When they got home, they were so hungry that they actually consented to eating soup!
By the way, it’s totally possible to ride on level ice, if careful, but some trails have this compacted ridge in the middle which makes them convex.
A bit late to the party, but I took my kids out for a bicycle ride (into the nearest bog, so we walked part of the way). The bits where the ground was still covered with ice were the most fun.
Play video games - Cataclysm:DDA or Dwarf Fortress (tho I stayed on the pre-Steam version as it’s lighter on the CPU).
Learn a new programming language at https://exercism.org
Read a book - tons of free ones around the interwebs, legally or not, as you desire.
Install a new operating system. Try Haiku or OpenBSD. See if your phone is compatible with PostmarketOS. If not, Termux + SSH + port forwarding in your WiFi box, set up a webserver and publish something. Host a Gemini pod.
Learn a craft. Repair something that another person would toss. Start a sourdough culture - it takes a week to mature (read up on how to do this right), then bake a bread. Homemade bread is approx 16× tastier than run-of-the-mill commercial stuff.
Take a walk somewhere you haven’t walked before. Find the nearest forest lake and arrange a picnic. Take someone with you on the 2nd trip.
I’m running my email server on a POCO F1 ex-Android phone (running PostmarketOS now).
I wish I could get NixOS running on it, then I’d move other things also there.
I’m using VNC over an SSH tunnel. TigerVNC’s vncviewer
even has the -via
parameter you can use to make creating the tunnel seamless.
Here’s a couple of pointers to get started:
top
in your terminal to see what’s taking CPU.top -o RES
(or what’s easier, run top
and then press M
while it’s running) to see what is taking up RAM.… though unfortunately, it’s mighty probable that the only significant consumer of memory and CPU is your browser. Get uBlock Origin, it helps web pages be lighter and eat less resources. Don’t open too many tabs at once - learn to use bookmarks efficiently, instead (folders, bookmarks toolbar and whatnot).
Reminds me of the programs that make the kernel drop FS buffers in an attempt to free up RAM. Or hog as much memory as they can in an attempt to have unused things swapped to disk. Yeah, they free up RAM all right, but at the expense of actual speed.
Most of the time, this junk is actively harmful. Forget it, modern Linux uses optimized defaults.
You can get more performance out of your hardware by switching to from heavyweight to lightweight programs - for example, instead of Skype (which uses Electron), choose some other way to chat like irssi
for IRC. Instead of Gnome, choose i3 or dwm or something like that. You need a bunch of tradeoffs and learning, though, to really get the most out of your hardware.
Windows has a pre-built index as well (or at least it has a search indexer service that enjoys as warm a CPU as possible). That doesn’t appear to improve the speed of search, though.
In Linux, the locate
command is crazy fast. I am amazed at how slow search is in Windows, compared to this.
I can drive my manual and eat at the same time just fine, thankyouverymuch :) I think I once submitted a pull request while on the road…
Having an unauthenticated relay imposes the responsibility to configure it correctly (the “only certain addresses” part) and protect it (the “accessible outside the local network” bit). Are you sure it’s not accessible? Did you remember to test with IPv6 too? Will it remain protected after the next time you mess around with your firewall for some totally unrelated reason?
If it works - good for you, but be mindful of all the baggage that comes with a new service.
You’re trading one security issue (profileration of app passwords) to another one (an unauthenticated relay). Is it worth it?
Yes, basically, except for the fractional amount of kids. Got my MSc for free (actually I got paid tuition to study, heh (living in Europe has its perks)). Now working in software engineering, happy with my life.
That said, I realize I’m an outlier, having many acquaintances with substantially harder lives. I’m deeply grateful to fate.
I can’t be sure it’ll last, though, so I’m trying to branch out into gardening now (while I have the money to spare for it). See if I can get a livable amount of veggies out of my farmland, some day. It won’t be enough to sell, but perhaps our family could earn subsistence level of calories out of our land…
The last time I needed to boot a PC that didn’t have a screen, I built a NixOS installation image with SSH access. I added a user, sudo access, and prepopulated authenticated SSH keys, something similar to https://nixos.mayflower.consulting/blog/2018/09/11/custom-images/
It was about as easy as configuring my own NixOS system.
Dwarf Fortress and Cataclysm: DDA generate some crazy plotlines, full of narrative, twists, and character development. How come no writer has converted a character’s story into a novel, yet?
There you go: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Bubblewrap
Environments are per-process. Every program can have its own environment, so don’t inject secrets where they’re not needed.
I’m using bubblewrap to restrict access to FS.
Trying to decide between The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind (OpenMW), Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, doomscrolling in Lemmy, or doing some work instead. So far, work has been winning, but I’m not sure of continued success.
I tried to run some software on my router. It kind of works, if it fits. Storage was the limiting factor. There’s an option to expand the FS to include a USB stick, but somehow it made something overheat, and the router froze every now and then.