whitelisted my address. Microsoft didn’t allow them to whitelist a whole domain. Google was a little easier, but they added new demands monthly.

In 2025, I can’t get reliable delivery to gmail .com addresses even sending from a hotmail .com address in the outlook .com web interface.

Not sure how much you’re paying for your VPN, but a virtual private server can be had for about $5 per month. You’ll get a real IPv4 address just for you, so you won’t have to use non-standard port numbers. (You can also use the VPS as a self-hosted VPN or proxy.)

$5 per month doesn’t get you much processing power, but it gets you plenty of bandwidth. You could self-host your server on your home computer, and reverse-proxy through your NAT using the VPS.

Cloudflare has IP banned me before for no reason (no proxy, no VPN, residential ISP with no bot traffic). They’ve switched their captcha system a few times, and some years it’s easy, some years it’s impossible.

This survey doesn’t distinguish between levels of cloud service provider, so I was a little confused.

Virtual private servers, cloud virtual servers (like AWS), cloud-based software where you provide code or a program and the cloud system runs it on a server of its choosing, and cloud-based systems where someone else provides the software (like Google Docs).

Steam is part social network, so it’s expected. The play time is clearly counted, and you can choose to hide it. Steam does not count your offline hours.

From the 15 minutes I’ve played Switch, it did not obviously: record playtime, phone home, or give any option to be online/offline.

This is dystopian, if true. This type of data should be kept private, on the console itself, for the use of the user only.

Jellyfin depends on proprietary Microsoft .NET, even on Linux.

It’s still better than Plex and Emby, which are fully proprietary, and have no source code. But I will stick with sshfs with kodi, and nginx plus mpv for now.

Removed by mod

The Logitech F310 (wired) and F710 (wireless) are ok. The F710 has a big 2xAA battery compartment which is uncomfortable for some.

Save your receipt, because Logitech’s warranty is better than their construction. I destroyed my first F710’s control pad on my second play of Crosscode, but they sent me a new one.

Do not use either one to operate a manned submarine.

Try going to http://000.000.000.000:8080/ in your web browser (replacing the 0’s with your public IP address), on your home connection. If it doesn’t work, it means that your port forwarding is probably not working. If the page loads correctly, it means your port forwarding is working correctly, and the problem is probably your ISP doing port blocking.

In my system, the raid arrays seem to do periodic data scrubbing automatically. Maybe it’s something that’s part of Debian, or maybe it’s just a default kernel setting. I don’t think it helps much with data integrity – I think it helps more just by ensuring the continued functionality of the drives.

When it’s running, you can type cat /proc/mdstat to see the progress.

That command will also show you if there is a failing drive, so that you can replace it.

Sure. First you set up a RAID5/6 array in mdadm. This is a purely software thing, which is built into the Linux kernel. It doesn’t require any hardware RAID system. If you have 3-4 drives, RAID5 is probably best, and if you have 5+ drives RAID6 is probably best.

If your 3 blank drives are sdb1, sdc1, and sdd1, run this:

mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md0 --level=5 -n 3 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1

This will create a block device called /dev/md0 that you can use as if it were a single large hard drive.

mkfs.btrfs /dev/md0

That will make the filesystem on the block device.

mkdir /mnt/bigraid
mount /dev/md0 /mnt/bigraid

This creates a mount point and mounts the filesystem.

To get it to mount every time you boot, add an entry for this filesystem in /etc/fstab

The man page at https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/mkfs.btrfs.html says:

RAID5/6 has known problems and should not be used in production.

So those profiles have unknown, unspecified problems.

But btrfs is safe on top of md-based raid1/5/6. It also has the advantage that you only need to encrypt one volume.

While this may look like a good reason not to use the service, I learned of an even better reason just now from this article:

At the start of next year, GeForce Now will roll out a 100-hour monthly playtime allowance to continue providing exceptional quality and speed – as well as shorter queue times – for Performance and Ultimate members

Apparently you have to wait in line?!

Disco Elysium

I acknowledge that it was well received, but it was from 2019.

Elder Scrolls 6 will no doubt be polarizing, with some calling it the game of the decade, and others saying that the TES formula just doesn’t work anymore. (The game might also just suck.)

The easiest way to disable unnecessary services is to uninstall them with aptitude, or whichever package manager you like. Try terminating services one by one, and see if anything bad happens. If nothing bad happens, you can probably uninstall it. On the other hand, if the system does get wonky a reboot should fix it. Or, you can research the services by name and decide whether to uninstall them. (avahi-daemon for example is a good idea to uninstall.)

To make the GUI not run, uninstall your display manager (gdm, xdm, nodm, or whatever) and uninstall your xorg server or wayland server. There may be GUI programs remaining after that, but they will only be consuming disk space, not RAM or CPU.

If the battery is old and holds little charge, you may save a few watts by removing it and throwing it away, instead of letting the system keep it topped off.

Get a power meter, such as a Kill-a-watt device. Then, experiment with different settings. If it’s consuming less than 30 watts, you’re probably fine. If you live in the US, one watt-year is about one US dollar (or a little more), so for every watt it consumes, that’s about how much you will pay per year for its electricity.

Looks like this program is really old. It appears to be designed for a 32-bit system, the way it casts between unsigned int and pointers.

unsigned int is probably 32-bit even on your 64-bit system, so you’re only printing half the pointer with the printf, and only scanning half the pointer with the scanf. The correct data type to be using for this is uintptr_t , which is the same as uint32_t on a 32-bit system, and the same as uint64_t on a 64-bit system.

Try changing the type of addr to uintptr_t , and change lines 14-17 to this:

	printf("Address of main function: %p\n", (void *) &main);
	printf("Address of addr variable: %p\n", (void *) &addr);
	printf("\nEnter a (hex) address: ");
	scanf("%p", &addr);

You may have to include <stdint.h> . These changes should make the code portable to any 32-bit or 64-bit architecture.

Beta testers should get a discount, or even get paid, in exchange for writing good bug reports. These people are fools for paying extra for earlier access to a bug fest.

I would never pre-order a game. That just makes it harder to refund it if it sucks.