WxFisch

Another plus one for Proton with your own domain.

Self hosting sounds good, but it’s fraught with mines that if you don’t know what you’re doing can take from “can’t send email because my domains been back listed” to “everything in my network is now sending spam to the entire world”. Sure, many folks self hosting sounds with no issues, but the price for configuring something wrong can be steep and IMO is just not worth the trouble and risks when there are good options for encrypted, privacy protecting email services for a reasonable price.

This guy s 100% accurate. When I was a contractor for the NWS in the mid 2010s they were working aggressively to get their HQ staff setup to telework at least some of the time to save on office leases. They built out a large fix work space in their silver spring building and when it went live they were able to vacate an entire floor, saving something like a million dollars in month in lease, utilities, etc costs.

This mindset of return to office to force attrition also seems less likely to work for federal employees that often need to work in the office at least part time anyways, and often have very strong union protections that will cost a ton for the government to fight through.

On top of that, the costs to return employees to offices will be astronomical both in fitting out those office spaces again and in terms of supporting infrastructure like transit costs. A lot of those additional costs get borne by state governments and often passed on to the federal government through grants and chargebacks for various services.

Our local police are really good, we call them a couple times a year for accidents in our front yard (we live in a fairly busy road where a 35 mph speed limit means read your phone while doing 50…). They are always really professional and helpful to both the drivers and us. It helps that our borough has I think 8 officers total.

I have also called when a driver got mad at me for turning towards our old apartment while he tried to pass us which caused him to spin in the middle of an intersection somehow. He then followed us to our building, and started beating on my window and cussing me out while I was on the phone with 911. Drove off before the cop showed up but I got a blurry picture of his plate as he drove away. Showed the cop who read it no problem, found out it was the guys wife’s car. Asked if we wanted to press assault charges (we didn’t, just asked him to go talk with the guys wife, figure that would be punishment enough when he got home from the bar he was at). Cop called me later that evening to check on us and let us know the guys wife was livid when the cop stopped by to chat with her.

Overall, our local police in the various boroughs around Pittsburgh have been pretty great, can’t say the same for the ones downtown though.

In this case it seems to be abandoned mine subsidence which at least in SWPA (where this happened, outside of Latrobe in Westmoreland county) is a huge issue. We had to do a search when we bought our house to see if there were known abandoned mines on our property which would have required we bought subsidence Insurance from DEP.

I’ll second most of the recommendations here:

Socket set in SAE and Metric Wrenches in the same A set of screw drivers (Phillips and Flathead, you want at least a standard length, long, and stubby in probably three tip sizes) An Allen key set

Honestly, Home Depot has a 120pc husky mechanics set on sale for $100 for the holidays I recommend if you have nothing. It covers all of the basics, the quality is decent enough, and it’s cheaper than putting it together piecemeal even at harbor freight.

You’ll want a jack and stands as well, and if you plan to do oil changes probably ramps too (plus an oil drain pain and a storage container to store the used oil to take it back to the store for recycling).

For cars that will get you 95% of the way through most jobs. From there I recommend filling out additional tools as jobs require them.

For home improvement, add a hammer, some pliers (I’d get one of the triple sets that go on sale various places all the time).

For power tools I suggest you pick an ecosystem and stay in it. Milwaukee, Rigid, and Ryobi are all made by TTS and perform pretty similar for home users. I invested in Milwaukee but would easily recommend rigid as a solid middle brand with decent price to performance. Dewalt has a great reputation as well, with a large selection and sometimes the price to match. I also know plenty of folks that are happy with the Hercules battery tools from HF. I would stay away from craftsman/black & decker, and other budget brands from big box stores, if that’s your price range then just go with the similar priced HF tool. I suggest a drill and driver to start, then fill out tools as you need them for projects. I use my oscillating multi tools a tons as a good fit most great at none tool for cutting. A lot will depend on what work you need to do around your house (which you won’t really know until you buy a house).

I subscribe to Adam Savages methodology of buying cheap hand tools and replacing them with quality ones when they break (since that’s the sign you need a good version of it). I’ve found I still have a ton of cheap tools that work just fine.

Lastly, shop around. Don’t assume the Harbor Freight will be the best deal (they have the reputation of cheap stuff, but as their quality has started going up so have their prices). Look for sales and deals, and for sure shop the clearance aisles at the orange and blue stores. I also shop estate sales and moving sales where folks are looking to offload an entire garage worth of tools quick.

Edit to add: safety equipment is the one area I never compromise. Good eye and hearing protection is invaluable (you only have one set of eyes and ears, and both are fragile). I keep safety glasses in the basement and garage near all my power tools and mechanics toolbox so they are always close by. I also keep n95 masks for working in dusty areas like the attic. I hate gloves but keep a couple pairs for mechanic and outdoor work mostly. Glasses and ear plugs/muffs/active buds (isotunes, AirPods Pro, etc.) should be the first two things you get.

Maybe it’s just a thing around here but almost every tire shop will pull and correctly patch a tire for free if you drive up and they aren’t super busy. The patch kits like you show are iffy IMO. They can last a while but I’d still err on getting it done right at a shop (from the inside of the tire, and ensuring the puncture didn’t expose any steel bands that will then rust and break).

I’d also say you don’t really need the thread depth gauge, modern tires all have tread wear markers molded into them, and in a pinch you can use a penny (the top of Lincoln’s head when inserted upside down is about the limit for tread wear on most tires).

