Photovoltaic / Solar power installation.

“Solar system” just sounds weird when I say it.

I finally pulled the trigger and bought/installed the PV system I’ve been wanting for 10+ years.

It was a good chunk of upfront money for something I feared would end up being a midlife crisis purchase*. I only have it partially installed (all DIY as time allows) but we’ve been running the whole house from it several days a week and have already seen significant savings on the electric bill (especially since the first week I had it hooked in was a heat wave).

*It’s not not a midlife crisis purchase, lol, but it’s also more useful than a sports car.

Sadly (and similarly anecdotally) yes.

Toggling airplane mode basically “turns off and on again” your phone’s network interfaces, resets the routing table, and, I think, flushes the DNS caches. I don’t have the problem so much with wi-fi unless I roam between my main and guest networks which use different DNS records for some of my self-hosted apps. (e.g. the “internal” DNS record gets resolved on main wifi, gets cached, and then is inaccessible on guest wifi until the cached record expires).

Mainly, I just toggle the cellular data since my primary issue is that sometimes calls/texts stop working without notice.

I try for at least 2 hours a day, excluding sleeping.

Usually that’s in the form of puttering around outside doing yardwork, working on whatever my summer/winter project is, and/or taking the dogs for a walk. It’s difficult in the winter but the other 3 seasons are pretty easy to keep the habit alive

However you choose to spend that offline time, I highly recommend a daily dose of it. Been doing that for a few years now, and my mental health has improved dramatically. The world isn’t nearly as horrible as social media makes it out to be.

I let it be, even if the person is still alive. Anyone can “allege” anything against anyone. Plus, if the friend is a devout follower of someone genuinely controversial, then there’s already a good chance I’m not that close to them and would be cutting them out of my life anyway.

https://startrek.website/post/41513045

I thought it was profound at the time, but no, it wasn’t at all.

This was a meme I posted a while back and based on a true story:

Basically I thought that plants were the manifestation of God himself. All around us, providing us with live-sustaining oxygen and food.

“Homelab nerds” are a market unto ourselves. We get most if not all of our gear secondhand from eBay or similar, and those storefronts on ebay are run by electronics recycling companies that get their inventory from data centers or corporate offices when they shut down or do hardware refreshes.

My Need -> eBay -> [server part search term] -> Multiple inexpensive listings with large quantities available -> Buy -> My Need Met

Replace “server part search term” with full rack servers, switches, SFP+ modules, RAM, power supplies, pulled HDDs/SSDs, and/or any other part I’ve bought used that was a corporate/data center pull.

She’s got an attorney and they’re trying to stop it based on that, but it just seems like everyone involved (edit: besides her) just doesn’t give a fuck.

It’s a lot like another commenter mentioned about eminent domain. It can be used for good (roads, fiber deployments, district heating, etc) but also for things not so good (data centers, etc).

I went out of my way to find a house that didn’t even have a vestigial HOA deed restriction, so I get that. But when a private citizen donates something to the local municipality, it’s pretty egregious to not honor those restrictions, especially for things that may take a while to develop.

I’d donate my share of my family’s farmland to build a park, but I wouldn’t sell it for all the money in the world to build a datacenter or landfill or anything else, really.

Even if they didn’t do her dirty, she wouldn’t. She donated it to the city and relinquished ownership of it. The expectation, even written into the deed, was that the land was to be used as a park, but they turned around and sold it multiple times. Despite the stipulation in the original deed to the parks and recreation department, the data center is still going forward.

The story is just such a tragedy all around.

Not sure about the buildings themselves, but I’m pretty confident at least their contents will flood the secondhand market with cheap secondhand gear. I won’t say the crypto bubble has burst, but a lot of the mining rigs are being parted out and sold fairly cheap, and one specific crypto mining board has become popular as a DIY gaming system. (Currently doing a BC-250 “DIY SteamMachine” build myself).

As for the buildings, maybe we’ll see some creative uses like indoor farms or something. Or, perhaps, it’ll just be a mundane “AI datacenter becomes a generic data center”.

I’d guess they’d be repurposed into business centers or office space like we’ve seen with old malls, but malls were usually in populated areas where datacenters aren’t.

Agreed.

Not sure about current generation, but the Gen Z people in my life do seem to understand the concept but are absolutely terrified of it. Like, if they don’t have cell service when we go camping, they are just super agitated like they’ve lost their sense of smell or something. Could just be those specific people, but that’s the only sample I have to gauge on.

IMO, peak internet experience was when you had to make an effort to log on. i.e. dialing-up and tying up the phone line. Yeah, the speeds sucked and sometimes you got the dreaded “all circuits are busy now” message during peak hours, but everything else about the experience was better.

When you logged into AIM/ICQ/MSN/Yahoo, etc, you did so with a purpose. You never worried about bothering someone by messaging them at a bad time because if it was a bad time to do so, they wouldn’t be online in the first place.

“Back in my day” (lol), the internet wasn’t always on, it wasn’t demanding your attention, it wasn’t pestering you with constant notifications, it wasn’t in your face all the time, it wasn’t constantly recommending or suggesting things at you (not “to” you, at you) etc, etc. It was there when you needed it but didn’t butt into your life every second when you weren’t.

You could disconnect.

I honestly don’t know what we can really do about it. Personally, I turn off pretty much anything that can send a notification except SMS/MMS and check manually when I want to. Some people hate that and get annoyed that I rarely respond instantly to IMs and such, but I hate being constantly “on” as well as the expectation to be.

I usually do everything from CLI.

Are you wanting to re-encode it to a different codec or just change the container from mkv to mp4?

To remux the file (change the container format), you can simply do:

# The -f mp4 is technically optional as it can deduce it from the extension, but I like to be explicit
ffmpeg -i file.mkv -f mp4 file.mp4

That should go very fast as it’s just copying the streams as-is into a new container.

If you want to re-encode it to a different codec, then you’ll need to use a more complex ffmpeg command.

https://ebooks.com/

They have a lot of DRM-free options and let you download a clean epub, but like with other stores, it’s up to the publishers whether (and/or when) they can sell them without DRM BS.

I like being able to download the epubs directly so I can put them on my Calibre-web instance and pull them to my Kobo or my phone or whatever I want to read on.

Lol, it really is. It’s how we got the terms “Debbie Downer” and “you’re bumming everyone out”.

What are you honestly tired of people bitching about by this point?

Literally everything.

Half the posts I scroll past are just someone bitching about something. Few people posting about cool stuff, most people posting about rage this or rage that. Or if there is a post about something good, there’s people bitching in the comments how it’s not good enough.

Ugh. It’s like this place wants to be miserable and doesn’t know any other way to exist.