And I self-host precisely because of the money I save using surplussed hardware. I have a symmetrical 1Gb SOHO fibre connection from my ISP, so I can host whatever the hell I want, I just need to stand it up. And a beefy older system with oodles of RAM is perfect for spinning up VMs of various platforms for various tasks. This saves me craploads of money over even a single VM on cloud platforms like Vultr. Plus, even if I were to support a “heavy” service sufficiently in demand to warrant its own iron, it still costs me less than a year’s worth of hosting to obtain a decent platform for that service to run on all by it’s lonesome.

My only cloud costs end up being those services which are distributed for redundancy and geographical distance, such as DNS and caching CDNs.

even if the kernel has extra chromosomes.

Okay, that is a hilarious way of saying those forks are back of the short bus “ssssspecial”.

Will have to look into that, thanks.

One of my key implementation requirements, however, will be resiliency, which means simplicity will be a core feature. The more “moving parts”, the easier it will be to break.

flip phone

Almost all such phones are actually smart phones in a flip phone Edgar Suit. Especially if it has maps or YouTube or any kind of an App Store. I see a crapton of flip phones that run Android, which has all sorts of Google spyware piggybacking along.

I think there may be only two or three dumb flip phones or feature flip phones left on the market, and IIRC two are locked to specific networks.

If you want a bona-fide dumb phone, you might be limited to something like the rotary un-smartphone.

or toaster can’t do its basic job offline

pats my 1962 Sunbeam Radiant Toaster

Obligatory Red Dwarf toaster scene

Go for older laser printers. They’re bulletproof, cheap on toner, free of DRM, and even if they only come with an LPT port you can always build your own print server that gives you all the bells and whistles like AirPrint.

About 3-4 years ago I took a bit of a dive into the firmware of IoT devices. The utter lack of security and the amount of information being hoovered up to the mothership made me swear to never build anything “smart” into the renovations of my current home. Sure, there will be automation. There will be CCTV. There will be solar with battery backup for essentials. There will be conveniences of all kinds. But virtually all will be air gapped, incapable of remote rooting, and under my full control.

Hell, even my laser printers are HP models over two decades old - an HP 4050DTN and an HP 5000DTN - that are totally devoid of any DRM or “smart features” and can trivially take generic overstuffed cartridges that can do 20,000 sheets at 5% coverage.

VM

That still doesn’t solve 99.9% of my issues, it just tries to solve a problem for which I already have a solution actively in-place: a KVM.

In that way it’s become adversarial.

Back in the 2000s, I was able to say that while a fundamental install took only about a half hour to set up, usability tweaks and a full fleshing out of functionality took another 4-8 hours depending on what the user was going to use the machine for.

I just did a Win11 24h2 install. It took nearly 24 working hours before I considered it even minimally functional for my needs. Cycling through Win10Privacy two or three times was particularly frustrating. Registry work alone took me a good 8-10 hours of trying stuff a step at a time and then rebooting to see how it worked.

At this point, the only reason why I am still running with a Windows rig is for those half-dozen programs that don’t have appropriate non-Windows variants. It’s why I’m also running a Mac Mini and an OpenSUSE tower through the same 4-port, 6-head KVM.

For such an invasive piece of code (it seems to drop into my system with every major Windows Update), this would be a hilarious message to see.

I have an apostrophe

Scottish/Irish?

some companies see it as a SQL injection hack and sanitize it.

Which kind of apostrophe?

A straight apostrophe, fine - that can and does get used in valid SQL injection attacks. I would be disgusted at any input form that didn’t sanitize that.

But a curly apostrophe? Nothing should be filtering a curly apostrophe, as it has no function or use within SQL. So if you learn how to bring that up in alt codes (Windows, specifically), Key combos (Mac) or dead keys (Linux), as well as direct Unicode codes for most any Win/Mac/*Nix platform, you should be golden.

Unless the developer of that input form was a complete moron and made extra-tight validation.

Plus, knowing the inputs for a lot of extended UTF-8 characters not found on a normal keyboard is also a wee bit of a typing superpower.

A line break is a non-printable character. So it would only work in the scope of electronic storage. The minute it hits other media, the line break character is subject to how that media handles it’s presence, and then it is lost permanently from that step forward.

Plus, many input forms make use of validation that will just trim anything that isn’t a character or number, removing the line break character.

His router is tri-band though meaning it has 2 5ghz transceivers.

Unfortunately, for many models - like the Linksys WRT 3200ACM - that second antenna (technically the third one if you include the 2.4Ghz one) doesn’t function at all without the manufacturer’s firmware. It’s a dead stick with any third-party firmware, and is 100% software-enabled.

I have found this fact to be reliable whether it is DD-WRT or OpenWRT, and across several different manufacturers including Asus and D-Link.

The hardware to read the tapes are calibrated to the maximum size they are configured to accept. So when you hit up eBay, you will need to know the maximum amount of data you will need, and either the size of the largest tape drive to hold all that - if you are not getting a machine with an auto-loader - or the maximum number of drives that the machine’s autoloader can take, so you can size the tapes properly for the data.

Say you need to back up 25Tb. You are unlikely to ever need more backup than that. So you either look for a machine that takes 25Tb tapes, or you get a machine that can take max. 5Tb tapes, but has an autoloader that can hold at least 4 additional tapes (in addition to the one in the drive) such that all five will automagically cycle through the backup process. That way, all 25Tb will be backed up in either case without your direct and immediate involvement, all you have to do is rotate the tapes off-site after the backups are done, and slot the next ones in for the next backup run.

Obviously, incremental backups are a no-go, as backups are stored off-site. So it’s an all-or-nothing process. And as such, this is usually done both on your entire primary data set (for fast total-disaster restores) once in a while, with a different set of tapes focusing on your local/on-site warm backups and backing up only the atomic/incremental locally-stored backups for the day/week/month.

If you want longevity and shelf stability, tape drives are the way to go. You can get them in very large capacities, even into the hundreds of TB.

Their benefit is that they have no internal motorized components, they are a lot like VHS videocassettes - two spools with tape. This makes them very shelf-stable, unlike hard drives which can have their spindles seize up over time.

They also have absolutely epic data densities. You could store on one tape the contents of dozens of the largest hard drives currently available.

Their downside is that you need highly specialized hardware to read and record them. And this makes the hardware quite expensive.

So why don’t we use tape drives to store data? Because they store said data linearly - great for writing once, terrible for finding or updating said data - and because they are slow. You want to get to a file 20Tb in? Enjoy scrolling past every single byte up until that point.

But for cold backups, there ain’t nothing better.

Cool, THANKS!! 😊 🙏

That is an interesting implementation of security through obscurity…

How does one enable this on the standard 7Zip client?

If you are looking for Bar, it is highly likely that you are already looking specifically for a particular functionality - say, the action - for Bar. As such, it is irrelevant which method you use, both will get you to the function you need.

Conversely, while it is likely you will want to look up all items that implement a particular functionality, it is much less likely you are going to ever need a complete listing of all functionality that an item employs; you will be targeting only one functionality for that item and will have that one functionality as the primary and concrete focus. Ergo, functionality comes first, followed by what item has that functionality.

There is a reason why little endian is preferred in virtually 100% of cases: sorting. Mentally or lexicographically, having the most important piece of information first will allow the correct item be found the fastest, or allow it to be discounted/ignored the quickest.

That makes a lot more sense for your setup, then.