Going great so far - as the work week has started a day late, today’s practically already Wednesday!

It’s finally warm enough to work outside most of the day, so that’s what I’m doing. Loving it. Behind the PC monitor I see mountains, a small forest and the dogs wandering around in the garden, trying to secretly dig holes where they think I can’t see them.

On a personal level, I find myself (finally) growing increasingly indifferent to various things that I can’t influence. If the world stays its current course, there’s a good chance I’ll lose some of the luxuries in my life, but in the grand scheme of things we’ll likely still be okay. Let the world burn if it wants to - I’ll save the rest of my sanity for the problems that affect me personally if and when they arise.
This mindset brings an immense sense of freedom. I’m much happier already.

Besides that it’s a pretty normal week, just busier than usual as there’s a lot to do in the garden and around the house. I still need to fix the holes in the lawn, get rid of a metric ton of weeds and paint some walls. It’s a lot of work but totally worth it.

and people like me are why Linux has even gotten to where it’s at today.

Not true. There are tons of nice developers out there. And I for one wouldn’t want to work in a team where an attitude like yours is prevalent.

You know, downcasting and/or insulting people just because they don’t live up to your personal standards is a pretty shitty thing to do.

To answer the question in the title: my money’s on an old white man with homophobic and misogynistic tendencies.

FWIW - as a person guilty of sometimes not texting back: most of the time it’s not because I don’t want to talk to that person, it’s because I don’t have the time and/or energy to write something worthwhile, make a mental note to text back something witty ‘later’, and you can probably guess where this is going.

Apologies for butting in here, but this brings up an IMHO very important point:

The general public HAVE NO FUCKING CLUE that the Fediverse exists.

If I may be so bold as to add: …and they like it that way.

When it comes to online stuff, most people are lazy, very very ignorant and anywhere inbetween politely indifferent and openly hostile towards any attempt to educate them. They want to look at cat videos and pr0n, collect likes for their food pics and chat with their grandkids. The technology behind all that is a nuisance, not a tool.
By and large, I think those people can’t be helped, because they’re happy with the status quo. If anything, you’re the enemy for wanting to take away their beloved Tiktok and WhatsApp.

That means our largest efforts - self-hosting, the Fediverse, … will probably always be a bit of a parallel universe to the Internet at large.
This is sad for humanity in general, but it makes enshittification of those services both technically more difficult and (due to its small size and enshittification-resistant populace) less commercially viable.
And small doesn’t equal insignificant.

So what I’m saying is, we shouldn’t see the Fediverse etc. as a replacement for everything, but as a safe space for refugees. And that’s what it excels at.

I run my own mail server since sometime late last century, and it’s gotten progressively more difficult over the years. Not setting up the server, that part is easy. Hardening it is a bit more work. But what’s making it nearly impossible is the big players’ anti-spam (or should that be in quotes) measures.
My mail server checks all the boxes it should - TLS, SPF, DomainKeys, DMARC, a domain name that’s been around for decades, same hostname and IP address for years, never been on any block list, … yet still e-mails relayed by it are tagged as spam for increasingly ridiculous reasons: it’s a residential IP (actually it’s not), the PTR record doesn’t match the A/AAA record (yes, that server has multiple jobs and multiple host names - not that unusual), the domain name is suspicious (same owner and tech-c for decades, same IP and SPF records for years), … if I didn’t know better, I’d suspect that MS, Google etc. just use their spam filters to make life difficult for anyone outside their oligopoly. But that’s probably just beause I’m a cynic.

I’ve tried meeting new people but it’s not the same.

Give it time. New friends are made by spending time with strangers until they’re not strangers anymore. If the new people are nice enough, and you get to hang out with them for a while, some of them will probably turn into friends. You’re already on the right track by getting to know new people.

Welcome! And I hope you did take that nap. It sounds like it’s been well-deserved. Always remember, the most important person in your life is you, so take good care of yourself. You’re the only you there is.

Currently walking part of the Camino Primitivo and alternating between “what kind of utter idiot does this to themselves” and “holy fsck is this great”.
It’s my third Camino and I know the drill by now, and still I manage to surprise myself. It also immensely helps me clear my head and leave everything else behind for a couple weeks, which is my main reason for doing it.

