The network gear I manage is only accessible via VPN, or from a trusted internal network…

…and by the gear I manage, I mean my home network (a router and a few managed switches and access points). If a doofus like me can set it up for my home, I’d think that actual companies would be able to figure it out, too.

Travel expense reimbursement — though many companies have a “no receipt required if under $xyz” policy.

Duh, just read it back from /dev/random

You will recover the data, you just need to wait long enough.

That’s how I started using Linux — big book with CD, I think it was “RedHat Linux Secrets 5.4” or something. 2.0 or 2.2 kernel.

Honestly, it was fantastic. And almost all of it is still relevant today. (Some of the stuff on xfree86 and the chap/pap stuff not so much.)

But it gave a really solid (IMHO) intro to a Linux/*NIX system, a solid overview of coreutils, etc. And while LILO has been long replaced, and afaik /sys didn’t exist at the time, it formed a good foundation.

I’ll refrain from commenting on any init system changes that have taken place since then.

Just use your $200+ Fluke to check the batteries, problem solved.

The grid needs to balance input and output. You can’t just “throw away” power.

It’s a real problem — not the “electric companies are losing money” part, but the “we need to keep the grid balanced” part.

Concentrated solar and wind are a bit different though?

Afaik photovoltaics are fine running open circuit, i.e., disconnecting them. Thermal solar, and wind, are (I think) much trickier (but covering things for solar thermal, like you suggest, is perhaps feasible).

No, unfortunately, you can’t.

Ground doesn’t typically dissipate power, rather, power is dissipated in the circuit/load — so if you just hook a wire to ground, you’re dumping gobs of power into the wire. If you do this in your home (DON’T), best case it will trip the breaker, worst case it will melt and catch something on fire.

It’s easy enough to burn a kilowatt — just boil some water. But it’s entirely something else to burn megawatt, or yikes, gigawatt scale power.

We tend to use between 3kWh (vacation/idle power consumption) and around 8kWh per day. If we switched to electric stove, water heater, and heat pump, and add a hot tub, that’d increase substantially. But if we added solar (on our long Todo list…), the battery in the article (60kWh) would probably be able to handle all our storage needs, and it’d fit in he garage (bonus of it can be placed outside/under a deck!). I live in a major city, but I would absolutely love to effectively be off grid.

Exciting stuff — it seems these are touted as being extremely robust/safe, which is of course important for me if it’s going to be in/near our house. Storage density not a huge concern, but price is somewhat important — let’s hope this sort of thing ticks all the boxes.

And your VPN connection to work knows your endpoint…

Interestingly, there’s another way of finding out if your coworker is in the office — just walk over to their desk.

As a long-time Debian user, I’d have to throw my vote behind Slackware for the title of most UNIX-y, which is I guess a bit different from most Linux-y.

Debian got me through grad school, but Slack got me through undergrad on a hopelessly underpowered old ThinkPad — Volkerding is a legend, and Slack will always be dear to my heart.

This happened to me when Debian switched from SysV to systemd. I am not the only person who experienced this (e.g., https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=147478 ).

This is not to say the systemd behavior is wrong, but it essentially changed the behavior of fstab. Whether this is Debian’s fault, Arch’s fault (per the above link), systemd’s fault, or my fault is a fair question. But this committed that most egregious of sins per our Lord and Savior Torvalds — it broke my userspace.

My favorite was when the behavior of a USB drive in /etc/fstab went from “hmm it’s not plugged in at boot, I’ll let the user know” to “not plugged in? Abort! Abort! We can’t boot!”

This change over previous init behavior was especially fun on headless machines…

If you’re OOTL, it’s a reference to the Republican posting about being a black nazi on a porn site https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/mark-robinson-black-nazi-porn-forum-1235107129/

TV show, not movie, but no, definitely not saying we should ban anything.

Given that the series handled his transition fairly head on, pretty sure no one wants to destroy the older seasons.

My only question was that this meme is directly referring to the top character as a woman. Most times I see this meme it doesn’t have any references to gender (“morning shift going to work at 6am / night shift coming home at 6am,” or something like that).

Is using an old picture of Elliot Page — and referencing women — considererd poor form? Honest question, I really don’t know the etiquette.

Area 51 in shambles.

No, they make a profit if your premiums are more than your care+overhead. Preventative care is sometimes offered with no co-pay — presumably because you end up costing them less over the long haul if you keep up to date with your Dr. appointments.

It’s not a great system; but it does work very well for some customers, and failing to recognize that tends to preclude having a productive discussion.

My university was pretty zen about this — essentially, “don’t use your own access point/router please. But if you do, please talk to your resident (University employed) student IT rep and they can probably help you set it up correctly.”