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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • USB OTG on android phones is severely underrated.

    • I can plug in a USB drive and transfer files around, I’ve used this to manage my retro handheld SD cards before.
    • You can tether your hotspot over Ethernet to your computer with an Ethernet adapter.
    • You can plug Ethernet into your phone to get faster connections.
    • You can plug a mouse into your phone and get a cursor on screen. Not super useful tbh, but kinda cool.
    • You can use your phone as an external webcam for your computer.
    • It’s a bit more annoying than it used to be but you can use your phone as a universal IR remote with a small adapter and free apps (I miss my built in IR blaster from my S3).
    • I haven’t used it much, but I can plug in a RTL-SDR dongle and get aerial TV on my phone, or a radio spectrum analyzer. I used it to discover that my garage remote is about to die and that’s why my car’s garage button won’t learn the signal.
    • USB (or Bluetooth) game controllers just work.

    Definitely a relatively niche usecase but I have SSH clients, terminal apps, RDP remote access clients, and other networking tools as apps on my phone for quickly messing with things. Very helpful to not need to bring out the PC when I’m fixing my network.

    The ability to VPN into my home network to access my NAS. Honestly being able to access my NAS in general is already great for backups or just so I don’t have to think about what’s physically on my phone.

    With a cheap Bluetooth device I can connect to my car’s diagnostic port (ODBII) and check engine codes. No more trips to the mechanic just to get it diagnosed.

    WiFi direct cameras are a great addon too. I have a wifi endoscope (camera on a long bendy stick) for inspecting inside walls and my phone works as a screen for it.


  • Dust will get in pretty much no matter what you do. I wouldn’t worry about it. If you live in an already really dusty environment then get some sections of filter and attach them inside of these holes but honestly I wouldn’t worry.

    It’s for water cooling loops if you want to mount the rad or pump or something outside of the case. I think it was more common in the early days of water cooling when things were less standardized.












  • The Lemmy app we are using on our phones needs to download content from Lemmy so it can be displayed to us. Lemmy might just have one big file full of links, but that’s annoying to have to write code to handle. Or it might have a folder full of files where each file is a post, but that’s also a bit annoying to write code to manage.

    It (probably) uses a local SQLite database to store all of the cached posts.

    Conceptually, a database is just a place to store things, just like a big text file. The database just handles a lot of the grunt work for you and makes it easier to search, organize, and filter the data.

    So anywhere there is data, there could be a database.


  • I see you got your answer, but I’m adding on for anyone else that comes across this.

    For me, I learned the most when I had a disposable and replaceable system. When I was dual booted I was too scared to touch anything in case it fucked everything up. Once I started poking round on a Pi, LiveUSB, etc it was a lot easier to learn because I could always restart.

    Id start there with something like Mint or Ubuntu. Then set it up in a way where you can easily replace your OS so you can reset it often and fuck around. Then just learn as you go.