Part of the free-market attitude though is that you should be allowed to buy policy, so in that regard it’s consistent, you just have to account for corruption in the cost of doing business.

I don’t want to speculate as to the fate of the baby, the corrugated sheet metal had to be moved and it was only a few minutes after I had removed it that we heard the squeaking. Nature is gonna nature, either the squirrel will survive, or a predator will get an easy meal. The thing is, within the family, we will probably ask “is that the squirrel all grown up?” every time we see a squirrel up there for the next few years. I think that’s the best outcome we can hope for.

El Dorado county in California, just north of Placerville, on a hill above the banks of the South fork of the American River.

It had a long worm-like tail. If it was smaller I would have thought mouse, but the leading theories are squirrel or mole.

If people are ok with that then I guess it will stand, but it’s insane and anti-consumer in my book. A product costs what it costs, based on supply and demand, and if you can’t afford it you don’t buy it. This flimsy premise of “It lowers the bar to entry so users can upgrade later without having to replace!” will never come to fruition, and it’s too slippery of a slope to “put in a quarter to turn on your A/C”.

That is insane. If it costs the same to make, then lower range isn’t a reasonable area to pitch a lower cost vehicle. Wanting to lower the cost is fine. Putting in cheaper/smaller components to get there is fine. If you are using the same components and just software locking them to nickle and dime the users later, that’s anti-consumer and should not be tolerated. I can’t believe how people look at micro-transactions in games and think “wouldn’t this be cool with IRL stuff?”

Universities have huge endowments and investment portfolios. These are generally broad and in support of keeping the financial backing of the school stable; this is extremely prevalent in the large older universities like Harvard or Columbia (but almost all universities have one in some form or another). They support both students and ongoing academic research.

While many of these portfolios consist of wider funds, many have specific investments in specific companies and industries. That means that the university is invested in, and taking benefit from, areas of industry. The main request is to divest the investment portfolios from companies owned by or supporting entities connected with Israel’s war on Gaza. In some cases this may be possible (move a ton of stock from a defense contractor making weapons sold to Israel to an energy company) and in some cases it may not (they’re invested in a wide market fund that itself invests in specific funds, but you can’t easily cherry-pick which stocks are actually in it). It’s also possible that there are research grants funded through companies who the students want to apply negative pressure to; cancelling a grant sends a message to the company, but also leaves entire teams and time-dependent science without funding, potentially ending it outright unless alternate funding can be found. There also may be contracts involved for specific research and engagements, and breaking a contract is more complicated than just ripping it up (especially if there are early termination policies outlined).

Realistically, the best students can hope for is a commitment to investigate and divest where possible, which is frustrating but also makes sense. I’ve worked in higher education for 20 years and have seen this on a smaller scale around defense contractors during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The endowment is a slow moving leviathan, but I think it’s a good place for the students to apply pressure.

Well, and Rogue One

Big picture, I really think Star Wars animation is peaking. The wide cinematic shots of ships crossing in front of the camera have really captured OT vibes. I think this was a good closure to this story, while leaving a lot of space for spinoff stories. Echo, as the focus of an anthology series about different rebel groups, could be great (I’m thinking “Tales of the Rebels”). I think Rex is getting over-saturated and I’m ok with just knowing he was off doing things.

Potential opportunities for spinoffs/appearances:

• Omega developing more force sensitivity and using it to “train” some of the kids they rescued. Not so far as Jedi, but closer to Chirrut. If it focused on connecting with animals, that’d be great too.
• Echo doing quests with pockets of the rebellion.
• The bad batch popping up as side characters in missions with a focus on them working with old clones and helping them have a life after being a soldier.
• Ventress. She has to have some sort of light/dark vigilante role.

My setup is a bit extreme, but here are my guardrails:

1. All users have the same UID’s on every system. I’m 1000, wife is 1001, son is 1002, daughter is 1003. All these exist on all systems. Our primary group is “family” (gid 10000). Our files are all owned by user:family. This matters because we let them have access to the share of things like home movies and pictures, and I have a TrueNAS with an NFS mount that their user folders rsync to nightly for backup. If you wanna get crazy, you can put in a whole LDAP/freeIPA setup, but that’s a lot (and I did all that as a learning experience).
2. They don’t have the account passwords. I have their password, and if they want to use it, the wife or I have to type the password. When we want them off, superkey+L to lock the computer, and if they reboot it comes to a login screen.
3. If you really go this route, and go the whole LDAP thing, you can also tie that into apps like Jellyfin. I have a huge library of movies and shows, but there’s a folder called “KidMedia” and I literally manually symlink things to that folder if I want them to have access. I set up the phones/tablet with their own jellyfin accounts, and when they log in they only see their media. I also NFS mount that share, so for the same reason, they can watch stuff on VLC from the computer with access control. We also do that with nextcloud, so we can use nextcloud talk to chat internally. The tablets/phones have built in android controls, so the idea is once they’re on their device, they’re free within the ecosystem I set up and they don’t enter credentials other than device unlock.

