tburkhol
@tburkhol@lemmy.world
- Comment on GrapheneOS refuses to comply with new age verification laws for operating systems — group says it will never require personal information 1 week ago:
That’s just systemd adding a birthdate field to their userdb. Doesn’t require that it be filled out or accurate, and especially doesn’t require it to be validated against a government database. I don’t see it as fundamentally any different from adding a userdb field for favorite color, phone number, or blood type.
Without 3rd party validation, I really don’t see the privacy issue with an age field. Without verification, it is, at worst, one more byte available to hash into a unique identifier, but you can feed that field from /dev/random at every query and poison even that hypothetical.
- Comment on Is it possible to have a usable domain without a VPS or a static IP address? 2 weeks ago:
If you only need it to be accessible inside your home, then you just need to run your own DNS. Have your dhcp point at your DNS and your DNS declare itself the master for your domain.
To get full functionality, you’ll probably want to have your registrar point to the public IP you get from your ISP as the domain’s authoritative name server.You should be able to script it to update the registrar when your ISP changes your IP, but that usually happens infrequently enough to do manually. Obviously can’t do that if you’re behind CGNAT.
To get Lets Encrypt certificates, you can do the DNS challenge. If your ISP gives you a (even inconsistent) public IP, you can do fancy ‘views’ with your selfhosted DNS, where it responds with private IPs inside your network and your ISP-given IP outside your network. I have certbot set up to expose my DNS & web server just before it starts its renewal process, then close the firewall after. Once you have the certificate, you can move it to where ever it will actually be used.
- Comment on Notes on full disk encryption on a Hetzner cloud VPS 3 weeks ago:
To me, the nonstandard port is mostly nice for reducing log spam from scripts. The risk is that using a nonstandard port lulls one into a false sense of security and overlook good sshd practices. Good sshd practices will prevent the script-kiddies just as well as the non-standard port, while a non-standard port will not challenge a targeted attack. And, if you interact with multiple servers, it can be inconvenient to remember a different port for each one.
- Comment on Roblox says it paid out $1.5B to game creators in 2025 and the top 1,000 earned $1.3M on average; 50%+ of creators list high school as their highest education 3 weeks ago:
A handful of people use Roblox to make milllions - if they pay out $1.5B total, and the biggest 1000 developers average $1.3M, then the entire rest of their 3.5 million developers average $60.
They claim 150M daily users.
- Comment on Forget cereal bars, what's your flavor of drug in the morning? 4 weeks ago:
And here’s me, reading that tech companies are feeding their employees tabasco and wondering just what that’s supposed to do.
- Comment on Amazon BUSTED for Widespread Scheme to Inflate Prices Across the Economy— Amazon, its vendors, and competing retailers are price fixing, hiking up prices for consumer products 5 weeks ago:
In the game, you have to improve your properties to charge more rent. In reality, the monopoly can reduce quality and raise price at the same time.
- Comment on Roblox, Reddit and Discord users compelled to use biometric ID system backed by Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel 1 month ago:
My nephew has a new baby. Her parents are constantly waving their phones in her face; sending pics back and forth; generally doing ‘millenial things’ with their phones when not actively attending the baby. Then proceed to get all freaked out when the baby expresses interest or curiosity in the phone.
Kids mimic their parents behavior and interests. If you want kids with healthy internet use, you have to have parents model healthy internet use.
- Comment on Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest Unwittingly Reveal the Severity of the U.S. Surveillance State 1 month ago:
The trouble with living in a panopticon is that becomes suspicious to not be on a list.
- Comment on Is the Raspberry Pi Still an Affordable SBC? I Don't Think So 1 month ago:
I have a n ESP32 with a thermocouple stuffed down my (gas) oven chimney, so I can tell what temperature it actually is (about 40°F/20°C cooler than the dial).
I have one plugged into an addressable LED matrix, which has yet to get mounted, but will eventually be a closet/dressing light. There’s a few places where I’d like a ‘normal’ warm white light, with the option to switch to a blinding daylight for chores, and maybe a low-light, colorful animated nightlight.
I have a Pi-0w reading temp/humidity/CO2 in a grow tent that’s a good candidate for ESP32-ification. I have an air quality sensor plugged directly into a Home Assistant server that could go on ESP32 if I wanted it in a different location. Humidity in the bathroom, with a controller for the bathroom fan is another good candidate.
If I can come up with a good way to put them on battery, with a 6-12 month lifetime, then temperature in the attic, and on the input/output sides of the HVAC would be useful.
