MystikIncarnate

I would like to be the first to encourage you on that journey.

For me, I've mainly focused on skills, more than stuff. IMO, preppers are a bit short sighted most of the time, they'll pack a month's worth of supplies in an airtight drum and leave it in their garage. It's 50+ lbs of stuff. You're telling me that when you get an evacuation order, you're going to haul that thing into you Ford Explorer before you evacuate, when there may be a flood or wildfire just minutes from you? Okay.

I have my first aid certificate. Standard first aid, level c CPR and AED training. I also know some basic self defense (though it's been years since I practiced anything), and I know enough about radio that if I'm presented with a walkie or ham radio, or something, I know what I'm doing without being told (maybe if I find one and the previous owner of the radio is incapacitated or something).

I've put a first aid kit everywhere I practically can, we have two in the house, plus one in my car (soon to be all cars). I also want to look into some MRE's and a safe way to store a moderate amount of water long term in my car (winters here are kind of a shit show)... plus maybe some basic survival supplies, enough to make a fire and a crude shelter, which can be repurposed for other things as well. Maybe a water filter for turning Creek water into drinkable/potable water.... I want to keep it fairly trim. For shelter supplies, a good multipurpose knife, a couple of tarps and some good rope... you get the idea. Though, that stuff sounds like things you would carry to kidnap and murder someone. Not my intent, but it's funny how much overlap there is between survival gear and gear for more nefarious activities...

I'm also very well learned on how to fix just about any common thing, like cars or something, so I should be pretty useful in a pinch. I have a ham radio in my car with more range than the walkies I have, and I have a small collection of walkies all with extra batteries charged and ready to fly (usually already attached to my backpack which is my usual daily carry). I need to make some tweaks and round out my setup (as previously mentioned), but I feel like I'm in a good spot for now.

That class of emergency radio is usually shortwave/am/FM. I have a shortwave/am/FM unit but it's not hand cranked. The one we have is a ccrane, and honestly I'm not sure if that's all that good. It seems to function, from the few times we've turned it on. I've never had to replace the batteries yet so that's a plus.

Not sure on this. I'm prepared for disaster but I'm not what someone would call a prepper. I mostly have VHF/UHF ham radios and the knowledge on how to make use of them. I'm still pretty new, so I hope someone can comment further.

The ccrane was my late father's. He insisted on buying that brand and I'm not sure why. It's probably about 10 years old right now. It's only a reciever, so anyone should be able to buy one.

As a ham, ugh.

I dream of it being more common to have radios in everyone's pocket, but it needs to be accompanied by some level of education on how to use it.

I'm a qualified amateur radio operator and I work in IT as my day job, if you can't see how bad it would be to continue to put all our eggs into one basket for datacom, primarily in the hands of poorly regulated private cellphone companies, then I can't really help you.

Fact is, 80-110 MHz FM requires less infrastructure (aka fewer broadcast points) to more completely cover an area, and it's almost impossible to have it blocked by buildings/walls/vehicles, etc. Sure, the signal might go to shit, but it's at least able to be heard even in very challenging conditions. It also takes nearly no power to run. Receiver chips can be made so small that it would be a trivial addition to make for most cellular manufacturers. There's no licensing fees or service fees so the entire process is free from top to bottom.

Add that to the fact that it's already deployed, regulated and configured for emergencies, and you have a very low implementation cost for a very reliable and robust service.

The idea here isn't to add it so we can listen to FM commercials all day. Anyone I know who had FM on their cellphone, didn't use it; and I won't suggest that anyone will use it now... but if there's a major catastrophe and the cellular networks go down, having a recieve-only way of getting emergency information to those who are otherwise disconnected from everything is a big deal. A lot of households are going digital only for their entertainment and getting rid of old stereos and hi-fi units with radio built in for all HDMI systems that make their Netflix work nicely. Many also have zero land line service so once the internet stops functioning and the cell towers go out, the only method of communication these people will have is standing on their porch and screaming into the void.

I've monitored communications during major outages, like sitting hurricane hits on the contental US and heard the radio traffic stating that there's people at x location and all consumer/commercial communication systems are inoperable. The only thing working was an amateur owned and operated repeater network to relay the communication across the region; I was listening to an internet relay on the outskirts of the coverage area and it was clear that they would have had no outbound communication if they didn't have those repeater nets. Inbound, I'm sure FM and AM radio was still operable, so anyone with an FM set could hear news and alerts as they happened.

Radio is also nearly instant, while LoRA mesh networks rely on people having nodes to relay the messages and the messages may be interrupted while a node is down. The first isn't a thing yet, the second is difficult to do at best. Amateur FM cells can transmit over many miles potentially several dozen, meanwhile most LoRA can't reach a fraction of that far, requiring a massively larger number of them, and each one is a potential point of failure.

With regulation, commercial broadcast FM sites are required by law to participate in the emergency broadcast system, no such regulation exists for LoRA.

Under normal operating conditions, FM is fairly useless, unless you feel like listening to ads, but in an emergency, it can be the only way for you to be told that, though the weather seems to have gotten better, it's temporary and you should stay where you are.