I built my kids potato computers from the time they were 3-5, which was during covid. They need computer skills nowadays, and it put them at an advantage for covid school. We got them on java Minecraft which was huge for reading, typing, and some basic math skills (they figured out multiplication for crafting things like doors). I made a chart which had icons of things they want, with the word next to it, so they could search and type in creative.

We used Ubuntu Mate. It’s simple, stable, and familiar. They do NOT have sudo on these boxes. As we’ve advanced, they now have firefox (behind a pihole which upstreams to opendns’ family protect), gimp (with a wacom tablet!), inkscape, calculators, tenacity, libre office, and they’re starting to get into some cad to make things to 3d print. You have to come to terms with doing a LOT of patient hand holding, but it has paid off dividends.

Yes, but it’s not an option yet. We’re heavily invested in veeam and are not looking to replace that piece yet.

Does that need to be true though? For like true “counting in how many 9’s” HA of course. But there’s nothing technically preventing high availability in 2 nodes; if the storage is shared and there’s a process to keep the memory in sync it should be possible with 2 nodes have some degree of high availability, even if it’s with big warnings.

Those are all fair, also the entire open-vswitch setup is very clunky. I always avoid the UI and just edit /etc/network/interfaces directly, especially for vlan networks. I dislike that it wants 3 nodes but I understand, still 2 nodes in the homelab is pretty reasonable. I wish in general the HA was more configurable, robust, and intuitive.

Yes, we are a medical/dental/pharmacy university and because of some of the specific data needs of our org we have a large on-prem ecosystem. We are currently a VMWare shop, but Broadcom’s business strategies have made us look for alternatives. I’ve used Proxmox in the homelab for years and have been feeling as its gotten more and more polished it’s ready to be considered for production work. Currently we have a lab environment of previous gen hardware which I want to use as a test-bed for possible production platform moves.

Proxmox isn’t VMware yet, but it’s close. The HA doesn’t work the same, I’ve struggled with something akin to DRS. If you use on-host storage, you have to constantly do replication work to keep them synced and even then a failover is essentially a storage rollback to the last sync. If you use iscsi storage, you have to be very careful. Snapshotting is only functional when backed by a few of the storage types, and we use ZFS. ZFS over isci is somewhat brittle, but we have a TrueNAS device which supports it here. We use Veeam as our enterprise backup solution, and I have no idea how these will work together. Veeam talks directly to our Nimble storage, does storage-based snapshots, and replicates them to our other site. Veeam theoretically does talk to TrueNAS, but without supporting Proxmox I don’t know what the backup/recovery flow would look like. Veeam is looking into this: https://community.veeam.com/discussion-boards-66/veeam-researching-support-for-vmware-alternative-proxmox-as-backup-buyers-fret-about-broadcom-6530 We tried to use TrueNas ZFS snapshots for just general VM semi-backup, but unless you want to rollback your whole dataset, it doesn’t work well. You have to make separate snapshot tasks for the specific zvol/dataset, otherwise you’re rolling your whole dataset back. Also, I tried mounting a snapshot, hoping to then share it as an iSCSI extent and remount it to a VM and pull out a specific file…this didn’t work at all, I can’t get the UI to show the promoted clone so I can try to present it to the host.

When coming back from a power-off, if your Proxmox hosts are in a cluster, there’s no cluster-aware startup order (HA disables the entire startup delay system). That’s not great, our apps have SQL dependencies which need to be started first.

That’s the issues, and it sounds negative, but ultimately for a zero-cost hypervisor that’s under active development those issues need to be viewed through the lens of the overwhelming achievement that the project is and continues to be.

We’re converting our workplace lab to Proxmox and it’s a great ramp for eventually leaving vmware. Great system.

Cable has to come back and fix this, there’s no way he just popped in for a cameo.

To be clear, this is a subset of the lunchables brand specifically manufactured and sent to schools for lunches, which has a higher sodium content than the retail variety you can buy. They don’t want to ban all lunchables

Huge bummer that they’re all 5+ years old. We’ve been moving to libreelec with Disney+, Jellycon, Netflix, Youtube, and amazon prime plugins. It’s not the same, but it’s workable. If Amazon keeps MatterCast open and open source implementations get made, that’s where I’m focusing my attention. A raspberry pi with libreelec that can be a casting target feels, to me, like the holy grail:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/9/24030324/amazon-matter-casting-echo-show-fire-tv-prime-video

No joke can you share those results? I’m holding out for matter cast