- Comment on Is the Raspberry Pi Still an Affordable SBC? I Don't Think So 1 month ago:
I only one I know about socprime.com/…/cve-2025-27840-vulnerability-in-es… which is a bluetooth thing, presumably meaning that you’d have to be in bluetooth range to exploit it.
My paranoid concern is that I’m going to buy these $2 ESP32 boards from some unknowable Chinese company, and how could I know if there’s an extra, malicious supervisor element added. So, my ESP32 devices live in the ‘untrusted’ VLAN. They could, theoretically, discover each other and send their sensor data to some nefarious broker, but they don’t have microphones or cameras. I don’t even see how they could get enough information to discover my physical address, without cooperation from my ISP.
- Comment on Is the Raspberry Pi Still an Affordable SBC? I Don't Think So 1 month ago:
I was really intimidated by ESP32. Liked RPi, back in the 3b days, because I could comfortably sit in the python interpreter, play with sensor interfaces, and get immediate feedback of what & where I screwed up. Familiarity led me to RPi4 for libreelec and 0w for more sensors.
Recently took the plunge on some ESP32s, though, and, just…wow. I mean, I’m going through esphome, but every sensor and control I’ve checked is just a couple of lines of YAML away. And low enough power that I’m starting to think about batteries. ESP32 is still pretty intimidating for noobs, but the ecosystem that’s grown up around it is fantastic once you get over that hump.
- Comment on The world is trying to log off U.S. tech 1 month ago:
The problem isn’t necessarily corporate services - the problem is corporate services with no practical competition. If there’s an actual marketplace, then enshittification is limited, because you can just hop providers when service degrades. If there’s an actual marketplace, then you can hop providers when some government takes control your provider.
Putting fun services behind the wall of ‘you must be this technically competent to participate’ isn’t going to fix the broken system.
- Comment on People espousing that unions don't work should have a look at police unions. 1 month ago:
I suspect that some of the ‘lazy union worker’ stereotype is workers following their contract and refusing to do non-contracted work, which is, of course, essential to maintaining the value of that contract. Pride in your own work/trade doesn’t mean cleaning up after the other trades; professionalism in your own work doesn’t mean unpaid overtime to fix someone else’s fuckup.
- Comment on 'Scowling Void of Pure Nothingness': Critics Destroy $75 Million Melania Trump Documentary | Common Dreams 1 month ago:
Malicious compliance?
- Comment on Why do you need a launcher? (asking older gamers actually) 2 months ago:
Use the launcher to install, then just run the exe. Point is you don’t need to interact with the launcher, its ads, and its bugs every time you want to play.
- Comment on Why do you need a launcher? (asking older gamers actually) 2 months ago:
Nothing from GoG requires their launcher.
- Comment on Does university email give you any free server? 2 months ago:
In the old days, university IT put essentially no access controls on their networks, so students’ dorm computers were completely exposed to the internet. Any service you started was immediately, globally accessible. Some big sites, including slashdot and facebook, got their start in some kid’s dorm room. I feel like access controls really got going in the early 00’s - first for residential, then for broader campus.
Check with your IT people - they may have policy or conditions under which they will expose ports on your personal computer to the internet. Otherwise, your best bet is probably free-tier AWS or Oracle.
Not free, but there are some ‘KVM VPS’ providers out there that will rent you a small, internet exposed computer pretty cheap. They can be a good platform for experimenting with self-hosting services, without exposing your personal equipment or home network. eg: 1CPU/1GB RAM/24GB SSD $12/year my.racknerd.com/cart.php?a=add&pid=903
- Comment on E-Mail with own domain 2 months ago:
I started using purelymail.com because they’re $10/year. Been happy with them, but I don’t use/need any fancy features. Hosted on AWS, if you care about that. Their domain instructions are purelymail.com/docs/domainDocs
- Comment on Do we need more users ? 2 months ago:
Good discovery tools are essential on a federated platform. An important part of twitter, facebook, and reddit success is/was that that they were the place for their particular style of content. You had a pretty good chance of being able to discover your old high school friends, because they were on the one platform. Then the (early) algorithm started discovering for you all the obscure content similar to your history.
Discovery has to work differently in a federated system. You can search for communities on Lemmy, but if your instance doesn’t already have someone subscribed to a community, then you’re not going to find it.
- Comment on Silent Storage Solutions for Homelab? 2 months ago:
I realize you’re looking for new toys, but ‘anywhere in the flat’ includes ‘under a pile of pillows.’ Otherwise, for personal photo-sized storage, just put a couple 2.5mm format SSDs in the QNAP.