All my handheld radio transceivers have commercial FM recievers built in, so either way, I'm covered. I also have several dedicated FM and shortwave receiving radios around. I have adequate communication capability for an emergency. I'm not perfectly set up, even remotely, but I'll be able to reach out to someone if I'm without power, internet, cellphone coverage, etc, during a major event. I can call for help, get information about the situation and it's duration, I can reach out over 10 miles or more to communicate with others, all with my handheld.

And you want to take all this infrastructure and preparedness that we as a society have developed over more than a century, and flush it all away... because why? You have a hard-on for LoRA? You think old tech is useless in today's day and age? Because you have a problem with broadcast radio trying to survive, a service that's free to you, by playing ads?

Do you realize how stupid you sound?

I get it, but I don't feel comfortable putting my car in the hands of an Arduino.

Nothing against the open source software at all. It's the fact that the Arduino is a consumer experimentation board, not an automotive rated component. I'm concerned for the reliability of the Arduino under the operating conditions of an automobile.

Articulate and concise. I like it.

I don't really have anything more to add, except that we as a society need to make up our collective minds on cg and AI csam/CP soon.

I definitely think that cg/AI content is less bad (still bad, but less so) because there's no harm being done to real children from it; but those AI image engines needed to be trained on some form of content to be able to generate the images that they do, so I'm not sure how the training images factor in, or what would even be used for training that AI... I know rather little about how AI is trained at the moment, so I'm not sure if it can be done without source csam material or not... IMO, that factors into the morality of the output.

I definitely agree that sexual preference toward minors (aka paedophilia) is just that, a sexual preference; and that, in and of itself does not make someone a sex offender in the same way that being heterosexual doesn't make you a rapist or other form of sexual "deviant" (or however you want to say that. It's interesting to me to think that paedophiles may have a semi-legal way of getting porn for themselves (which causes no harm to children). I feel a bit bad for paedophiles in that they're basically forced to have relationships with persons that they don't find very sexually attractive, else they break the law. Not bad enough that I think that laws should change our anything, it's just a crap situation. It would be like having a preference towards men, as a man, in a world of heteros. The men are there and you're interested in them, but none of them are interested in you. Almost always that's not the case, there's other homosexual men that exist, no matter how rarely... in the case with pedos, there are exactly zero underage people who they can interact with at all sexually. I still don't think that should change, but at least with the internet, a gay man can go and find porn that interests them. With pedos is literally a crime to even look at, possess, or make any porn that appeals to them.

I can sympathize with the impossibility of their situation, that's all. For the record, I'm just done cis male with no interest in anyone too young to date. I can recognise their attractive qualities without being attracted to them (speaking mostly about those that have reached their sexual maturity here, who are still not 18 or whatever)... I can understand it, I'm not so hateful to want anyone who feels attraction to young people to die or anything, but young people don't have the experience to understand the situation they're getting into, when they're being mislead or gas lit, etc (though to be fair, a lot of "mature people seem to not know either, but that's another discussion)... Fact is, they're shit out of luck.

I'm sure many are forced into celibacy just to be lawful. I don't think any grown adult wants to be forced to be celibate; so I can understand the plight. AI/cg porn, tailored to that specific preference may give pedos an outlet that they can utilize to temper their urges and keep them on the right side of the law here. Of course it won't solve the problem entirely, the same way that rapists are still a thing, but it may severely reduce illegal activity and harm to children.

But I agree, it's a slippery slope (so to speak) because it can easily evolve into lowering the age of consent, and bringing back child marriages and such. Which IMO, isn't a desired outcome. I also don't think that content should intermingle with either social networks or existing porn sites, since it's so specific, it should be relegated to specific sites and not left flapping around the internet. It's also a vast minority of people that are afflicted, so segregation may be a minimum measure to keep things somewhat clean. I know I don't want AI generated CP content mixed in with my usual porn browsing... I'm sure there's plenty of people in the same boat, so IMO that's a minimum. But I'm only one voice in the society, so I don't make the decision; I'm interested to see what decision is finally made and implemented, whenever we get there.

As a disclaimer: I'm not attracted to underage people. I'm also not a doctor or scientist, or psychologist or anything else. I'm not in favor of anything here, besides society making a decision, and I'm just positing that it could be beneficial to society as a whole. I welcome other opinions, except those by people whom are heavily religious. Good day.

So many.

Doom, the og, first FPS... we had Wolfenstein 3D before that but it always felt like it was a demo of something to come for me. Doom felt like it stood on its own. I couldn't play it at home, had to go to a friend's house to play, for two reasons. 1. I couldn't run it, and 2. My parents were kinda uptight... they loosened up over the years, but it kept me from a lot of good stuff.

Quake was the next one up really land at least on PC.... we had a lab of Pentium computers at school that were all networked with what I now know is called 10Base5 or 10base2 (not sure which)... it was the first "real" network we experienced, and it was great. At the time those premiums were basically brand new, state of the art machines..... the teacher was cool enough to let us use the lab to play quake over the lunch hour sometimes... so we had quake LAN parties over lunch.

