I live in a dry but mountainous area. I’d like to see them pump water uphill with any overpower so we can just use turbines to recapture that energy later. The average american keeps impressing me with their turnip-level intellect to the point where I don’t want them running a carwash, much less a nuclear reactor. There are a lot of IRL Homer Simpsons out there.

I remember this too. Somehow, despite all the laptops I installed it on I got VERY lucky and only had a couple of WiFi issues, one totally incompatible laptop, and one that would not boot until I got the boot parameters right. I heard plenty stories from other people though. All that said, it’s so much smoother and easier installing Linux nowadays that the Windows install where I worry the whole time that MS is trying to reverse psychology me into agreeing to sell my unborn children into slavery.

Seriously, the window seat makes flying fun. I remember flying over a huge pit mine in Canada one time and searching satellite maps for hours later to find it and figure out what I was looking at. Flying over Greenland on Iceland Air can be jaw dropping amazement for hours at a time. Istanbul with scattered clouds was like a fantasy novel city. Even flying at night the lights tell some cool stories. I do close the window on transatlantic flights when they dim the lights for mandatory naptime. :-P

I’m a nerd for urban planning, land use, railroads, history, etc, so I find something cool to look at even if I’m flying over the biggest cornfield in Kansas

0p3n w!nd0w g@ng 4 lyfe!

I would check out Recallbox. It’s quite polished feeling and looking. It can run on a raspberry pi, or something more powerful. You mention accessing the files and I liked the SMB access because I could just cut and paste my new ROMs over from the PC or phone. I imagine you could set up a script to do this automatically or just expose a read only SMB server for your friends to access. If your games are older, like Atari or Sega Genesis this would work great. If you have big ROMs like Gamecube or Xbox, then you’ll probably need a different solution since copying entire romsets to the device itself may not be practical.

I have seen a DIY Steam-ish software floating around, hopefully someone pitches in to get you that link as well.

I hope your project goes well!

Seems poorly thought through. Some chump with Photoshop and a text editor could replicate this but change the QR code to a malware site in minutes.

Same, once I got PWM set up right on my fans, my desktop former gaming PC server has been 90% silent. Even when under load, it only kicks up a notch or two. I’m under the roof, so my summer temps will be the real test.

Thanks for the reply. At this point, I’ve decided I’ll need to try both. Fortunately my old router still works. I just need to make some hardware decisions now as I don’t have any hardware with multiple lan ports to try it out on. I don’t want to buy twice, so I’m trying to figure out what I’m going to need to overshoot my requirements a bit but not go crazy overboard and overspending for unused specs. My current router is the GliNet Flint 2 which has an open-WRT advance mode that I’ve messed with a little bit.

Sounds like you are pretty far along in your networking journey. I can appreciate the vLans and the 10G backbone, but a lot of the hardware you mention is over my head. :D I’d take the miniPC route, but like you, I’d like to attach my 4g router as a failover.

Glad to know I’m not alone! Sometimes it feels like everyone else has either figured it all out, or I’m charting new (and potentially silly) territory and nobody knows wtf I’m doing.

I’ve been doing Linux stuff for a long time, but I was still living under my parent’s roof back then so I never had to network anything, I just had the wifi password. After school, out in the world, I still didn’t have my own network for quite some time. Only in the last few years have I really started to grasp how it works well enough to actually do something useful with that knowledge. I’ll take a look at ipfire too. Luckily my current router is still functioning okay, so I have time to play around and see what software will work for me. Right now I have to make some sort of decision about hardware because I don’t have anything with dual ethernet on hand.

I have the fiber ONT straight from the wall. The tech support guys at my ISP gave me all the details I needed to configure my own current router (GLInet Flint 2). I’ve just been not trusting corporate solutions lately. I’m almost completely degoogled on my phone and the recent router banning drama is encouraging me to do this now instead of later when I had originally wanted to do it.

This is good info. I remember hearing a little bit of that and someone set me straight on DDWRT vs OpenWRT as well. I think I’ll take OPNsense for a spin.

Thanks for the reply.

I have devices I could use, but they’re earmarked for other projects. I’m looking at acquiring hardware specifically for this project. I could acquire it at a garage sale or a classified ads site. I don’t really want to spend more than $350 if I can help it and even then, I have to be able to justify that to myself somehow. (since that almost enough to add another 2TB of SSDs to my server). Having said that, if the features I want are only present in pricier hardware, I want to find that out now.

I have a 4g WiFi router I carry around when I travel that I call “the hocky puck”. It also has an ethernet port, so when I’m home, I take the battery out and attach it to my router as a backup in case the fiber fails. If I want to do the same thing on OPNsense, I would need to add an expansion card with more network ports, right? That would steer me from miniPCs to barebones router hardware or a small-form-factor PC build where I could add as many NICS as I have PCI slots.

Does wanting a 2nd WAN pretty much rule out mini-PCs for me?

Even in my God Tier build-dreams, I only have 2WANS a LAN and a management LAN. :D

Someone talked shit about me in their Instagram posts once during one of the most difficult times in my life (unrelated to their BS). It was kind of indirect, but it was clear who they were talking about and they held up an object I had given them during their video and talked shit about it too. I know that kind of thing is common nowadays, but I don’t play that game. If you have a problem with me, you don’t need to slam me online behind my back… just talk to me.

I still see this person semi-regularly, but I just ignore them because I’m not interested in putting in the effort to fix our friendship when they weren’t. This post is looking for “unforgivable” situations. I could maybe forgive this person if they apologized and explained themselves, but I won’t ever make that move myself because I didn’t do shit to deserve it.

That’s kind of what I’m figuring out. I don’t want to put hundreds of hours into documenting and organizing my life so I can switch platforms and put in another hundred hours of migration effort. I’d rather use open formats from the start. That rules out some complexity, but I at least retain most of my freedom.

.fart because decades of growing up haven’t quite cured my potty humor.

There’s a great bike trail between Glenwood and Aspen if you ever make it out that way. Highly recommended.

They should have sent the manager and crew to the thrift store with a corporate CC and a box truck for furniture. Instead it’s bland, depressed, “I can’t believe it’s not cardboard™.”

Chipotle is still the king of food poisoning. They have a proven track record in toilet-related war crimes going back many years. Guess I’m adding BK to my no-go list now too.

I’m happy to drink a $2 coffee from the gas station (probably a half gallon of it 🙂) and set the remaining $7 aside. Then again, I only get drip coffee and not any of the milkshake-y stuff Starbucks specializes in.

They stopped indexing years ago if I recall correctly. If they still had search results, they were probably white-labled. Doesn’t take much to beat modern google results though. 🙂