Could try hosting a Multi-User Dungeon (MUD). I tried to host an Evennia server last year but could never get it to work properly. Wasn’t a big deal though cause it’s not like I had any friends who wanted to play, lol.

I remember L’oreal Kids shampoo commercials (like 25 years ago) very specifically showed kids happily wiping suds out of their eyes when “NO TEARS!” showed up on the bottom of the screen, clearly to exploit this misunderstanding

Could build a wheelchair ramp on the side of the tub so you can just roll on in

I watched Game Grumps play this game a while back and found it very funny. Certainly a labor of love

I’m saying it’s weird that wirchcraft is “culturally acceptable” while the other extremely similar “hobbies” draw widespread derision

I think you said more than that. You said people would “rightfully” make fun of you, suggesting the derision is warranted.

people who don’t leave the witchcraft stuff behind when they grow up are on par with disney adults and hardcore weebs

People with harmless hobbies? I see no problem with this. Why would a self-respecting adult care if others cringe at their interests?

A license obtained in the USA (issued by the FCC) only permits transmission on regulated frequencies within the USA. Other nations will have different regulatory bodies you’ll need to comply with instead. You can probably just do a web search for “<your country here> amateur radio license” and go from there.

Space RF communication protocols and best-use technologies - I need to read about it more

You can get a decent primer on this topic here and here. If you aren’t already a licensed ham, you can look into getting your Technician license (a lofty goal, given the exam comprises thirty whole multiple-choice questions, assuming you’re in the U.S.) and get familiar with transmitting/receiving across long distances.

One fun experiment you can tackle early on before even getting licensed to transmit is to just receive signals from satellites that are already in orbit and can be reliably tracked. For example: you can easily track the International Space Station and know when it will be passing over your location and set up a receiver to listen on the right frequency. It’s not uncommon for them to be broadcasting some kind of signal on a regular basis. Sometimes they even broadcast SSTV signals that you can receive and decode. Once you’ve done this a couple of times, you oughta be pretty comfortable with at least receiving signals from satellites in orbit. Good preliminary proof of concept.

A couple of handy web apps I’ve used to track satellites before:

• https://in-the-sky.org/satmap_radar.php
• https://www.n2yo.com/satellites/?c=18
• https://www.heavens-above.com/

You used to be able to track the ISS through a NASA web app, but they recently retired it in favor of their first-party app 🙄. Admittedly, it’s a pretty great app in my experience. But I wish the old web app were still online. That said, the apps I linked above should also be able to track the ISS as well.

You could use PiVPN (you don’t need to install it specifically on a Raspberry Pi – this is just a handy all-in-one software solution). It supports both OpenVPN and Wireguard standards. Forward the relevant port in your router configuration, set up a single user for yourself in the VPN settings, and then connect via whichever client you prefer (OpenVPN if you use OVPN, or Wireguard if you use Wireguard).

I’ve used it before to access locally-hosted services from outside my home network and it gets the job done with fairly minimal setup.

“Octopus’s Garden” by The Beatles seems apropos.

I had this same error a few months ago when a drive was failing to mount because (unbeknownst to me) it was overheating. I turned the system off for a few hours before troubleshooting (I had errands to run). When I came back, the system booted without issue.

If you’re looking for an easy troubleshooting step, have you tried turning off the system for several minutes (and unplugging it) and then powering it back on?

I’ve had moderate success by using a handful of quotes over the years whenever this topic comes up with friends or family.

“Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.” - Edward Snowden

This quote can substitute out the “free speech” bit for “gun rights” if you are talking to a gun nut.

“I like to close the bathroom door when I’m taking a shower. It doesn’t mean I’m doing anything immoral in there, I just have the right to privacy.” - Anonymous

A fair followup question when they say “why bother, it’s pointless anyway,” that might provoke some thought on their part is: “Do you ever make any effort at all toward a goal that is ultimately a drop in the bucket? Have you ever recycled a single plastic bottle? Covered the PIN pad when entering your PIN number at an ATM? Walked to the store instead of driven? Written a letter to a congressman? If so, why? The overall effect of your action was probably negligibly small in the grand scheme of things, so why did you bother to put any effort in at all?”

The answer to that question is: just because you can’t get to 100% privacy/eco-friendliness/whatever goal it is you have, doesn’t mean you can’t put in some degree of effort to protect your rights, the earth, or hold your government accountable.

They don’t have to ditch Google entirely in one day. That’s ludicrously hard and even privacy advocates like myself can’t do it easily. You take incremental steps when you are ready. Ditch Chrome when you have the bandwidth and get Firefox. Ditch Google search in favor of DuckDuckGo when you think you can deal with the different experiences. etc, etc. Everyone’s journey is different.

I guess I could tell a story about the worst person I ever met. I don’t know exactly what criteria elevate someone to the level of “evil” versus just being an awful, horrid person, so I’ll let readers make that judgement.

It was 2010. I was 20 years old and needed a job. Through family networking, I was able to land a brief stint working with a distant cousin of mine who I’d never met before. Let’s call him “James”. I’m scheduled to work with him for about a week, traveling out of state to a small town in Virginia to do some maintenance on pools and such. Seems like a simple enough gig.