On PC, there were a lot of greats, but nothing too groundbreaking until half-life... but I'm guessing most people experienced that. I'll give an honorable mention to unreal and unreal tournament as well (every version). Bluntly, UT was significantly better than quake arena.

We had a short list of consoles over the years. But I have to take my hat off for final Fantasy (either 3 or 6, whatever you want to call it, the one on the SNES)... which I was obsessed with for a while there. We only had three consoles over the years that I recall... the NES, SNES, and genesis. After that, we couldn't continue to convince my parents to keep buying consoles. I eventually picked up a PlayStation, but that was a long time later.

There's a lot of people in this discussion taking about how raspberry Pi and the pi foundation isn't worth your money, whether on principle, or just dollars per unit of compute.

I get it, but I have a question. Is there a competing SBC that has official PoE support? I know there's half baked ways to sort that out separate from the device, but I have a few edge cases where the last viable option was the pi 3B+. The official pi 4 case is horrendous for airflow, and third party cases usually either assume you want no protection (and all the airflow) or you want to handle thermals by contact pads passively (making it difficult or impossible to use the PoE hat), or are just as bad as the stock case for airflow, but they have enough room inside to add a hat, in which case, why go third party when the official case is equally terrible?

The pi 3 had a PoE hat, and a case you could take the top off and get decent airflow. Too bad the fans in the first gen PoE hat are unicorns in terms of power draw, with no way to adjust the power curve for the fan connector to suit a different fan, and since they're unicorns, you can't find them for purchase, and if you find something remarkably similar, they're still slightly different enough that they don't work (I've tried). So the fans burn out and IDK, good fucking luck I guess. Buy a new PoE hat?

Then there was the gen 2 PoE+ hat which released alongside the pi 4, which supposedly works with the 3 as well, which I haven't tried yet, but I'm planning to.

In every case, I have done network monitoring and service nodes that aren't exactly local to a power receptacle and they need PoE. The pi 4 eliminated itself because of the garbage case design of the official case and the lack of thought by those doing the third party cases... so I'm looking at the 5 like, finally, they got it right.

Now everyone is talking shit about the pi foundation, which I can completely understand, but for the application I need these for (and my pi 3's have been in service for like ~5 years and probably need to be refreshed), what other option do I have? What's decent with a good case and PoE input? PoE or PoE+ doesn't matter, I just need to be able to package it up into a relatively small footprint for the application.

Anyone have any suggestions? I'm all ears. I've googled till I'm blue in the face and I can't even find an SBC that has an option for PoE, I never got to looking into whether it has a decent case or if it will run my software...

Great, now they've turned karma whoring into a profitable enterprise. This will surely go well.

I agree that Thanos is dumb, but he's well written. He's supposed to be stupidly short sighted; that's his whole deal. He experienced a problem with his own society, and invented an idiotic solution that was readily rejected (rightly) by his own people. He saw the downfall after that and said to himself that the cause was that they didn't listen to him.

When he grew powerful enough to do it, wanting nobody else to suffer the loss of their entire society like he did, forces the universe to participate in his little exercise with little to no regard for the losses people suffer, nor the long term consequences of his plan.

He has no ability to think beyond the small scope of time that encompasses his plan.

Sure, resources will be far less scarce for people in the short term, but, as you've correctly pointed out, in the long term, he's simply delaying the inevitable, which is why his statement near the end of endgame is so poignant: "I am inevitable". Then he snaps, and nothing happens because Tony stole the infinity stones, proving he's not inevitable and underneath it all, he's not thinking of the inevitable outcome of his plan (which is only delaying things at best, and is an actual war crime).

He's convinced himself so throughly that his way is the only way that he refuses to even entertain the idea that there may be other solutions, which bluntly, other solutions may have an actual effect in the long run (more than 100 years out).

He's meant to be fanatical about it being the only option and unable to be convinced otherwise. He's written perfectly for that role.

Other means of population control should be considered, but he'll have none of it. I see it as analogous to so many humans in real life that deny long term damages to the planet and to future generations because of short sighted "freedoms" or benefits that they may reap in their lifetime. A whole "fuck the distant future for immediate gains" kind of mentality; something that, quite bluntly, is the prevailing mindset of most capitalist businesses. It's all about maximizing the present and damn the consequences.

Thanos is a literary tool to describe problems we have right here and right now, on a fundamental level. People do convinced that their way is the only way that they will do immense harm to their fellow humans (and/or other living beings) just to do what they think is in the best interest of themselves and others, without considering evidence or any discourse that may prove that their way may not work out long term.

Hello fellow IT Patsy. I hope you're having an uneventful day.

Working in IT, I understand the frustration.

There's a couple ways to do it, but you can add SharePoint to your OneDrive on your PC, it shows up basically the same as any of your OneDrive files in Explorer.

Apparently there's a way to map it to a drive letter as well, but it gets complex pretty quickly and as far as I know, you need to get the link to paste into the mapped drive dialog from the object owner... I might be wrong here.

Google it. You'll improve your life so much.