Seems like a good opportunity to remind folks about the Kiwix project, which allows you to download local private copies of select information such as Wikipedia. It was originally created to provide offline access to content for countries that were otherwise blocked, but events like this have sparked some recent discussion about archiving older files to preserve history.

I just store all my passwords in robots.txt on my web server, makes it easy for me to access them anywhere I go...

/s

Hell I'm still trying to figure out why the spell checker changes "i'll" to "i'LLC" every time I type it. Auto-correct on phones is just worthless and I spend far more time correcting it than I do trying to correct actual mistakes.

It may not be a hazard in your area, but around here there's about a million bicyclists who have no objection to riding out into the middle of the road in front of fast-moving traffic to go around parked vehicles. Also that parked vehicle could be someone changing a flat tire and walking around their vehicle, or present some other type of hazard. You don't know why they are parked there, and if you're driving at night you might not even see them until it's too late. Obviously other people in your area want to know about these parked cars or they wouldn't be reporting them.

If you want less information, why not switch to Google maps or OsmAnd?

Don't feel bad, that's a shitty process even for those of us in IT. Sometimes it doesn't work for certain models of memory sticks, sometimes something on the computer gets in the way of booting to the drive. I recently worked on some servers where I had to disable EFI, grab a 15 year old installer to get linux booted up on it, then switch to the newer installer to complete the process. So far Dell has been the worst (but also the most frequently used) I've had trouble with for getting linux installed. Unfortunately the solutions usually involve combinations of disabling EFI, changing the hard drive to a different mode, or even changing what mode the memory stick is booted with (all selected from within the BIOS at boot time), and it's not always the same process even for the same release of a machine.

It's not you, it's Microsoft working with the manufacturers to make it difficult for people to switch.

If there's any question about how one-sided this war has been, there's a Wikipedia page keeping track of the casualties. They currently list 30,228 Palestinian deaths compared to 1,410 Israeli deaths beginning with the October 7th attack, with estimates that between 61-90% of these are innocent civilians.

My current setup is eight 18TB Exos drives, all purchased from Amazon's refurb shop, and running in a RAIDz2. I'm pulling about 450MB/s through various tests on a system that is in use. I've been running this about a year now and smartd hasn't detected any issues. I have almost never run new drives for my storage and the only time I've ever lost data was back when I was running mdadm and a power glitch broke the sync on multiple drives so the array couldn't be recovered. With zfs I have even run a RAID0 with five drives which saw multiple power incidents (before I got a redundant power supply) and I never once lost anything because of zfs' awesome error detection.

So yes, used drives can be just fine as long as you do your research on the drive models, have a very solid power supply, and are configured for hot-swapping so you can replace a drive when they fail. Of course that's solid advice even for brand new drives, but my last set of used drives (also from ebay) lasted about a decade before it was time to upgrade. Sure, individual drives took a dump over that time, this was another set of eight and I replaced three of them, but the data was always safe.

Don't worry, your brain is just an unfortunate side-effect and the gut microbes actually rule the body. When they're in danger they sacrifice unimportant organs like the brain first. "Death" doesn't actually mean what you think it does... 😬

Wow, that's not something I even considered could happen. It does raise an interesting question though -- how many more of these could be out there? Seems like it would require a whole-sky survey just to detect them.

It seems like you are making the assumption that time and the laws of physics follow the same rules inside the singularity. If we ourselves are inside a singularity, the net result was enough matter to create our known universe... but maybe in the next layer down matter behaves differently and stars can be produced on a smaller scale. Or maybe the matter is heading towards its own scale of big-bang. And what if time contracts to the point that the life of the black hole, and its relative size, corresponds to the life of that universe and its expansion?

A story which comes to mind and presents an interesting theory that could apply here can be found in He Who Shrank.

There's actually a distro called Sourcemage with commands like cast/dispel/summon and packages stored in grimoires. I ran it for awhile on my servers. The command structure is quite fun.

No.