Plays the Menards “Save Big Money” Jingle

I’ll just go get my flamethrower.

Some yes, some no. I’ve had a lot of short relationships, and only one long one.

If you’re in a relationship with an abusive person, a person who is barely interested in you, or a person who always takes and rarely gives, then you have to break up. Unfortunately, many people will go through such relationships in their life.

Don’t throw away your own life to find love. If you are playing the game while desperate, you may get taken advantage of. It may be better not to play. It’s ok to be single.

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.)

I don’t know much about client certificates, because nobody ever used them. All I know is that they are decades older than passkeys, and “certificate” implies there is a public-private keypair, just like in a passkey.

What are the benefits of a passkey over a client certificate?

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.

That first part is eerily similar to what I was about to post.

In 2011, I was a lonely introvert. I spent my time binging TV shows and reading.

In 2012, on an IRL meetup thread on the 4chan x (paranormal stories) board, I met a new friend. I think deciding to meet them was the critical moment. They introduced me to a local arts and crafts club, a certain sci-fi fandom, and Minecraft.

The arts and crafts club became the basis of a friend group that is still my main friend group today. They brought me to a local convention in 2013 where I discovered I was trans.

In that sci-fi fandom, at a 2016 convention, I met my current partner, and a bunch of new friends.

I played a lot of Minecraft from 2012 to 2016, but then my partner in 2016 introduced me to Factorio.

draw .io is closed source.

I’ve seen “Domain Controller” and “Subscriber” for the sake of plausible deniability.

In the case of SPI, they want to keep intact the names MISO (master in, slave out) and MOSI. So they use things like “Main” and “Sub”.

The existence of one or more gods can’t be conclusively proven or disproven. So it makes sense to me that some people believe in it and others don’t.

Using a VPN (like Tailscale or Netbird) will make setup very easy, but probably a bit slower, because they probably connect through the VPN service’s infrastructure.

My recommended approach would be to use a directly connected VPN, like OpenVPN, that just has two nodes on it – your VPS, and your home server. This will bypass the potentially slow infrastructure of a commercial VPN service. Then, use iptables rules to have the VPS forward the relevant connections (TCP port 80/443 for the web apps, TCP/UDP port 25565 for Minecraft, etc.) to the home server’s OpenVPN IP address.

My second recommended approach would be to use a program like openbsd-inetd on your VPS to forward all relevant connections to your real IP address. Then, open those ports on your home connection, but only for the VPS’s IP address. If some random person tries to portscan you, they will see closed ports.

So are you able to view content, but pay to download? If that’s the case, I could probably write a scraper for the site.

If you have to pay to even see the content, then you may have a bigger problem. Try pooling resources with some of your fellow students, to have one person download all the content, and then make it available to everyone else.

Another option is to expose your instructors. There’s a high probability that they are getting kickbacks, especially if this is at college level. Maybe in the form of 10% of each dollar spent by one of their students. Or, they might be getting free equipment or content from Docsity, in exchange for forcing students to use it, and offloading the costs to students.

When I was in college, one of my instructors used these “clickers” that cost students $40 per semester to rent. They used radio to allow submitting realtime quiz answers during class. Students were scored on how many questions they answered, not whether they were correct. If you didn’t pay the clicker fee, you lost that 10% of your final grade.

I was suspicious, so I looked into it. It wasn’t hard. The clicker manufacturer advertised kickbacks on their own website.

Cloudflare seems to incorrectly classify my Internet connection, which is a residential Internet connection going to my house, as a datacenter connection or VPN or something.

Many websites that use Cloudflare give me endless captcha forms. As soon as I solve one, it demands another, and never lets me access the website.

Sometimes I solve one captcha, and then it says I’m blocked forever for sending automated queries, even though I filled it out correctly. The error message is: “You are blocked.”

Sometimes it lets me in after one captcha, but I still resent having to enable Javascript for these assholes just to access a site that doesn’t otherwise require Javascript.

Sometimes Cloudflare adds extra security to certain pages, just for me. The developers of the website didn’t program it to handle this extra security, so the site fails for just me, and the site developers don’t believe me, telling me I have a browser problem (in three different browsers, which I can fix by using a proxy). For example, when the site’s javascript has my browser to do a CORS operation, the first step is the browser sending an OPTIONS request. However, the extra security of the proxy introduced by Cloudflare responds slightly differently from the actual website, so the site breaks.

Cloudflare uses a holistic approach to deciding whether you are a legitimate user or a bot. In other words, they use every single possible piece of data they can get on you, including tracking your visits across other Cloudflare sites. They do discriminate against certain user-agent strings.

Cloudflare completely blocks many Tor users, even from having read-only access to a site.

When you ask Cloudflare why your IP address is blocked, they falsely claim that it’s a setting created by the website admins. I strongly suspect that this setting is something like “use Cloudflare™ Adaptive Security™” and probably doesn’t explain to the site admin that they’re blocking large quantities of innocent users.

Cloudflare has previously used Google Recaptcha, which has a ton of problems (tracking, accessibility, training AIs that will make my life worse).