The difference between a cheap bike and a nice bike is similar to the difference between a Chromebook and a decked out ThinkPad or Macbook IMHO.

You’re absolutely right: most folks just browse the web, and a Chromebook is enough. But the other products do have value.

Whenever I mess with my bike brakes, I only do one wheel, then a few rides later allow myself to do the other. That way if I botch it I should have another brake that sorta still works.

Maybe not a service in the typical sense, but setting up your router+server to route your home network traffic through a VPN is a fun project.

My router (MikroTik) supports WireGuard, so I can use it with Mullvad for the whole house—but wg is demanding and it’s a slow router, so while it can NAT at ~1Gbps, it can’t do WireGuard at more than ~90Mbps. So, I set up WireGuard/Mullvad on a little SBC with a fast processor, and have my router use that instead. Using policy based routing and/or mangling, I can have different VLANs/subnets/individual hosts selectively routed through the VPN.

It’s a fun exercise, not sure I implemented it in a smart way, but it works :)

grep -rIi “John.*Cena” dir/

I have this sort of thing aliased, with some added --include flags to filter file type (e.g., only match source/script files). Super useful!

This review of Olive Garden went viral, and the review/reviewer was mocked online—but then Anthony Bourdain came to her defense.

Kinda a cute story, and a fun read.

Having lived without a dishwasher for many years, I’m never complaining about loading/unloading the dishwasher. From starting the kettle to finishing a pour over is more than enough time to unload.

And never again having to schlep clothes to the laundromat because we have laundry in our home? Likewise, I’m not going to complain. The only reason laundry takes real effort is when we opt to use the clothesline instead of the dryer.

Not everyone has a dishwasher, washing machine, and clothes dryer, so I absolutely recognize that I’m very fortunate here. And the crazy thing is, these devices aren’t even particularly expensive, especially since they can be had used — I think a big reason folks don’t have them is the installation+room required. Which probably says something about landlords and the general cost per area of housing.

When the son of the deposed King of Nigeria emails you directly asking for help, you help. His father ran the freaking country, okay?

I have one, it’s been great.

That said, “exactly what the problem is” isn’t always the same as telling you the solution. I had a “misfire on cyl #3” error or something like that, which can be a number of things. Replacing all the coils and plugs myself was probably still cheaper than taking it to the shop though!

poweroff and reboot work as advertised for me, but I’m running headless homelab servers and a laptop with i3. Maybe DEs/GUI shutdown is more subtle?

Yeah, I run i3 and headless servers, so it’s poweroff or reboot for me. Always works as advertised.

Except on the Linux systems I’ve used, when I ask it to shut down, it shuts down no matter what. Windows and macOS let programs stop the shutdown process indefinitely (when shutdown/reboot are invoked the usual way).

I think that’s what the meme is trying to get at.

Never said that at all. I’ve had some fantastic food in England.

Oh please. The US has many problems, and there are food deserts to be sure — but go to a first class US city and you’ll find great food.

go2rtc, a camera streaming tool that’s useful for security cameras, at least has some humor in their choice — port 1984, of course.