Pretty much all of the partnered episodes are good. Year of Hell, Time’s End, Equinox, and Scorpion are all fantastic two-part episodes, and that’s just off the top of my head.

If you like that about Picard, you’ll probably hate Kirk. Kirk frequently wipes his ass with the Prime Directive. His relationship with Spock frequently boils down to some variation of the following:

Kirk: “I’m gonna break the rules cuz it makes my job easier.”
Spock: “No, please do not. That is against the rules.”
Kirk: Does it anyways.

I will say that the Kirk/Picard contrast is largely due to who they are paired with on the bridge. As individual characters, Kirk is a giant nerd while Picard is basically Indiana Jones. But their first mates make them seem like the complete opposites…

Kirk is a giant nerd. But he’s paired with the even-tempered and by-the-book Spock, and frequently goes on away missions… So Kirk seems super wild and impulsive in comparison, because Spock is constantly nagging him about the rules. Picard is a dude who goes hiking through alien jungles for fun. But he’s paired with the handsome and impulsive Riker, who tends to go on away missions in Picard’s stead… So Picard looks super calm in comparison. But if you put the two captains together without their first mates, Picard would 100% be the wild one. The only real outlier is that Kirk can’t seem to keep it in his pants, (often during his away missions), while Picard tends to be picky about who he beds.

I actually tended to dislike the holodeck episodes, because it always seemed to boil down to some variation of “the holodeck is {malfunction} and the ship will {bad thing} because {technobabble}, unless we go in and manually turn it off. But oh no, {malfunction} means the holodeck controls are disabled and the safeties are turned off!”

I know they were struggling for human plots in the deep of space, and the holodeck was usually their way to have humans surrounded by other humans in places that weren’t distinctly alien. But that meant a lot of the holodeck plots usually needed some sort of broader impetus to get the crew to engage with it. Because the stakes are low if the holodeck is working properly and the safeties are enabled; Whenever things get tense, the crew can just pause the simulation and exit the holodeck. So lots of the holodeck episodes ended up putting a proverbial gun to the crew’s heads with “shit’s broke, and it’ll do bad things to the ship if you just refuse to enter the deck. Now go pretend to be {period character} for the plot!”

So can a mini-M&Ms tube…

Restoring old business laptops will usually get you a better laptop than buying a budget new one that costs the same.

Retired business machines are also fantastic for “server in a bedroom closet” types of setups. When IT retires an entire department’s desktops, they’re forced to list them for sale, because the bean counters want to see that they got something back from them. IT doesn’t care how much they sell for, and are just listing them to get them out of the way. And since they’re listing like 50 of them at a time, the listings end up competing with each other to lower the price. No gamer is selling their two year old battle station unless they need the money, which means they’ll be looking to get top dollar for it… But the bored Help Desk 1 worker got assigned the task of selling them because nobody else wanted to do it, sees it as busywork, and knows they won’t personally see a single cent of the resale price. So they don’t care what the final price is.

The machines are usually very lightly used. Typically only used for running MS Office, answering emails, and browsing Facebook. This can be true even for the top-of-the-line laptops… Because the CEO will throw a fit if he notices his laptop is older or cheaper than the graphic artists’ laptops are… Even though the graphic artists need a dedicated GPU and lots of RAM for their CAD, video editing, etc… While the CEO only uses it to answer like three emails a week. So the C-suite tends to get upgrades to the newest model every year, even though they don’t need it. And last year’s model gets listed for sale.

Yeah, there really hasn’t been a good alternative for fabric. Lots of people were quick to jump on the “lol join the 21st century and just buy it online” side of the argument, but buying fabric is an extremely tactile experience. You need to feel it to know that it will have the correct texture, weight, see it will hang, which direction(s) it will stretch, how much it will stretch, how easy is is to stretch, etc for what you’re trying to make, because all of those qualities will heavily impact the end product. Those things are difficult to quantify, and nearly impossible to judge purely from photos on an online listing. Two fabrics that look identical online can have vastly different weights, stretch, textures, etc…

Yup. The reverse proxy takes http/https requests from the WAN, and forwards them to the appropriate services on your LAN. It will also do things like automatically maintain TLS certificates, so https requests can be validated. Lastly, it can usually do some basic authentication or group access stuff. This is useful to ensure that only valid users or devices are able to reach services that otherwise don’t support authentication.

So for example, let’s say you have a service called ExampServ running on 192.168.1.50:12345. This port is not forwarded, and the service is not externally available on the WAN without the reverse proxy.

Now you also have your reverse proxy service, listening on 192.168.1.50:80 and 192.168.1.50:443… Port 80 (standard for http requests) and 443 (standard for https requests) are forwarded to it from the WAN. Your reverse proxy is designed to take requests from your various subdomains, ensure they are valid, upgrade them from http to https (if they originated as http), and then forward them to your various services.

