Become a network admin and you can stare at blinking lights instead, making sure they don’t stop blinking.

In California the property tax can only increase a maximum of 2% per year, so at least there’s that. (this law was put in place so that older people don’t get priced out of their house due to house values going up a lot)

there was about 22% inflation

I’m not disagreeing with you, but I just wanted to note that inflation numbers (more specifically, the CPI) is an average across multiple industries - supermarkets, rent/mortgage, furniture, cars, flights, health care, and several more. It’s possible for inflation to affect some industries much more than others and I wouldn’t expect everything to all go up at the same rate.

In California at least, houses made with a wooden frame are usually on top of concrete (either a concrete slab under the whole house, or a concrete perimeter under the exterior walls), and the frame is bolted into the concrete along the entire perimeter.

Older homes often aren’t bolted into the concrete, but it’s common to retrofit this to improve earthquake resistance. Without the bolting, the house can move around during an earthquake. The government here has a program (Earthquake Brace and Bolt) where they cover part of the cost of doing this work.

Masonry (houses made of bricks, stone, etc) are much less common here, since they perform much worse in earthquakes.

The transition to contactless (where you tap your card or phone instead of inserting the card) took so long in the USA though. It only really became popular during COVID and with Apple Pay. Home Depot finally enabled contactless payments recently. In Australia, we were using contactless payment 15 years ago!

US banking is behind in a few other ways too. Apps like Venmo and Zelle just don’t exist in some other countries since you can easily do an instant transfer through your bank to anyone else for free. Some US banks still use SMS for two factor auth, which is insecure.

I like the SwitchBot Lock because it sits over the existing thumbturn rather than completely replacing the lock. It still looks like a normal lock from outside, unless you get a keypad of course. I got one with a keypad so my dog sitter can come check on my dog and take her out while I’m at work.

It’s not internet enabled by default. You can buy a wifi gateway from SwitchBot, but instead I have mine connected to Home Assistant using Bluetooth via a Bluetooth proxy.

The whole point of Lemmy and the Fediverse as a whole is to decentralize, so everyone routing through a single service (Cloudflare) seems to go against that.

Maybe it’s for asking questions, like “420?”

If you can find it :) DDR2 is old enough that a lot of it has been thrown out as e-waste. If you’re lucky, you may be able to find some at a computer/electronics recycler for free.

I have a separate home server, so I don’t have a reason to not shut down my desktop PC. No reason for it to be using electricity while it’s doing nothing.

I shut down my laptop because suspend/sleep support on Linux still isn’t great.

Oh that’s a good point. I totally forgot that Discord has voice features. don’t use Discord often, and when I do, it’s just for text chat. Unfortunately some open source apps I use use Discord for communicating with the developers.

I switched back to Linux on the desktop earlier in the year. I hadn’t used it on a desktop/laptop since 2008 so I was pleasantly surprised how much better things are these days (except suspending a laptop which seems to still be kinda broken). I’m glad we don’t have to deal with AMD proprietary drivers (fglrx) any more.

Something that wasn’t immediately obvious to me, coming from the BIOS era, was that if you want to install multiple Linux distros, you just need a single EFI partition and they can all use it.

I also share my /home partition between Debian testing and Fedora, but that might be risky. I’m planning to remove Debian soon anyways. I love it on servers (and have used it for over 20 years for that purpose) and it’s what I was trying out initially, but on a desktop, Fedora has newer packages and a better out of the box experience. I’m also forced to use Fedora at work (I can choose Windows 11, MacOS, or Fedora) so I may as well use it on my personal computers too.

In theory, compatibility on Fedora-based distros may be slightly better since they have newer Linux kernels, meaning all the drivers are newer and you get bug fixes sooner. On the other hand, you also get all the new bugs sooner :)

Not sure about Ubuntu, but the AMD GPU firmware that ships with Debian can become very outdated, and you need to manually download newer firmware to get the bug fixes. Until July 2024, the version of AMD firmware in Debian (even in testing and unstable) was over a year old, from June 2023.

You absolutely need swap on a low RAM system. It’s the only way the system will actually be usable. You’ll hit OOMs (out of memory errors) that take down the whole GUI if you turn off swap on a system with only 2GB RAM. You can only really turn off swap if you have a very large amount of RAM, and even then, it’s safer to keep it enabled and set swappiness to 0 instead.

you can disable swap.

Be careful with disabling swap if you don’t have a very large amount of RAM, as many apps rely on memory overcommitment and a large virtual address space, which can behave erratically without swap.

You’d be better off keeping swap enabled and instead setting vm.swappiness = 0 in sysctl.conf.

Swappiness is a value between 0 and 100, where 0 means to never swap unless absolutely necessary (only if you completely run out of RAM), and 100 means all programs and data will be swapped nearly instantly. Think of it like a target for the percentage of RAM to keep available. The default is usually 40 which is fine for a low-RAM system, but swaps way too often for a system with more RAM.

I had around 1500 open tabs in Firefox. It was fine. I figured enough was enough and closed them all. Now I close all tabs at the end of the day before shutting down.

What’s the benefit of running Discord’s app instead of just using it as a PWA? A PWA would reuse your existing browser and its session.

I left a bowl of candy out once, and some teen boys took the whole bowl.

uBlock Origin, not uBlock. They’re different - uBlock Origin forked from the original uBlock.

Wow I haven’t seen this in a long time.