Still now I’m looking forward to arriving in Santiago, recovering there for a few days and then flying back home. I’ve started missing my family (including the dogs!) and friends.
This spring and summer look like they’re going to be super lovely, and I can’t wait to put the finishing touches on the garden, sit there with other people, share a drink and watch the doggies chase each other and try to dig holes where they think we don’t see them.

“Give a man a cleaning rag and he will stare at it helplessly. Give him a pressure washer and he will clean everything as far as the cable will reach.”

The world keeps getting weirder and weirder, and it’s the bad kind of weird. Can somebody please have the tangerine bollock committed to a mental home, or at least tell our government to grow a pair and stand up to his bullying for a change?

I’ll say. I’d have expected him to be using Grok, not ChatGPT.

Home ACs are just wasteful.

I don’t know, ours eats 400-500W to cool the entire ground floor, which is a fraction of what the solar panels produce on a sunny day, and a fraction of the surplus energy we have no choice but to sell the utility company for a pittance.
In spring and autumn it can also heat the inside and has a COP of between 4 and 5 then, so much more efficient than a regular electric heater and probably more environmentally friendly than if the central heating would burn more oil - the circulation pump alone uses close to 400W.

Of course we could live without it (people have lived in the house without an A/C before), but it’s much more agreeable like this, not to mention that it allows us to use the winter garden as an office in summer, which has a great view over the garden and allows us to keep an eye on the dogs. There are many much less sensible ways to use that energy than the A/C.

Back to the battery, some EVs can be used as battery storage (vehicle to house, vehicle to grid or vehicle to load). Maybe one of those would make it more viable to have both an EV and storage space for your harvested sun? Not mavy EVs can do it at present, but it may pay to keep an eye on new models.

I don’t know if you’ve already heard of them or if they’re even available where you live, but if it’s the cold air that bugs you, there are water-cooled ceiling plates that work just as well as a conventional A/C. An office I used to work at had them and they were lovely. They cost quite a bit more though.

As an alternative if you just want to avoid feeding surplus energy into the grid, what about a battery of 5-20kWh? It could store more energy than the A/C uses during the day, probably costs about the same or less, and you can use that energy at night.

I’m not sure “cooling degree days” are a good way to measure environmental impact. They neither represent the amount of heat pumped into the atmosphere (as the energy per degree depends on several factors such as mass and heat capacity of the cooled stuff) nor the amount of electricity used (as different A/C’s have wildly different degrees of efficiency) nor the amount of CO2 released (as that depends on how the electricity has been produced).

The power hunger of AI has already been mentioned, so I’m not going to repeat that point, though IMHO it’s by far the bigger issue than residential cooling.

Having said that, if you’re worried about the enviromental impact of your home, the power consumption of a reasonably efficient A/C can easily be offset by just a couple of medium-sized solar panels. Of course both the solar panels and the efficient A/C cost money that not everybody can afford to (or cares to) spend, so you’d have to take cheap and inefficient A/C’s off the market, thus effectively making chilled air a privilege that only the rich can afford. That’d probably lead to lots of heat strokes and other health problems amongst low-income families, so you’d have to weigh the environmental impact of inefficient A/C’s against another rich/poor gap.

I was with a dude once whose foreskin was super tight and couldn’t even be pulled down when flaccid.

That’s called phimosis and is an actual medical condition where it makes sense to remove part of the foreskin.

Other than that, without informed consent (which a baby/child obviously can’t give) it’s genital mutilation, plain and simple, and should be punished as such. It’s a remainder of barbaric times where the concept of enjoyable sex was considered evil and masturbation in particular was to be prevented at any cost. The excuses about health, hygiene etc. are just convenient lies.

Personally I’ve heard (anecdotal evidence) from men who had a circumcision as adults (either by choice or for medical reasons) and some say the sex afterwards was better, some say it was worse. The point is, either way it should be an informed decision by the person whose penis is affected, and not by anybody else.

It depends on what you’re looking for.

