hopefully someone will appreciate it 😋

Not sure if wholesome, or wants there to be a car crash…

(I know what you mean, I just found it humorous.)

Our experience is that basically the only really expensive thing is childcare. Are you eligible for subsidized, or free, care (or have trustworthy and willing relatives)?

As for gear, babies don’t need much. But for what they do need, reach out to friends, neighbors, and family! We’re fortunate that we could have afforded everything new, but we really only bought a few things because friends and randos alike gave us so much free kid stuff (we bought a nice stroller, a baby basket, and an IKEA crib — basically everything else was a hand-me-down). Join local “buy nothing” groups, or parent groups (sadly they’re usually WhatsApp, but whatever). Most people hate throwing away stuff, and would rather it go to a good home.

Look at programs for subsidized/free necessities like diapers. There are lots of resources out there, especially in cities.

As everyone else said, no one feels ready. We certainly didn’t!

What kind of cutlery are you dropping that requires refinishing your floor?

UPS and American companies in general

But this is USPS, which isn’t an American company, it’s a US independent agency.

Their mandate isn’t (AFAIK…) to make a profit, but rather to serve the mail requirements of a very large country.

Personally, my experiences with USPS have been generally positive, from passports for infants to free change-of-address forwarding service to tracking down quasi-scam products from Amazon. YMMV though.

I’m holding out for Aperture Science, if for no other reason than that their AI has a dry, dark sense of humor.

My headcanon for The Matrix’s “humans are batteries” is that it’s the machines’ perverse interpretation of this — killing the humans is off the table, and for whatever reason letting them live with no purpose to serve the machines is also disallowed. But giving their lives “meaning” in the form of a shitty (and thermodynamically dubious) “battery” somehow satisfies the rules.

It’s a very big stretch, I’ll admit…

I think it has a lot to do with disposition and convenience. I’m lazy, and I don’t like to drive if I can help it. But I live near enough to public transportation that we’ll spontaneously decide to hop on the subway and grab dinner on the waterfront.

It’s not the money that’s preventing us from hopping in the car to go to some new beach for dinner, it’s the convenience.

I mean…it depends on the job? I go on walks during working hours all the time to clear my head and think about a problem I’m working on. I don’t try to hide this from my manager.

I think an issue here is that taxonomic and colloquial definitions don’t always agree.

Spiders are colloquially bugs, but they’re not taxonomically “true bugs” (which is itself a colloquialism for Hemiptera). Tomatos are colloquially vegetables but taxonomically fruits…but afaik vegetable is a purely colloquial term anyway.

And as someone else in the thread mentioned, colloquial berries are not always taxonomic berries.

So…colloquially, “plants” sorta means, “macroscopic multicellular living non-animal thing,” but taxonomically it’s something else.

If you have a TV, you likely already have the receiving device. Antenna can cost, or you can play around with wire length and orientation.

It’s mostly so that I can have SSL handled by nginx (and not per-service), and also for ease of hosting multiple services accessible via subdomains. So every service is its own subdomain.

Additionally, my internal network (as in, my physical LAN) does not have any port forwarding enabled — everything is over WireGuard to my VPS.

My method:

VPS with reverse proxy to my public facing services. This holds SSL certs, and communicates with home network through WireGuard link configured on my router.

Local computer with reverse proxy for all services. This also has SSL certs, and handles the same services as the VPS, so I can have local/LAN speeds. Additionally, it serves as a reverse proxy for all my private services, such as my router/switches/access point config pages, Jellyfin, etc.

No complaints, it mostly just works. I also have my router override DNS entries for my FQDN to resolve locally, so I use the same URL for accessing public services on my LAN.

Isn’t this extremely genre dependent? And regardless, this has been going on for a long time.

The Supremes? Good looking gals (and great music IMHO).

Grateful Dead? Sure, rough around the edges.

The Doors? Um…ever seen a picture of Jim Morrison? Dude would make Derek Zoolander blush.

Out of curiosity, I asked Spotify for modern metal music, and I got The Black Dahlia Murder — frontman looks like a regular dude who I’d grab a beer with.

Yeah, modern pop places a ton of emphasis on looks, sure. But I think this has been pretty prominent in music for a very long time, be it the airbrushed R&B of the sixties, the androgynous glam of the eighties, or the metro sexual (guy)/model-esque looks of modern pop.

It can be daunting to get into the hobby, there are a ton of niches.

To start: where are you? I’m in the USA, so that’s where my experience is.

License: required to transmit on the ham bands; you can listen without a license.

Range: are you looking to talk to people in your city/region? If so, a cheap “walkie-talkie” style (called “HT” in the biz — best avoid “walkie-talkie”) is a good place to start. These VHF/UHF (very/ultra high frequency) radios are affordable — something from Baofeng(~$30) or similar will work just fine, though they are often looked down on (I have one — for the price, it’s great). You will have the most luck if there is an active ham scene in your area, in large part because they may have a repeater, which can greatly extend your range. Many regions will have scheduled “nets” where you just go around and chat.

If you’re looking for the ability to chat with folks on the other side of the world, you’ll want to look into HF (high frequency). This is much lower frequency, thus longer wavelength, than the handheld VHF/UHF HTs. So…the antennas take up a lot of space. Mine is 52 feet long, in the attic. And the radios are much more expensive (more like $1k new). ICOM 7300, Yaesu FT710 are popular entry level units (but you also need power supply, cables, and antenna).

That said: if you just want to listen to HF, the antenna doesn’t matter as much at all, and you can use an SDR (RTL-SDR probably works?) for listening. You can probably also find a used shortwave radio that covers some of the HF ham bands.

Getting TLS certs will be complicated

I just use Let’s Encrypt with a wildcard domain — same certs for public and private facing domains. I’m sure this isn’t best practice, but it’s mostly just for me so I’m not too worried :)

I’m guessing it wouldn’t work for a variety of reasons, but having cameras digitally sign the image+the metadata could be interesting.

Yeah I don’t expose Jellyfin over the Internet, so it doesn’t matter for me, and wouldn’t work at all over WAN (unless VPN’d to home network).

Also, it’s all reverse proxied, and there’s nothing preventing having two Jellyfin hostnames, e.g., jf-local.mydomain.com and jf-public.mydomain.com.

Another fun trick you can play is to use a private IP on your public DNS records. This is useful for Jellyfin on Chromecast for instance — it uses 8.8.8.8 for DNS lookup (and ignores your router settings), so it wants a fully qualified domain name. But it has no problem accessing local hosts, so long as it’s from 8.8.8.8’s record.

I have set up local DNS entries (with Pi-Hole) to point to my srrver, but I don’t know if it possible to get certs for that, since it is not a real domain.

So long as your certs are for your fully qualified domain there’s no problem. I do this, as do many people — mydoman.com is fully qualified, but on my own network I override the DNS to the local address. Not a problem at all — DNS is tied to the hostname, not the IP.

…and I don’t see it motivating people to go vote.

But it can do the opposite perhaps — “motivate” people to stay home who would otherwise vote R. Not that, in general, we should be celebrating voter apathy, but I think that some of these endorsements could dishearten folks enough that they end up abstaining.