VNC? You have your choice of servers, and clients are ubiquitous.

A big gotcha is that you need to be careful with encryption/security, as in classic UNIX style VNC does one thing (remote desktops). It’s easy to forward over ssh though.

You can also use VNC to share, which is not what you want; this depends on the type of server/settings. But you can definitely create a new virtual X11 session and access it remotely.

The thing that fascinates me is that every single digital microwave I’ve ever used behaves the same way, and allows the “seconds-place” to be 0-99.

My best guesses are

• There’s some ASIC that’s been around forever and everyone uses it (a cockroach chip like the 555)
• The first digital microwave did this and all subsequent ones followed
• There’s actually some implementation reasons why this is way more sensible.

Writing it in software, there are different ways that folks would probably implement it, for example, “subtract one, calculate minutes and seconds, display” seems reasonable. But nope, every one I’ve ever used is just the Wild West in the seconds department.

Bookmarked, thanks!

I bought a Rockchip SBC (Orange Pi 5+), and when it worked it was awesome…but man, the software support (mainly kernel space) is just not there. Exercise in frustration to get everything working at the same time.

Currently running armbian. I don’t think HW acceleration is working, and I don’t think HDMI out is even working, but for my use case it’s a stable config…for now.

Except it would probably end up being a sequel and prequel at the same time…

But once you got that XFree86 config dialed in, life was awesome.

(Ok looks like Xorg has been around for 21 years, so maybe you were running it instead.)

Mac at work. Yabai+sketchybar is no i3wm replacement, but it works ok.

My .zshrc is basically the same as I use on my personal computers, and aside from a few coreutils differences it…kinda just works. I have apt aliased to brew so I can feel more at home.

Stock terminal works fine—I use xterm on Linux, so I’m used to relying on tmux for nice features anyway.

Basically, I miss the window manager, but practically speaking that’s a about it. (I obviously have xscreensaver installed!)

nc is useful. For example: if you have a disk image downloaded on computer A but want to write it to an SD card on computer B, you can run something like

user@B: nc -l 1234 | pv > /dev/$sdcard

And

user@A: nc B.local 1234 < /path/to/image.img

(I may have syntax messed up–also don’t transfer sensitive information this way!)

Similarly, no need to store a compressed file if you’re going to uncompress it as soon as you download it—just pipe wget or curl to tar or xz or whatever.

I once burnt a CD of a Linux ISO by wgeting directly to cdrecord. It was actually kinda useful because it was on a laptop that was running out of HD space. Luckily the University Internet was fast and the CD was successfully burnt :)

A dishwasher is a total quality of life thing for us.

It sucks that some places don’t offer them. They’re not even very expensive, it’s just the kitchen real estate/installation that sucks.

A place I loved in after college had a full size unit on wheels that you hooked up to sink to use—worked fine, just took up space. They also make countertop units, but I have no idea how well those work.

You might say, “well akshually it should be sudo apt upgrade, because you shouldn’t generally use the the root account,” but some of us just have apt aliased to sudo apt.

I’m a ~/tmp man myself.

Maybe not a service in the typical sense, but setting up your router+server to route your home network traffic through a VPN is a fun project.

My router (MikroTik) supports WireGuard, so I can use it with Mullvad for the whole house—but wg is demanding and it’s a slow router, so while it can NAT at ~1Gbps, it can’t do WireGuard at more than ~90Mbps. So, I set up WireGuard/Mullvad on a little SBC with a fast processor, and have my router use that instead. Using policy based routing and/or mangling, I can have different VLANs/subnets/individual hosts selectively routed through the VPN.

It’s a fun exercise, not sure I implemented it in a smart way, but it works :)

Whenever I have a Linux box without Internet I just USB tether an Android phone—if the phone is on WiFi then it uses that (not cell), so it’s basically just a WiFi adapter that’s almost universally supported. (I think it NATs, so in some circumstances won’t work, but good enough for most emergency use cases.)

I would recommend PoE security cameras. You probably want support for RTSP / ONVIF.

I have some Amcrest cameras talking to Frigate. It is completely local—cameras on a separate VLAN that can’t talk to the Internet, footage is recorded on a server running Frigate. Works very well for me. No vendor lock-in is also nice!

I probably would have ordered my matrix so that my/my and (not my)/(not my) were the diagonal elements, but that’s just nitpicking I suppose.

The pandemic was great for my city (San Francisco) in this regard—they shut/heavily discouraged a bunch of streets to through traffic for a number of “slow streets.” Kids and adults alike run, bike, scooter, etc. in the middle of these streets. Obviously people love them, so they remained after the pandemic (at least, the one’s I’m familiar with remain).

It’s not a full-on car ban, but it’s a start!

640k 780k ought to be enough for anybody…

If you search around you might find free ones. Oracle has/had a free tier (though it’s Oracle, so…).

Yes, but you can run multiple VPS, from different providers, simultaneously.

What I like is that while it does depend on an external provider, it doesn’t depend on a specific external provider. Any VPS with a public IPv4 would work.

VPS+VPN, this is what I do.

VPS has public IP and runs WireGuard “server”* and a reverse proxy (and fail2ban…). Reverse proxy points to my home computer over the WireGuard link. No open ports on my home router.

For private facing/LAN-only services I just don’t have an entry in the VPS reverse proxy. DNS on the router points everything to my local server, so if at home I access everything directly. To access internal services remotely requires VPN (i.e., WireGuard to the VPS).

Works well; I have a tiny free tier VPS but even so, no complaints.

*Yes I know there are no wg clients or servers, only peers, but it plays a server-likr role.