File storage - plenty of solutions, though make sure you don’t pick one that rents their storage space from AWS or Azure.
Personally I use Tresorit at it is end-to-end encrypted, easy to use and has a native client for almost every system I use (except for FreeBSD) in addition to the web interface. On your PC you get a network drive but can also include folders located elsewhere. It’s by no means the cheapest solutio though.

For pictures there’s Ente. It works very well, is cross-platform, and you can even set up your own server if you’re so inclined.

Sadly there’s no real alternative to Microsoft’s 365 offers - maybe a combination of lifetime MS Office licences or LibreOffice plus some cloud storage provider comes close.

To replace Teams you could use a secure messenger such as Threema Work (this version comes with user management and a versatile inbuilt MDM) and your own Jitsi videochat server. We’ve replaced Teams with this combo years ago and never looked back.

Hosted Exchange can be rented from many service providers, running on either genuine MS Exchange or a compatible third-party system such as KerioConnect.

There are also other places such as Proton that offer several services at once.

Or are you looking for something completely different?

If you’re going to be there between, say november and february, do let me know. If your travel schedule happens to fit ours, the first round of cold ones is on me!
(No Dos Equis. Pinky swear.)

European here. I’d say it depends on what you want to see/do and how much you’re willing to spend, resp. to what degree your willingness to spend is influenced by how much you like the place.

SO and me like to flee the dark and cold days a couple weeks a year and mostly fly to Egypt, Mexico or the Dominican Republic.
Last fall we went to Jamaica, which was super super lovely all around, but very expensive compared to every other caribbean place we’ve been to. Pretty much anything they want, they have to import from the US, so as a rule of thumb add a hefty markup to Florida prices.
Besides that, it’s easy to fall in love with the place and people.

Mexico:

Quintana Roo is hot and lovely pretty much all year round, except sometimes during hurricane season. Cheap-ish flights should be available from most larger US airports, and once there you can spend anything ranging from USD 25-500 per day and person for food and accommodation.

Things to avoid:

• The official airport taxis. They’re a mafia like you wouldn’t believe. Book a transport in advance for a fraction of the price and exit the airport through the small exit hidden behind the huge taxi/exit signs. The signs lead you through a one-way gate to the official taxis where you can expect to spend upwards of 80 bucks for a 5min ride. The same money will get you a private driver for several hours.
• Cancún, especially the zona hotelera. It’s the ‘party’ mile (using that term loosely) and full of drunken partygoers pretty much around the clock.
• Holbox - it is as beautiful an island as the ads say, but dramatically overpopulated with tourists, rather smelly (mainly due to the sewage collecting in the streets) and extremely overpriced. Also slowly drowning in trash and mosquitoes.
• Las Coloradas - never as pretty as on the pictures and a huge rip-off. Last thing a local told us is that they now employ guys on motorbikes to interfere with tourists trying to take a picture without paying an entry fee.

Things to do:

• Look for a nice apartment in Cozumel (do stop by Señor Frog’s next to the Playa del Carmen ferry port) or Isla Mujeres (try Villas Najo’). If you don’t feel like feeding The Man, find a nice place on booking.com and book there directly - most landlords will give you a better price and still make more money themselves that way.
• In Cozumel, eat at Casa Denis and then visit that tequila bar on the way from there to the main road that has swings instead of bar chairs. Ask for samples.
• If you feel like scuba diving in Cozumel, go to Jungle Divers and ask for Stéphane. He generally hates having to babysit customers on his dives, but if you manage to get on his good side you’ll have great dives and learn a lot. Only take courses there though if you don’t mind a very impatient teacher.
• On Isla Mujeres, talk to Sharon of Aqua Adventures Eco Divers. She’ll be happy to make suggestions for a great dive. (If it’s whale shark season, don’t miss that experience)
• In Isla Mujeres, eat at Sonny’s. Don’t order more than half a pizza per person.
• Playa del Carmen is nice for a daytrip or shopping. If you want to stay there, find a place a bit on the outskirts or bring earplugs.
• Chichén Itzá is half a day away and very impressive to see firsthand.

General tips:

• Whenever possible, ask you driver / guide / … if they offer private tours. Sometimes they can’t or are loyal to their company, other times you’ll get a private driver / guide / … for a much lower price.
• You can save a lot of money by buying stuff at the supermarket and cooking yourself.