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Cake day: July 25th, 2023

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  • Any breakfast at home is almost always better than breakfast out, if you’ve got the time and ingredients. I can, with the right ingredients and tools and while half asleep, hungover, or still drunk, make a full breakfast for a family of four better than 90% of the breakfasts I’ve ever had out. Sure it took some practice, but breakfast isn’t rocket science or usually particularly complex recipe wise.

    The only thing I haven’t been able to do better at home breakfast wise so far is making my own fresh bagels or donuts. I don’t like making poached eggs either, and hollandaise sauce is a pain in the ass, but I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve gotten an eggs Benedict out at a restaurant that didn’t make me immediately regret my choice. Same with biscuits and gravy (why do restaurants think that gravy comes out of a box and should be bright white?) , bacon (just bacon flavored bacon please), eggs (sunny side up does not mean I want the whites to be clear and runny too), etc. All things I really like, but can’t tolerate having someone else fuck up and charge me for it.



  • Teach us then 😭

    I think this hits on another big generational difference. Those who grew up in the early days of personal computing and the Internet didn’t have teachers or a hallucinating language model to spoon feed them instant answers. They had to actually RTFM thoroughly before they could even think of asking in some arcane BBS, forum, or IRC for help from elders that had absolutely zero tolerance for incompetence or ignorance. MAN pages and help files came bundled, but the Internet (if you had it) was metered and inconvenient on a scale more like going to the library than ordering a pizza. They had to figure out how to ask the right questions. They had to figure out how to find their own answers. The Internet was so slow that all the really interesting bits were often just text. So much indexed and categorized one might need to learn a little more just to find the right details in that sea of text. There was a lot less instant gratification and no one expected to be able to solve their problems just by asking for help.

    I’ve seen way too many kids give up at the first pebble in their path because they are so accustomed to the instant gratification that has pervaded our culture since the dawn of smart phones.




  • I’m not a nice person. I’m not a kind person. I’m not even a good person. I try to be all of those things and sometimes it feels like a struggle. I don’t think I’m evil or a total asshole or a sociopath or something. I just think it a metric we have to constantly check-in on and adjust. I don’t really trust people that think of themselves as nice, kind, or good. I don’t think I really agree with those people about what it really means to be nice, kind, or good. For example, I do believe the song got it right, sometimes you do need to be cruel to be kind in the right measure.


  • Downloading from YouTube or Spotify is still piracy. And those sources offer mostly shit quality far removed from the artist’s intent.

    Believe it of not, there are things that aren’t on Spotify, YouTube, TIDAL, Apple Music, Bandcamp, or any streaming service. Sometimes when a streaming service does have a song or album, it’s either not the best quality or only a radio censored version available, even if Spotify claims it’s the explicit version. And that explicit tag feels like a slander because the original intent should be default and the radio edits should be the one’s with the CENSORED tag.

    There is great music out there you can’t purchase or stream a digital release of.

    There are old and often played CDs in my collection that can’t be ripped properly (by me) for one reason or another.

    There are some really high quality vinyl recordings out there, done by people with better hardware and more skill than I. Again, many of these vinyl releases are not available in any other format and are no longer available for purchase anywhere.

    The real primary reason I got into it, in the long ago times of Napster, was that I liked to make mixtapes/discs. When radio was no longer playing songs I wanted on those tapes, the wilds of Internet was the answer.

    I still regularly support the artists I like as directly as I can: buying albums and merch directly from them at shows or their own websites. And I spend more of that money on more artists and especially less popular artists specifically because of the habits listed above.


  • In my experience, 2 devices will ultimately save you effort and frustration. Anything you choose as a good NAS/seedbox will be unlikely to have a good from the couch interface or handle Netflix reliable and easily. A small Android TV box may have a much better interface, simple app setup, and support all the streaming services, but probably won’t be very powerful or convenient to use as a NAS. The NAS is always on, plugged directly into the Internet access point, and tucked away out of sight and sound. The Android TV or Apple TV box is silent, small, and can be mounted directly to the Beamer/Projector.

    Yes, Kodi exists and it’s add-ons can bridge this gap. But I still think that a SBC NAS running Jellyfin or plex + an Nvidia shield with jellyfin, Plex, Netflix, Spotify, YouTube, amaon, etc. will be so much easier to setup, manage, find support for, and upgrade.

    I have a similar setup even though my server has a direct HDMI link to my TV. I’m not a fan of viewing using the server it from the couch. Setting up IR remotes sucks always. And it’s confusing for anyone but me to use. But if my Nvidia Shield dies or I’m having network trouble, VLC a pretty good backup.







  • If you can remove the alcohol from any “cocktail” and still have more than just flavored ice or a dirty glass, you were drinking slightly alcoholic mocktails the whole time.

    Old Fashioned mocktail is a cherry on top of a large ice cube that you’ve used to bludgeon some sugar and an orange.

    A Sazerac mocktail is akin to an empty glass someone just drink a sweet lemony drink from. You don’t get the lemony drink, just the dirty glass.

    A margarita mocktail is salty lime flavored ice. This is basically a daquiri mocktail too, adding a strawberry seems popular.

    A Manhattan mocktail is a sweetened cherry in an otherwise empty glass.

    A mojito mocktail is a bit more substantial, minty sugar water with a hint of lime.

    A mint julep mocktail, again just minty sugar water.

    A white Russian mocktail is just a glass of cream over ice.

    A mimosa mocktail is just a nearly empty glass of orange juice.

    The non-alcoholic parts of a cocktail are rarely more than a quarter of the volume if they’re made properly. Most cocktails are a half oz of sugar water and a citrus flavor. The other 2/3 of the volume (not counting the ice) is alcohol. Just order a soda, soda water (with or without a garnish), tea, or my favorite a Topo Chico and lime.






  • Remember when courts declared Microsoft was a monopoly because they bundled their own browser, Internet Explorer, with the operating system? And they did it in a way that made it impossible to completely remove from the OS. Did they learn their lesson? I think they did, just not the lesson we wanted them to learn. Go ahead and try to uninstall Edge from Windows 10 or 11. Dive into the task manager sometime too and you’ll see Edge sub-processes running under a surprising number of other apps. There is no Windows operating system any more, it’s just Internet Explore refactored and rebranded as Edge all the way down. (Obvious hyperbole) At least Chromebooks were up front about it.


  • Docker compose is just a setting file for a container. It’s the same advantage you get using an ssh config file instead of typing out and specifying a user, IP, port, and private key to use each time. What’s the advantage to putting all my containers into one compose file? It’s not like I’m running docker commands from the terminal manually to start and stop them unless something goes wrong, I let systemd handle that. And I’d much rather the systemd be able to individually start, stop, and monitor individual containers rather than have to bring them all down if one fails.