So maybe you create a subdomain of exampserv.example.com, with an A-NAME rule to forward to your WAN IPv4 address. So any requests for that subdomain will hit ports 80 (for http) or 443 (for https) on your WAN. These http and https requests will be forwarded to your reverse proxy, because those ports are forwarded. Your reverse proxy takes these requests. It validates them (by upgrading to https if it was originally an http request, verifying that the https request isn’t malformed, that it came from a valid subdomain, prompting the user to enter a username and password if that is configured, etc.)… After validating the request, it forwards the traffic to 192.168.1.50:12345 where your ExampServ service is running.

Now your ExampServ service is available internally via the IP address, and externally via the subdomain. And as far as the ExampServ service is concerned, all of the traffic is LAN, because it’s simply communicating with the reverse proxy that is on the same network. The service’s port is not forwarded directly (which is a security risk in and of itself), it is properly gated behind an authentication wall, and the reverse proxy is ensuring that all requests are valid https requests, with a proper TLS handshake. And (most importantly for your use case), you can have multiple services running on the same device, and each one simply uses a different subdomain in your DNS and reverse proxy rules.

I mean, hate crimes are very real. But you don’t typically get charged just for hate; the “hate crime” charge is a modifier to an existing crime. For instance, if you attack someone, it’s assault (or battery, depending on where you live). But if you have a history of posting about hating black people, you attacked a black person, and witnesses heard you drop the N-word while you were attacking them? Now it’s a hate crime, which is an upgraded form of the same assault charge, with steeper penalties if you’re found guilty.

Let’s say you’re in America, posting on Facebook about how much you hate black people. You wouldn’t have been charged with hate just for posting about hating black people, because that would violate your first amendment right to free speech. Maybe you’d be banned from the site, (if the company refuses to platform you and your speech), but that’s not protected by the first amendment; private companies aren’t required to give you a platform. The government isn’t censoring you in that scenario, so it’s not a violation of your first amendment right to free speech.

The “crime” part of the “hate crime” is the key factor. You wouldn’t be charged with a crime until you actually committed a crime, and hateful speech by itself (as long as it isn’t inciting others to violence), isn’t criminal. The “inciting violence” part is the difference between “I wish the POTUS would die” and “you should kill the POTUS”. The former is legal, while the latter is not. So posts about hating black people would be legal, but posts calling for attacking black people would be inciting violence.

And if you attack a black person, then that criminal charge could be upgraded to a hate crime charge, if the prosecutor believes they can prove that you committed the crime out of hate. And they can 100% use your previous “I hate all black people and wish they would die” Facebook posts against you, to build a case that you targeted the victim out of hate.

Phew, I’m sure the automod is going to have a field day with this comment…

Worth noting that dementia often affects fine motor control, like the ability to independently control your fingers. It usually becomes apparent when people lose the ability to dress themselves, (buttons, zippers, and buckles become hard or impossible), cook for or feed themselves, (chopping ingredients, using utensils, etc. becomes difficult), and write/type.

For real though, I’d be wearing that like a god damned badge of honor. I’d be making t-shirts that said “The President of the United States told me to f*ck off after I called him a pedo protector.” I’d get enamel pins made from the grainy footage of Trump throwing the bird, to wear on my gear. I’d have that photo printed as a vinyl sticker to keep on my water bottle. I’d be writing and/or drawing children’s books about how adults making you keep secrets from your parents is bad, and those adults should be reported. I’d be doing interviews and podcasts, where I can call him a pedo protector with the widest audience possible.

I hope that dude’s pillow is always cool, his socks are always dry, his teeth are always healthy, and his cock is sucked so hard (by a consenting adult!) that he gains an inch and a half.

You can play WoW on Linux, though there may be a few extra hoops to jump through when installing the BattleNet client. Hell, there was even a test case where someone got it running on their SteamDeck as a proof of concept.

It runs in Wine or Lutris, which acts as a compatibility layer. The compatibility layer doesn’t emulate Windows directly. It just translates the Windows-specific stuff into something that Linux can use, and vice-versa. That’s why lots of games can actually run better on Linux, because you’re running a Windows native program without fully emulating Windows. So you don’t have all of the Windows bloat that tends to bog down gaming PCs.

I was a freelancer for about a decade, and only ever walked off of one job site. It was because of safety concerns and one asshole. I was a stagehand, setting up lighting, decking, and audio gear for a musical in a local megachurch. I was in charge of a crew for this job, through a local labor company; Church hired the company to provide labor, who hired me as a subcontractor to make sure things went well, track workers’ time, etc… The load in was set to last three days, with them rehearsing in the evenings. Then they’d open that weekend.

