Don’t listen to the people saying there’s an issue anywhere.

All this racist nonsense is just that - nonsense.

I’ve lived or worked for extended periods in numerous states, from Maine to Alabama, North Dakota, Washington, Texas, California, and all over the midwest, especially in rural areas (worked with trucking companies), and you really don’t see all the racism people claim on the internet, even in the trucker world.

Yea, you’ll find an ass here and there, but that’s very much the exception today. Far more so than even the 70’s, when being openly racist in a small town was tolerated a lot more (“the older generation don’t know no better” kind of stuff).

So come to the US. You’ll be fine anywhere except specific areas in certain inner cities (and that’s a general crime issue, not a race issue).

Not really, it’s not the 50’s or 60’s.

99% of people don’t give a shit.

Middle of the country? Haha

Nobody gives a fuck

Yea, crappy mixing. It may technically be “excellent” mixing, but only works in a theater.

Even that isn’t true, pretty much every movie I’ve seen at the theater in recent years, the dialog is hard to hear.

Damn, 5 years from LTS? That’s impressive

Thank the asshole directors for choosing to make sound so crappy any more (my opinion, I think all movies have crap mixing, with too much focus on sound effects so even when voice is brought forward it’s still hard to hear clearly).

Part of it is the movie audio is mixed for a theater that has multiple channels and speakers, so the output is the better separated and voice can be delivered better. It would need to be remixed to sound better at home, and since all homes are very different, what would you target? (Plus they simply don’t want to pay extra for mixing which doesn’t contribute to seats in a theater). Yea, they could probably use a generic mix, but again, it costs to do so, and some home users would still (justifiably) complain.

The other is some directors intentionally crapify the mix because they want a certain experience while watching the movie in the theater. One director recently even stated he wanted dialog to be difficult to understand in certain scenes (I forget what movie). I get the director’s intent, even if I disagree.

The only solution for home that I know is to have a sound system that can manage the separate channels. Many systems now have a sound bar just for voice, so this is already happening to some degree, but I rarely see discrete volume controls for the channels.

I’d stop wasting time trying to make it work. Simply save your spreadsheet (you are saving it early, often, and keeping dupliicates, right?), and just copy/paste the file into an email.

At one point I supported Office for Microsoft, and while they’d never admit it, this process for embedding files has alway been a little wonky (directly from one app to another). Grabbing the file and pasting it eliminates the risk of either app causing a problem because the OLE registration isn’t perfect, by using a file system path to the object.

I believe you can paste into Outlook a sheet as a table this way, if that’s what you’re trying to do. Not something I’d do, because, again, this kind of stuff has always been a little less than perfect. Attached files seem to have fewer issues.

Edit: I currently have one machine where URLs in docs (Word, excel, Publisher, Project, Onenote) can’t be launched, an error says “Administrator has disabled this feature”. I gave up trying to fix it (and remember, I supported Office, I know how this stuff works, I have notes from years ago about which reg entries handle this stuff). Now I just copy the URL. It’ll get fixed when I refresh this machine.

Standard rifle rounds during WWI would go right through a WWII helmet.

Generally it’s very difficult to stop a rifle round.

Perhaps a WWII helmet could stop a contemporary .32 or .38 cal pistol, but I don’t know.

Documentation has been mentioned already, what I’d add to that is planning.

Start with a list of high-level objectives, as in “Need a way to save notes, ideas, documents, between multiple systems, including mobile devices”.

Then break that down to high-level requirements such as “Implement Joplin, and a sync solution”.

Those high-level requirements then spawn system requirements, such as Joplin needs X disk space, user accounts, etc.

Each of those branches out to technical requirements, which are single-line, single-task descriptions (you can skip this, it’s a nice-to-have):

“Create folder Joplin on server A”

“Set folder permissions XYZ on Joplin folder”

Think of it all as a tree, starting from your objectives. If you document it like this first, you won’t go doing something as you build that you won’t remember why you’re doing it, or make decisions on the fly that conflict with other objectives.

Yep.

I have friends in the SMB space, one thing they do is a regular backup verification (quarterly). At that frequency, restoring even a few files (especially to a new VM), is very indicative, especially if it’s a large dataset (e.g. Quickbooks).

In Enterprise, we do all sorts of validation, depending on the system. Some is performed as part of Data Center operations, some is by IT (those are separate things), some by Business Unit management and their IT counterparts.

Performance may be an issue. It’s not specifically designed for streaming performance, and being a software VPN, it will depend a great deal on the devices used at each end.

Great summary!

Why Debian or Ubuntu? (I have my own thoughts, but it would be useful to show even high-level reasons why they’re preferred).

Re: Backup - Backblaze has a great writeup on backup approach today. I’m a fan of cloud being part of the mix (I use a combo of local replication and cloud, to mitigate different risks). Getting people to include backup from the start will help them long-term, so great you included it!

It’s up to the squatter to actually spend the time and money to sue though.

A C&D is a letter from a lawyer to stop or they’ll sue, it’s not a court order.

Yea, if you use Tailscale with Funnel, you get a secure connection with no config required by the web user.

Not seeing why you need WordPress.

The safest way I can see to make a secure connection across an untrusted network is to use a VPN of some sort, specifically a mesh network like Wireguard or Tailscale.

Tailscale has the advantage of being almost zero config, plus has the Serve and Funnel features which provide a mechanism to allow specific traffic into your Tailscale network.

Edit: Tailscale Serve is probably what I’d use.

I think seven was answering the question

After (ugh) 30 years of having PCs and many, many, drives, Seagate has been the worst.

But I’ve had WD fail too. Just not as much, and I’ve had far more WD drives. I currently have about 20 drives of varying ages, 98% of them are WD, because more of the Seagate drives have failed and been trashed.

And backup, proper backup.

My only issue with Grayjay (both Android and Windows app), is you have to manually export the videos out of Grayjay

If you try to grab the files directly, they don’t work.

Syncthing

Windows - Synctrayzor

Linux - Syncthing

Android - Syncthing-Fork

iOS - Möbius