Oh, yeah. SSH from laptop or Termux on my phone.

Not sure if there’s a CLI way to deal with captive portals or not. Maybe a text-based browser like Lynx/Links2 if the portal isn’t super fancy, but I’ve used the MAC cloning method for ages and it’s just my “go to” for dealing with that. Honestly, I don’t deal with them very often since I just use a hotspot much of the time with it.

I’ve only had to go through a captive portal once with it but MAC cloning was sufficient

how goes the mesh

By the wayside LOL.

That was a last winter project that kind of plateaued. I keep my everyday carry node with me and I built that NWS/EAS Alerter relay a month or two ago, but I’ve mostly been working on getting my PV system installed since spring.

Photovoltaic / Solar power installation.

“Solar system” just sounds weird when I say it.

Is it the ordering of the options? I just put them in top to bottom, left to right (except the free space) as I thought of them.

I started to do a 5x5 one but the text ended up being too small to read, and I couldn’t think of that many things to fill it in with.

I finally pulled the trigger and bought/installed the PV system I’ve been wanting for 10+ years.

It was a good chunk of upfront money for something I feared would end up being a midlife crisis purchase*. I only have it partially installed (all DIY as time allows) but we’ve been running the whole house from it several days a week and have already seen significant savings on the electric bill (especially since the first week I had it hooked in was a heat wave).

*It’s not not a midlife crisis purchase, lol, but it’s also more useful than a sports car.

Same. I moved because of the API debacle in 2023 (my original account was on .world) not because I was asked to leave.

Sadly, that’s like the free space on the “What brought you to the Fediverse?” bingo card.

Sadly (and similarly anecdotally) yes.

Toggling airplane mode basically “turns off and on again” your phone’s network interfaces, resets the routing table, and, I think, flushes the DNS caches. I don’t have the problem so much with wi-fi unless I roam between my main and guest networks which use different DNS records for some of my self-hosted apps. (e.g. the “internal” DNS record gets resolved on main wifi, gets cached, and then is inaccessible on guest wifi until the cached record expires).

Mainly, I just toggle the cellular data since my primary issue is that sometimes calls/texts stop working without notice.

I looked but there doesn’t seem to be a straightforward way to do that in Linux. I was thinking a udev rule but it would be clunky since the low level details for media like SD cards aren’t available. At best, maybe a generic rule that mounts it and looks for an autorun.sh or something, but that’s basically reinventing Autoplay on Windows and would have the same security implications.

I read Hack-a-Day frequently, and I’ve come across several projects that use NFC readers so you can tap a card to play specific songs or start playlists. Maybe something like that but launch a specific game instead?

e.g. https://hackaday.com/2025/03/31/a-music-box-commanded-by-nfc-tags/

I try for at least 2 hours a day, excluding sleeping.

Usually that’s in the form of puttering around outside doing yardwork, working on whatever my summer/winter project is, and/or taking the dogs for a walk. It’s difficult in the winter but the other 3 seasons are pretty easy to keep the habit alive

However you choose to spend that offline time, I highly recommend a daily dose of it. Been doing that for a few years now, and my mental health has improved dramatically. The world isn’t nearly as horrible as social media makes it out to be.

Security is pretty minimal, not gonna lie.

There’s a 50 GB LUKS partition that stays locked unless I’m actively using it. It’s got backup copies of my important/critical documents and password manager exports but the rest of it is just media and doesn’t really merit encryption.

All applications have local accounts but I’m not using LDAP or any kind of SSO like I am with my main stack.

At home, I keep the firewall disabled on the interface configured as “WAN” so I can access its services directly via their hostname (I point its wildcard DNS record to its local “WAN” IP) but do enable firewall when I’m using it on an untrusted network. Granted, I have to manually remember to do that, so that’s kind of a security risk if I forget. Generally, though, when I’m using it remotely, it’s using my secondary phone as a USB-tethered uplink so even if I leave its internal services exposed to WAN, the NAT from the phone blocks that. One of my goals, eventually, is to automate some of the firewall rules depending on where I’m using it.

Either the 3rd one or the least important one. Whichever causes me the most inconvenience.

Bonus “Mildly infuriating”:

Ask 4 bullet-point questions in an email, they only answer one of them and ignore the rest.

Definitely does, and it’s a beautiful city, but I never want to drive in it ever again lol.

Had to travel there 3 times for work. The first time I rented a car and immediately regretted it. The second and third times I demanded that management reimburse me for taxis instead of the car rental or I wouldn’t go lol.

Boston. IYKYK.

That’s supposedly part of the justification for the quota, but it hasn’t been shown or proven those top 3% or whatever are engaging in any malicious behavior. And it brings me back to "why not just investigate that 3% and deal with them individually? Or make reporting/tools to examine the behavior of those “problematic” 3% of users?

I’ve been outside working in the heat, so the best comparison I can come up with at the moment is how ISPs use the top 3% of power users to justify data caps for everyone.

*3% used as a “low percentage of users” since I don’t remember the exact numbers from the explanation post about this.

Honestly, my opinion is that any vote quota that applies universally is unreasonable and development effort would be better spent identifying the small percentage of accounts that may be abusing the system / manipulating votes and applying a quota to those accounts specifically or making it easier to deal with those identified accounts in some other way.

Like, looking at the modlog, you’ll often see bans with “vote manipulation” as the reason, so that seems to be working fine for everyone else. Maybe put development effort into making those easier to identify rather than arbitrarily limiting everyone who interacts with your instance.

And I’m not convinced that the underlying reason(s) for having the quotas holds water, so if I have a bias here, that would be it.

I genuinely hope that there is no, has been no, and will be no directed personal attacks toward the Piefed devs over this because nobody deserves that kind of crap (especially when they’re building something you use for free), but I completely understand the backlash against this particular anti-feature.

I’m not even on Piefed, but apparently I do have a horse in this race after all. Assuming I’m both reading the code correctly and that this code also handles incoming-federated votes, then my votes to piefed.social are also silently quota’d.

So, if I step away for a few days and come back and catch up in bulk (as I’m wont to do), then assuming the quota of 240 votes per day, only 240 posts and or comments originating from piefed.social are allowed to please me that day. Anything beyond that will seem like it upvoted on my end but will apparently be discarded and the OP will never see them.

If I’m interpreting that wrong, please correct me.

So apparently now I have to play resource management and track how many things on Piefed I upvote lest something I really want the OP to get credit for go silently ignored.

Yeah, please accept my downvote. If I wanted political “humor” I would unblock one of the many, many, many political meme communities this could have been posted in.