I ended up attaching myself to the lighting crew for the first day, because decking and audio crews already had people who knew what they were doing. Plus if I’m in the catwalk, I can usually keep a pretty good eye on what is going on around the room. Some catwalks are easy to get to. They’re designed thoughtfully, with the expectation that crews will need to access them regularly. Other catwalks are… Not so easy. Maybe it was designed to be easy at one point, but then engineers added more structural beams, HVAC installers added air ducts, electricians added panels and conduit across doorways and walkways, architectural lighting got added in walkways, etc… Basically, the construction was a bunch of different crews, and none of them talked to each other to keep the catwalks accessible.

This church’s catwalk was unfortunately in the latter group. Getting to it involved a combination of a six-story-tall spiral staircase, army-crawling under an air duct, climbing over some electrical conduit, and squat-walking on a steel mesh grid to avoid some overhead beams. Needless to say, we made the trek up there once, and immediately decided that we weren’t going to be carrying our lights the same way we got up. Hell, lots of our lights wouldn’t even fit the same way we came up, due to the army-crawling section.

So we throw a rope down from the catwalk. Our lights are heavy, and it’s about a 7-story-tall lift to get from the audience to the catwalk. But many hands makes for light work, right? I ask who knows their knots, because we need someone on the ground to tie the lights onto the rope. One of the newbies (who I had never worked with before) raises his hand, so I send him down to act as ground support. His job is simple. We send the rope down from the catwalk, he ties the light to it, and then we haul the light up while he watches from the ground, making sure we don’t knock into anything or scratch the ceiling of the theater. Lather, rinse, repeat. This dude has the easiest job in the entire goddamned building, because all he has to do is tie a knot every few minutes, then watch the rest of us work.

So we send the rope down. A minute or so later, he calls back up that we’re good to lift. So we haul this light up. It’s heavy. It sucks. Many hands makes for light work, but we can only get a few hands on the rope due to the way we’re positioned in the catwalk. But we muscle this light up. One down, only 90 more to go.

But then as we set the light down on the catwalk, we realize that the “knot” we had lifted it with was basically just a bunch of loops with the tail pulled through. It fell apart as soon as the tension on the rope was released. Apparently our knot-tying ground support lied about being able to tie knots, and just went with the “if you can’t tie a knot, tie a lot” method. Except his “tie a lot” part wasn’t even safe, because he ended up just making a tension knot that completely fell apart as soon as the tension was gone. So I send someone else (who I have worked with before, and actually trust) down to the ground, and they send him back up.

All of this was simply to say that we were already a little bit on edge regarding this lighting install, because if that “knot” had come undone midway through our lift, we would have dropped a thousand dollar ~120lb light onto the audience seats, from about 90 feet in the air. So I want you to keep that part in mind when I bring up this next part…

After we get thirty or forty lights lifted, we’re feeling the strain. These lights are heavy, and my guys are smoked. The catwalk is hot (because hot air rises, this is in Texas in the summertime on a sunny day, and we’re basically pressed against the roof,) and we’ve all soaked through our shirts with sweat. For every light, once we get to the edge of the catwalk, we basically have to manhandle it up and over the railing to avoid scratching the decorative ceiling panels that are below us.

In the meantime, the church’s audio guy has shown up. He is sitting in the audience, chatting with another church employee. He apparently brought his son to work today. His son was like 5 or 6, and was suddenly running around in the audience, directly underneath us as we’re lifting these damned lights. Again, we’re already worried about dropping one of these lights. Even if we have the best knots in the world, accidents happen. I have seen clamps, handles, and hard points break off of lights before. I have seen ropes break. I have seen steel cables break. So there’s always some measure of “this could all go wrong and there’s nothing we can do but watch it fall” in the back of your mind with every single hoist. We already watched a knot fall apart that morning. And now there’s a fucking child playing underneath us.

So I call down, something along the lines of “Hey, can someone get that kid out of the way? We’re working up here!”

The sound guy almost immediately shouts back “how about you parent your kids, and let me parent mine!”

Like I said, my guys were already needing a break. We had already told ourselves that we were going to take a water break soon. As soon as that dude’s response had stopped reverberating around the (now dead silent) auditorium, I called out “Okay {company name}! Make it safe, then tools down! Take 20, then meet me on the dock!” Simultaneously, all ~40 crew members got the exact same glint in their eyes as they realized what was going on, finished whatever they were doing, then walked away for a smoke break.

In that 20 minutes, I called the company owner (who I play board games with nearly every week), and let him know what was going on. This was ~90 minutes into an 8 hour day. But notably, the crew had a 5 hour minimum. Meaning they’d get paid for at least 5 hours regardless of how long they worked. The intent is to ensure every job is worth the drive; without a minimum, nobody would take a 30 minute job if they had to drive 45 minutes to get there. And he said I could give the crew a choice. They can stay for the full 8 hours, or they can take the minimum and walk away right now. Next, I talked to the church’s main point of contact, to let them know what had happened, and what I was about to tell the crew. And when my crew came back after their break, I gave them all that choice. Every single person on the ~40 man crew took the minimum and walked away for the day.