He pulls up to my house in his pickup truck to pick me up. Keep in mind I’ve never met this guy before in my life. We’re not 10 minutes down the road when he starts dropping every racial slur you can think of talking about Obama and minorities and such. Guy was like a thesaurus of epithets.

Fast forward 5 or 6 hours that we’ve been driving. During this brief window of time I have heard this guy scream at his girlfriend over the phone about how she “better not be at the bar” or “hanging out with her friends”. He has road raged at every inconsequential inconvenience, making multiple reckless, dangerous maneuvers to save virtually zero transit time. He has pinned every misfortune in his life on black people, immigrants, gays. Anyone but himself.

After this harrowing trip, we’re finally at our destination and we can get to work. To say this guy was an abusive boss would not do it justice. His preferred method of communication was yelling. He’d light up a joint and smoke it very brazenly when there were children not particularly far away from us (one of the pools we worked on was at a community center where lots of kids would play). I don’t have any problem with weed, but c’mon.

Each day when we were done with work, we’d pick out some place to eat. During this week-long stay in this small town, I witnessed multiple random acts of kindness by strangers. James had nothing but angry, hateful things to say about every single one. I saw a guy let some veterans cut in front of him in line at a Bojangles. “What a kiss-ass,” James says. One day at a KFC, an elderly woman gives me and James a big bucket of chicken and biscuits because they got her order wrong and told her to keep it. “Old bitch,” says James after she walks away.

Every night after dinner he’d be at the bar getting hammered. Picking fights with other patrons and generally being a miserable pile of shit. One evening James gets up from the bar to go take a piss. A big biker guy James has been fucking with comes up to me and says, “Your friend’s got a big mouth.”

“Not my friend,” I reply. “He’s my boss, unfortunately. But if you and your biker buddies wanna drag him out back and beat the piss out of him, you ain’t gonna hear me complain.” Biker guy gives a big laugh and pats me on the back in an understanding way.

On the last day of the job, we’ve begun the drive back home. He sees a hotel with a pool that we’re about to pass and unilaterally decides we’re gonna try to fleece some hotel owner by doing some “maintenance” on the pool. He convinces this old man that the pool needs inspecting and the guy agrees to purchase our services. James fucks around for an hour doing virtually nothing to this pool and then charges the guy several hundred dollars. Brow beating and bullying him the entire time.

And to wrap it all up, he didn’t pay me what we’d negotiated. Unfortunately I wasn’t good at advocating for myself at this time in my life, so I just put up with it.

The silver lining to all this is I haven’t seen or heard from him since then. He drove away and has never darkened my doorway in the 15 years since that dismal week. Good riddance.

I appreciate Angus Young’s self-awareness.

“I’m sick and tired of people saying that we put out 11 albums that sound exactly the same. In fact, we’ve put out 12 albums that sound exactly the same.”

It’s impressive, just not particularly useful,

I will have to disagree with this. I have found LLMs to be remarkably useful in a variety of circumstances because they are pretty good at regurgitating API documentation and man pages in a relatively small context (effectively making them a very efficient google search).

For example, last week I accidentally deleted a partition from a USB drive. I asked an LLM how I might recover my data using GNU/Linux tools and it pointed me in the direction of ddrescue (and subsequently, gddrescue) and showed me how I could use the recovered disk image to recover my lost files.

I was already aware of ‘dd’ as a tool for disk management, but was wholly ignorant of ddrescue or gddrescue because I haven’t had a data recovery use case in over 15 years. It was a fairly simple affair, and it was much easier than asking StackOverflow.

I dunno if I’d say I’m “unimpressed” with AI. I certainly find the technology itself fascinating. I worked with machine learning for years before consumer generative AI became mainstream and it’s profoundly impressive what decades of research and development have yielded. I genuinely do admire the painstaking work that underappreciated computer scientists have put in to make such things possible.

That said, “AI” is the new “blockchain” insofar as virtually every company on the S&P 500 has decided this is the new be-all-end-all feature that must be integrated into every aspect of every project. I don’t need AI to be part of my OS. I will open a new tab in my web browser if I decide I have a task for it. Granted, I am not a representative sample of a typical computer user (I use GNU/Linux btw).

To say nothing of the unethical manner in which these models are trained, using works produced by actual writers, artists, programmers, etc. Obviously profiting from their works while offering zero compensation (and actively taking work away from them by offering AI as an alternative to their craft).

You could install something like LMMS and let them experiment with making their own music (without needing recording equipment or learning real instruments yet).

Have him search Wikipedia on something he loves and to look for the sources.

I like this idea, but with the additional step of vetting the topic in question on Wikipedia before allowing the kid to read the page.

e.g.: the kid says, “I love MrBeast!” and wants to research him. That Wiki article, while mostly innocuous, has a fairly lengthy “Controversies” section, including blue links to topics like “sexual harassment” and “homophobia”.

Can you define “god” in this context? Does “god” imply a creator of human existence, or merely a being with abilities not understood or quantified by humans (think Q from Star Trek).

The latter isn’t necessarily a belief system in and of itself. It’s just the acknowledgement that “higher”, ascendent beings can exist because humans are not, necesssarily, the be-all-end-all sapient beings of the universe.