- Comment on Ubisoft Closes Canadian Studio After It Unionizes 2 months ago:
They weren’t my favorite studio before, but they’re definitely never getting another dime from me. There’s a lot of fish in the sea.
- Comment on [Help] Improving HDD storage setup for personal server 2 months ago:
Depending on the board in your mini-server, you may have enough SATA ports to plug in directly. I have a system similar to what you’re describing (N100 with 4x 2TB HDDs with 1.5TB data): 2 of those drives are set up in RAID1 (mirror), and once a month, I plug in one of the spares, rsync the array to it, and unplug it. Every 3 months or so, I swap the offline drive with an offsite drive. I used to use a USB dock for the offline drive, but I got a 3-bay hot-swap enclosure to make the whole process faster and easier.
The server shares the array via NFS and SMB, and it is absolutely a NAS for all my other systems.
If you expect to exceed 2TB data within 2 years, then you’ll need to replace all 4 of those 2TB drives in 2 years. You might, today, get a pair of 4 TB drives and one 2TB, use the 4TB as your main storage, the 2TBs as rotating backups, and wait until you actually outgrow 2TB to upgrade the backups.
- Comment on The whole "toilet seat up, toilet seat down" gender debate could be solved by everybody putting the seat and lid down. 2 months ago:
I’m not interested in their narrative, I’m talking about their numbers. They measured plaque formation - colonies - of bacteria from surface wipes around the toilet after flushing a contaminated toilet bowl. Depending on the location & lid state, they got, generally 10^3-10^6 plaques. 10^5 with the lid closed, 10^6 open, which is a 10x difference. There’s no difference in the surfaces directly facing the bowl; hardly surprising that there’s little contamination left by the time you get all the way to the walls - 1/r^2 effect. Look at the surface you sit on.
- Comment on The whole "toilet seat up, toilet seat down" gender debate could be solved by everybody putting the seat and lid down. 2 months ago:
Are you sure you read that right? They report contamination in log units, so a reduction from 6.23 to 4.81 is a 26x difference. There’s not much difference on the faces of lid & seat that directly face the bowl, but even the seat top had 15x more contaminants with the lid up than down.
- Comment on The whole "toilet seat up, toilet seat down" gender debate could be solved by everybody putting the seat and lid down. 2 months ago:
The study where gustofwind got the illustration says it’s around 10x reduction of deposited bacteria with the lid down.
- Comment on Contract for self-hosting help 2 months ago:
I see you’re getting lots of advice just to use c/selfhosted as a free consultant. That’s good advice if you’re self-motivated and focused.
If you want someone to be a coach through the process, to keep you focused and moving, that’s a) a slightly different skillset and b) worth putting in the description. I mention this only because I have a bunch of aspirational projects on my to–do list that have just sat there for literally years because of perfectionism, anxiety, and maybe some undiagnosed ADHD. I’ll also counter by noting that a lot of people, this time of year, buy a gym membership on the theory that spending the money will somehow force them actually to go to the gym, only to find that spent money is not actually a motivator.
- Comment on Nvidia insists it isn’t Enron, but its AI deals are testing investor faith 2 months ago:
Steam can do massive numbers spikes because they have essentially infinite inventory. The whole reason scalping video cards works is that Nvidia can not make as many as people want, even at full retail price. The existence of scalpers implies that Nvidia could raise prices, sell slightly fewer units at higher margin and get greater total return.
- Comment on BentoPDF is a self hostable, privacy first PDF Toolkit 2 months ago:
Great project. I like the 1-star reviews complaining about the lack of advertising and tracking.
- Comment on Suggestions for Community Organizing 3 months ago:
If you want it to be an actual community service, then you want it to be something that outlives your residence, your tenure as event coordinator, and your interest in being the neighborhood IT guy. It’ll be much easier to transfer control of a VPS to your successor than to give them hardware that also hosts a bunch of your personal services.
You can start with a very small, nearly free VPS while you recruit users & scale up as (if) anyone bites. Probably even get the HOA to pay for it.
- Comment on DOJ Redacted Names of ‘Politically Exposed Individuals’ in Epstein Files: Report 3 months ago:
They definitely didn’t redact Bill Clinton: he features prominently in this first tiny slice of documents. Almost like they’ve cherry picked docs that would be worst for Dems while protecting their friends.
How do you do the shocked Pikachu emoji?