The show’s load in was delayed by a day, and the church’s sound guy wasn’t present for the rest of the week’s load in and setup.

Yup. Either eliminating a competitor, or getting ahold of some obscure patent that they don’t want to be stuck leasing indefinitely. Or they want to be the ones to lease the patent for exorbitant amounts, and they’re willing to write off a short term loss for longer term profits.

It’s worth noting that illiteracy isn’t simply a pass/fail test that depends on if you can read individual words. Literacy is largely determined by critical thinking skills and the ability to intuit things that aren’t directly stated.

For a good example, a large part of higher literacy is based on being able to see a piece of work, (a news article, video, book, song, etc.), and identify who the intended target audience is. Usually, the answer is not “me”. But I mention this specific example because people have become accustomed to laser-focused algorithms that only show content that is directly relevant to themselves. TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, etc all have finely crafted algorithms that are designed to keep you engaged. And they do so by serving content that is directly aimed at you.

As algorithmic media feeds have become more common, people have literally lost the ability to identify when something is not meant for them. People used to see an irrelevant piece of media, and they would just go “oh it’s not for me” and move on. But now they tend to be surprised that they’re seeing the media, and they tend to get angry when something doesn’t directly confirm their lived experience. And they tend to take it out on the creators. We have literally seen content creators start changing the way they make their media, to avoid people getting angry when something isn’t directly relevant to themselves.

For instance, maybe I make a TikTok about the proper way to throw a football. Pretty basic stuff, right? Previously, if I left it at that, anyone who wasn’t interested in throwing a football would just move on. But now, I’d inevitably get angry comments about “but I’m in a wheelchair, what about me”, “why is this on my feed, I hate football”, “I have a torn rotator cuff, why are you excluding me” types of comments.

Now, content creators literally add disclaimers in their content, to directly state who the intended audience is. To go back to that same example, I’d probably have step 0 of the tutorial be something along the lines of “okay so this is obviously just for the people looking to check their throwing form. If you don’t like football, can’t throw a ball, or have some sort of disability that stops you from doing so, you can obviously move on.” Because if I don’t have that disclaimer somewhere near the start, I’ll inevitably get some angry comments. And those comments are being left by functionally illiterate people, who have lost (or never had) the ability to determine an intended audience.

Well yeah, that’s all it ever was. The lawsuit was because of misleading/deceptive statements made by Google, which led some (intentionally misinformed) users to believe that Incognito Mode was more private than reality.

Basically, the company knew some users believed Incognito Mode hid their browsing activity. Not just from their local machine (via no logged site history, clearing cookies, etc), but also by hiding it from prying eyes like Google. Some users genuinely believed Incognito Mode was basically some sort of combination of Tor, degoogling, VPN, tracker-blocker, etc… And Google actively encouraged this incorrect belief, because they could continue to siphon off users’ data when they thought they weren’t being watched. The active encouragement of incorrect beliefs is what the lawsuit was about, not the data collection.

It can be both server and DNS provider. For instance, Cloudflare allows you to set rules for what traffic is allowed. And you can set it to automatically drop traffic for everything except your specific subdomains. I also have mine set to ban a IP after 5 failed subdomain attempts. That alone will do a lot of heavy lifting, because it ensures your server is only getting hit with the requests that have already figured out a working subdomain.

Personally, I see a lot of hacking attempts aimed at my main www. subdomain, for Wordpress. Luckily, I don’t run Wordpress. But the bots are 100% out there, just casually scanning for Wordpress vulnerabilities.

+1 for dropped connections on invalid domains. Or hell, redirect them to something stupid like ooo.eeeee.ooo just so you can check your redirect logs and see what kind of BS the bots are up to.

Modern society is designed from the ground up to favor the high-functioning sociopaths who only care about themselves but blend in well enough to seek powerful positions. Because those people are the ones who will strive to get those positions of power, while also simultaneously being willing to step on others to accomplish it. An old saying went along the lines of “anyone who would actually be elected president should be barred from the office.” But this also goes for smaller spheres of influence too. CEOs, church leaders, etc… It’s possible for a good person to get that position, but it’s more likely that they’ll be shoved out of the way by someone with fewer principles.

The single largest determining factor for your future earning potential is which ZIP code you were born in. We can predict, with an extremely high degree of accuracy, how much a child will make when they grow up… Simply by looking at where they were born and raised. Because wealthy parents raise wealthy children. Your parents’ income is a glass ceiling that eclipses all others.

Yup. Landed here during the APIcolypse and haven’t looked back. The only time I visit Reddit now is when I have obscure tech issues, and the only search results are people asking about it on Reddit.

It’s actually “TL;DR rich people bad” but sure, pop off I guess.