So we did exactly this when we dropped our Prime membership a few years ago as part of working against Amazon building a massive warehouse in our fully residential borough (we won if anyone was wondering, they chose not to continue fighting it in court). We shop mostly in store at Target and other brick and mortar stores. We will also shop online still, but almost always directly from the manufacturer. This usually means paying shipping, but I figure our UPS driver and mail person need a paycheck too so we are fine with that. We will occasionally use Amazon for things that are just hard to find elsewhere but only order once our cart is in the free shipping price range. It turns out, Amazon is not only a shit company the uses dark patterns to push a mostly superfluous subscription, most things we buy are cheaper elsewhere. Combined with not buying nearly as much random crap, we have saved a butt load since quitting Amazon.

Our cat will put us to bed. When we turn the light off she will lay on my hip for 5-15 minutes then once she’s convinced I’m asleep (I’m not) she will hop off the bed and go do cat things (she tells us it’s catslified and we can’t know she does these cat things). She sometimes will lay on my wife for 30 seconds, maybe a minute but always lays on me. She’ll pace around too until I lay on my side so she can put me to bed.

In the winter she’ll come back and snuggle up with one of us because she likes the warmth and we keep it cooler at night. In the summer she’ll lays a bit further away near one of us (usually pinning the blanket down so I can’t get up). She is truly a creature of habit.

The creativity is in how the photo was shot; the camera settings, framing, when the photographer chose to take the photo, etc. To say that anyone could have taken this exact photo is both incorrect and doesn’t matter. Anyone could have written any book, play, or script but they didn’t. Anyone could have painted pretty much any particular painting, but they didn’t. I don’t disagree that many aspects of US copyright law are ridiculous, but to say there’s no artistic vision in taking a photograph like this is ignorant.

No, because no one intends to hit a pedestrian with the car they are buying. That’s why we need to mandate safer vehicles, not trust people to factor that in as they look for a car.

The article title is misleading, but the research is interesting. Essentially it’s saying that when the rocket self-destructed due to it performing off nominal (as the first test ever of this vehicle) it ionized a large swath of the ionosphere from Mexico to the SE US which can impact the accuracy of GPS for systems that require high precision. The ionosphere reionizes very quickly naturally though so the effects are short lived (hours to maybe a day) and the impact to navigation at least should be small because of how GNSS works with built in corrections for exactly these types of errors. It feels like Nature is stretching a bit with the doom and gloom headline that the authors don’t even point to in the article (though I have not read the paper to be fair).

Link doesn’t work with ad blockers, archive.is link here: https://archive.is/TcDlm

Surely not Maslow or MB, both have so many exception’s and so little real science behind them they just aren’t really useful things for the majority of people.

Trees and scratchers are a must, cats usually scratch furniture because there isn’t something else nearby to use. Trees give them a place to climb and feel safe up away from things. You should also have places for them to hide (boxes, piles of blankets, a bed in a quiet room, etc). As for toys, it really depends on the cat. Ours is super picky and only likes specific rattle balls from Amazon, small rattle mice, and some kickers (there are few others but they are all small and easy for her to cray around). But for every one toy we found she likes we have half a dozen she won’t touch. You’ll likely need to try a bunch to find what yours will enjoy.

Please keep in mind that you need to seal that print before you use it with food. Because of the layers, there’s are a ton of places for dirt and bacteria to hide that are impossible to clean. Additionally, depending on what kind of nozzle you used, heavy metals can end up in your print which you don’t want to then leech into your coffee. General advice is to just not use 3d prints first good, but if you really want to you should coat them in a food safe epoxy before using.

Ours is also Rosie, it just seemed so obvious

I would recommend prowlarr instead of jackett for indexer management, and pihole as at least an additional blocking service but in reality it’s really all you need for use at home. I’d also strongly encourage use of a VPN on your *arr download services. I use a separate box to run Plex and then have my *arrs all running on their own VM inside if it to provide separation and allow be to more easily segregate the network traffic (as someone that doesn’t really know docker that well it “just works” for me. Also probably worth looking at how to store your media on an external target, it’s easy to quickly accumulate 10s of TBs of media and trying to store that all on the server locally is asking for trouble. Better to set everything up on a NAS to start.

Asking broadly like this is akin to asking for a guide on how to cook, it’s generally too broad for there to be a single guide. You first need to figure out what your goals are (you state one already, you’d like it to be externally accessible), determine what services you want to host, and then start looking at how to do so.

The advice I’d give is to start with a solid base, you’ll need something to self host on and it really shouldn’t be the PC you use for other things. Get it setup to run a virtualization OS such as proxmox and use that as your starting point. Then do a lot of reading. I spend probably three to four times as much time reading about the service I’m planning to deploy compared to actually doing the work to deploy it. Lastly, plan. You should have a solid plan in the beginning of how you want your service to work (what will be external vice internal only, how will you setup the networking stack to do that, are you going to have a domain, and will you use subdomains or folders to divide services, what does your IP space look like, will you host your own firewall to make the networking more controlled or fight with your ISPs router, do you want to use docker, kubernetes, or maybe full VMs for each service, do you want/need a UI to manage things from or are you comfortable with CLI, etc). These answers will lead you to guides for various services as well as service specific forums where help is more focused.