I don’t have experience with rust on cars since I live in California and the main conditions where cars rust (high humidity, snow / salt on roads) aren’t a thing here.

I’ve got a 13 year old Mazda 3 that doesn’t have any issues though. No rust, and no major repairs needed so far. I’m getting rid of it soon (replaced it with a BMW iX) but it’s served me well for a long time!

In addition to Toyota Corollas and Honda Civics like others have mentioned, look for Mazdas as well. The Mazda 3 is a great car.

Due to how expensive electricity is in California, a lot of people have solar, so savings are likely higher than illustrated here. I’m charging my EV using excess solar power I wasn’t using, so it’s effectively $0.

Most modern Linux distros do use secure boot and TPM, but you’re right that they’re optional.

Wow, a post from 2001 that’s still online today. You don’t see that often any more!

Encryption would prevent it - that’s what I meant :)

I think the trick is to convince someone to send that string, so the modem sees it coming from the computer. Similar to tricking someone into pressing Alt+F4, or Ctrl+Alt+Del twice on Windows 9x (instantly reboots without prompting).

“I’m having fish tonight!”

XFree86 was such a tacky name

+++ath0 is a command that tells a dial up modem to disconnect. I’ve never seen it used in IRC this way, but my guess is that the modem would see this coming from the computer and disconnect.

This was back in the days when everything was unencrypted.

A part of this was that they wanted people to drive far so they’d have to replace their tires more often.

Standard riser cable is fine if the cable won’t be exposed to sun (UV) or water. If any of the cable run is exposed to the sun then I’d use outdoor (CMX) rated cable like this: https://a.co/d/gOOUBGW

Cat6 is fine for home use - you really don’t need Cat6A. Cat6 can do 10Gbps up to 55 meters (180 feet) and it’s very rare for residential use cases to require cables longer than that.

When you terminate the cables inside, use keystones. If you have a lot of cables that go to one place, use a patch panel with keystones. Also make sure that the cable is pure copper, not CCA (copper clad aluminium).

A few basic steps can keep Arch just as stable as anything else.

“stable” in this case means “doesn’t change often”. Is that actually doable with Arch?

Debian testing is usually good enough. Packages have to be in unstable for ~10 days with no major bugs to migrate to testing. Of course, you can run unstable if you really want to live on the edge.

If you do run testing, you’ll want to install security updates from unstable, since testing isn’t officially supported by the security team. https://github.com/khimaros/debian-hybrid

Building houses that are properly insulated would help far more since people wouldn’t have to use heating and cooling as often, yet that doesn’t seem to be a thing that builders are actually doing. I’m an Aussie living in California in a house built in the 1960s, and it’s better insulated than an Aussie house built in the 2010s.

In any case, updating food packaging to include an environmental score isn’t a bad idea. Hopefully it’d work out better than the health score, which is still entirely voluntary and doesn’t always make sense.

business class data plan that actually allows hosting

You can get a VPS for $30/year with 4GB RAM, 25-35 GB SSD. Still good enough to host some things! Self hosting doesn’t mean it has to be at your house. In some cases, using a VPS ends up cheaper than just the electricity cost for hosting at home, let alone hardware costs, internet costs, etc.

Spam protection is hard given SMTP was never designed with it in mind.

I also self-host my email, but I use an outbound SMTP relay to avoid having to deal with all that stuff. My server sends outbound emails to a company that’s got that all figured out.

Maybe that’s not “true” self hosting, but it’s really no different to people that self-host but put Cloudflare in front of their server, apart from the direction (Cloudflare is for inbound traffic whereas SMTP relaying is for outbound traffic).

I think the most feasible solution is municipal internet, where the city owns its own fiber lines and essentially runs it like a non profit. Good cities that do this don’t see it as a profit center; they see it as providing a critical service to their residents. Some of the maintenance cost comes from taxes, just like roads, public schools, etc.

Palo Alto California is doing this. They’re modernizing their electricity grid, so they’re also running fiber at the same time as running the new electrical lines. Electricity in Palo Alto is run by the city, and as a result, electricity there is less than 1/3 of the price of electricity with PG&E, the investor-owned utility company that supplies most of Northern California.

More community run mesh networks

That’s kinda what settlement-free peering at an IX (internet exchange) is. Multiple networks agree to connect to each other for free. Of course, the networks are usually large ones, so that kinda goes against your other points.

I’ve been self hosting my email for a long time, but I use an outbound SMTP relay so I don’t have to deal with IP reputation. The more interesting part to self-host is the receiving part, not the sending part.

How does Docker reduce security?

Just some parts of it. https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds