OK, so you want to install Linux on an old laptop after wiping the hard drive.
Sure, you would have root control for that OS. Make sure that there is no BIOS/UEFI password set before you start, or that you have the password.
Do not use the root account for regular use, especially if you will be connecting this laptop to the Internet. Log in as a normal user account and escalate your privilege as needed.
I also highly recommend gparted for editing the hard drive partitions before you install the OS. Don’t install goarted, just run it live from a USB drive.
Do you know which Linux distribution you want to install?
There are definitely at least 9 circles of emacs filled with tormented souls.
er, what exactly do you mean by “from the scratch”? and what exactly constitutes “my own system”? are you planning on designing your own logic circuits, manufacturing your own chips, and then writing your own firmware to run them?
Most biodegradable polymers are water-permeable (water intrusion is how bacteria get inside the material to break it down). Anything water-permeable is not appropriate for medical use, even as a wrapper for something else, because you can’t guarantee that the thing inside is sterile.
There’s several big tradeoffs there.
Glass is heavy compared to plastic, and also bulkier. A truck full of product in glass containers will carry substantially less product volume than if it were plastic containers. In order to distribute the equivalent amount of product, more trucks will have to make more trips. When you scale this up to national distribution you’re talking about hundreds more trucks on the road, thousands more trips per year, which is going to have an environmental impact.
Glass is fragile compared to plastic. Some accounting is already done for product loss due to breakage during distribution, but plastic containers are fairly durable (part of the problem of course). If you switch to glass the loss percentage goes up, which again means you have to make more trips to distribute the same amount of product, so compounding the environmental impact.
What percentage of single use plastic is used for storing liquids? I would imagine it’s a minority, with things like plastic bags making up the majority.
Plastic bottles are the most common type of container for fluids and make up a huge portion of plastic waste. Drinks, cooking oil and vinegar, cosmetics, personal hygiene products, cleaning products, motor oil, paints, medical products… and that’s just the common consumer stuff. Plastic bags are a big part too but liquid bottles are certainly not a minority.
Plus very acidic liquids like soda may not be bio-active enough to cause this to break down, depending on what the process is.
You also have to be concerned about the outside of the container. Will it be washed as part of the production/handling process? Will sweat and bacteria from human hands cause it to start breaking down? It will be packed in a box for shipping, then unpacked at a store, then picked up and looked at by who knows how many people before being purchased, then it has to stay in one piece until the product it contains is used up. A bottle of toilet cleaner or shampoo or laundry detergent might be handled hundreds of times, and its lifespan from production to final disposal might be a year or more.
yeah, ha ha… “paranoid”
Perfect explanation.
Thank you, I try. It’s always tricky to keep network infrastructure explanations concise and readable - the Internet is such a complicated mess.
People like paying for convenience.
Well, I would simplify that to people like convenience. Infrastructure of any type is basically someone else solving convenience problems for you. People don’t really like paying, but they will if it’s the most convenient option.
Syncthing is doing this for you for free, I assume mostly because the developers wanted the infrastructure to work that way and didn’t want it to be dependent on DNS, and decided to make it available to users at large. It’s very convenient, but it also obscures a lot of the technical side of network services which can make learning harder.
This kind of thing shows why tech giants are giants and why selfhosted is a niche.
There’s also always the “why reinvent the wheel?” question, and consider that the guy who is selling wheels works on making wheels as a full-time occupation and has been doing so long enough to build a business on it, whereas you are a hobbyist. There are things that guy knows about wheelmaking that would take you ten years to learn, and he also has a properly equipped workshop for it - you have some YouTube videos, your garage and a handful of tools from Harbor Freight.
Sometimes there is good reason to do so (e.g. privacy from cloud service data gathering) but this is a real balancing act between cost (time and money, both up-front and long-term), risk (privacy exposure, data loss, failure tolerance), and convenience. If you’re going to do something yourself, you should have a specific answer to the question, and probably do a little cost-benefit checking.
But if I’m reading the materials correctly, I’ll need to set up a domain and pay some upfront costs to make my library accessible outside my home.
Why is that?
So when your mobile device is on the public internet it can’t reach directly into your private home network. The IP addresses of the servers on your private network are not routable outside of it, so your mobile device can’t talk to them directly. From the perspective of the public internet, the only piece of your private network that is visible is your ISP gateway device.
When you try to reach your Syncthing service from the public internet, none of the routers know where your private Syncthing instance is or how to reach it. To solve this, the Syncthing developers provide discovery servers on the public internet which contain the directions for the Syncthing app on your device to find your Syncthing service on your private network (assuming you have registered your Syncthing server with the discovery service).
This is a whole level of network infrastructure that is just being done for you to make using Syncthing more convenient. It saves you from having to deal with the details of network routing across network boundaries.
Funkwhale does not provide an equivalent service. To reach your Funkwhale service on your private network from the public internet you have to solve the cross-boundary routing problem for yourself. The most reliable way to do this is to use the DNS infrastructure that already exists on the public internet, which means getting a domain name and linking it to your ISP gateway address.
If your ISP gateway had a static address you could skip this and configure whatever app accesses your Funkwhale service to always point to your ISP gateway address, but residential IP addresses are typically dynamic, so you can’t rely on it being the same long-term. Setting up DynamicDNS solves this problem by updating a DNS record any time your ISP gateway address changes.
There are several DynDNS providers listed at the bottom of that last article, some of which provide domain names. Some of them are free services (like afraid.org) but those typically have some strings attached (afraid.org requires you to log in regularly to confirm that your address is still active, otherwise it will be disabled).
Even if it’s just Earth, if we assume there is a degree of randomness in species assignment then you’ve got decent odds of reincarnating as an ant:
We conservatively estimate total abundance of ground-dwelling ants at over 3 × 1015 and estimate the number of all ants on Earth to be almost 20 × 1015 individuals. 1
And of course, massively high odds of being a bacteria. There are probably ~40 trillion bacteria living just in your body right now:
They estimate that the range of bacterial cells goes from about 30 to 50 trillion in each individual. 2
Assuming this is a desktop PC, prevention is much better. Get a case with dust filters (preferably removable) on the intake fans or just add some to your existing case. I would call this essential if you have pets.
The fact that the demonstrations were done with small molecules, however, means that the modeling run on the quantum computer could also have been done on classical hardware * (it only required 15 hardware qubits). So Google is claiming both quantum advantage and quantum utility, but not at the same time. The sorts of complex, long-distance interactions that would be out of range of classical simulation are still a bit beyond the reach of the current quantum hardware. O’Brien estimated that the hardware’s fidelity would have to improve by a factor of three or four to model molecules that are beyond classical simulation.
The quantum advantage issue should also be seen as a work in progress. Google has collaborated with enough researchers at enough institutions that there’s unlikely to be a major improvement in algorithms that could allow classical computers to catch up. Until the community as a whole has some time to digest the announcement, though, we shouldn’t take that as a given. **
The other issue is verifiability. Some quantum algorithms will produce results that can be easily verified on classical hardware—situations where it’s hard to calculate the right result but easy to confirm a correct answer. Quantum echoes isn’t one of those, so we’ll need another quantum computer to verify the behavior Google has described.
* Still not actually any more useful than similar modeling done on standard binary computers.
** Not peer reviewed.
I can’t charge you rent for that, obviously. Everything you use should be a service, that you subscribe to, and pay me to access every month, or every week, or every day if I can get away with it.
AWS is a huge suite of products and services, and there’s a lot of old legacy shit running on it.
Yup, AWS is legacy cloud. It was only recently that they set encryption by default on S3 buckets, before that they were just in the clear by default.
Cybersecurity and disaster recovery are not directly profitable, so they are almost always neglected in your average shop.
It’s never important until suddenly it’s the most important thing in the world.
Flatpaks are better than Snaps, but properly maintained dependency trees and SBOMs are best, by a wide margin.
Yeah, but proper failover and recovery requires additional infrastructure, and that costs money.
Hopefully a bunch of risk management people are writing I-told-you-so emails to C-suites right now.
Depending on what you’re emulating, the 8BitDo ultracompact options might work for you:
8BitDo Micro
Basically turn your phone into a Gameboy, good for 90s games where you don’t need sticks. The controller and clip together will cost you $35.