You're competing with bots, trolls, mentally ill people, and an algorithm that promotes them all. Why bother?

But when you do use them to talk to other hams, all you talk about is ham radio 🤣

Nice. I just imaged a hard drive I pulled from a laptop I decommissioned over 10 years ago. Imported it into a #proxmox VM as a ZFS volume, and it booted up just as if it didn't know it was in the matrix.

Feels like magic, but I'm just catching up to the present.

You fresh and shiny young pups are going to laugh at this old dude, but when I first came to Silicon Valley in the early 90s to work at a networking company, the most common desktop NIC was 10Mbs twisted-pair Ethernet, and 100Mbps was the hot stuff to upgrade to.

Now, 30+ years later, I'm sitting here upgrading my lab to 10Gbs everything, and wondering if it will be fast enough.

I live in the city but close enough to the edge that only a few miles bike ride takes me to some really nice trail systems.

Pro tip: When the comet arrives, be the mammal, not the dinosaur.

So true. The many benefits of self-taught and life-long learning are hard to overestimate. I'm in my 50s and still spend a significant portion each day tackling new developments in my own academic field, or keeping pace with general technical knowledge in areas that are important to me.

The biggest downside to self-learning is sometimes you don't know what you don't know until you interact with an expert, so it is important to do so regularly.

Trying *real* hard to be this guy right now...

Yeah, my local police implemented their 10 most wanted list as a...Instagram page. 🤦‍♂️

GM ☕

Hmm, yeah, hadn't considered that.

This was a huge disappointment at the time and in my mind called into question the technical judgement used in the rest of the product. Seems like nothing has come of it and tbh I had forgotten all about it.

Yeah, you're not the first to say that. I'll get around to it someday.

Yes, mostly. You get some challenges with booting, however. Some machines allow you to interrupt boot up and select an alternative boot drive, while others (particularly Windows-based) want to own the machine and make it more difficult to do so. I don't have a great deal of experience with Windows and it might have gotten easier in more recent versions to do this.

Regarding portability, Linux distributions handle changing the hardware out from underneath them pretty well, but things like hardware device names etc. changing might disrupt some configurations.

Absent more complex solutions like virtualization, dual-booting is typically the easiest and best option. Then one day you stop booting into Windows are are free 😏

I have a great deal of experience with this, and I'd highly recommend against it.

First of all, the endurance of USB drivers is very poor; most retail flash drives are designed for light weight storage of files with occasional updates and accesses, not the continuous hammering a drive gets during live OS operation. It's quite easy with continuous live OS operation to "burn out" a flash drive.

Secondly, typical OS configurations write to log files and update packages, etc., so the persistence space tends to fill up faster than one might expect.

Both of these are less of an issue with external hard drives connected over USB, either spinny disks or SSDs. But at that point you can do a full OS install onto the external disk and boot from that rather than using a live distribution. I've done this and it works well, though the USB speed becomes a big limitation.

There are other solutions that involve more work such as virtualization (running either linux as a VM on Windows, the reverse, or full virtual environments like #proxmox), but require more technical knowledge and administration.

I find Mastodon very useful to follow "normie" academic content in my professional field (machine learning, wireless communications), while Nostr is a unique and refreshing throwback to the ethos of the early days of Bitcoin. Vastly different communities...

"You don't play music to get to the end."

Pro tip: Find a woman who was born on Valentines day and marry her on her birthday.

A gang is an unpopular government and a government is a popular gang.

But both claim dominion over you.