8Tb optical disks don’t exist. Much cheaper to just do spinning-rust or cloud.

Implying that we have a future at all is inherently hopeful

Over the last year I have done a deep dive into climate science, the capitalistic and political responses to it, the collapsing Return on Research, and how modern agriculture at scale is going to be impacted.

If humanity is either not already extinct by 2100, or at the very least caught in an unavoidable terminal decline leading towards it, I would be very, very surprised.

There is a reason why climate scientists have begun to - very grimly - start calling themselves “climate pathologists” and - for the younger ones, at least - avoiding having any children at all.

The vast majority of people have absolutely no clue how apocalyptically bad things are out there, and how on the one side capitalism is whitewashing the problem under the rug, while on the other side right-wing politics are trying to make everyone think it’s all fake.

running it in an ssd is it can speed it up

Let me be absolutely clear: due to the finite write capabilities of solid-state technology, using SpinRite on an SSD is materially harmful to that SSD, and WILL shorten it’s operational lifespan by a non-trivial amount.

This is why SSDs have wear-levelling technology: to limit the number of writes that any one data cell will receive. By using a program that conducts intensive read/write operations on sectors, you are wearing your SSD out at a much higher rate than normal, dramatically speeding up any failures in the future.

I don’t care about living longer. I see no point in doing so when beset with dementia or unable to even walk, much less run.

Give me full vitality in body and mind until my last day, and I’ll be satisfied even if it’s only 80 or 75 years.

SpinRite is only meant for traditional “spinning-rust” mechanical drives.

SpinRite IS NOT meant for SSDs. The existence of TRIM makes SpinRite useless on any sort of solid state storage.

And since almost all laptops sold within the last half a decade use SSDs almost exclusively, it is highly unlikely your advice will be useful.

Removed by mod

Well… looks like I’m going to have to find a new payment platform to use.

I am also supremely space-constrained, but I also had no need to take my development device away from my desk. So I got a workstation and a KVM to switch between workstations, thereby needing only one keyboard, mouse, and set of monitors for multiple computers.

I went further than that, because I also needed to keep the desktop largely clear and the floor space used down to an absolute minimum. So I got a 60s “tanker desk”, and put a smaller office table on top of it. the computers all sit on top of the office table, up near the ceiling (and away from a lot of the dust!) and the monitors and KVM dangle down from beneath it. This leaves only the two pedestal legs of that office table and my keyboard and mouse as the only things “on” the top surface of my desk.

And ignoring the chair, I can have four workstations and six monitors within a 30×60 inch footprint (the tanker desk).

Yet more evidence that CloudFlare is inherently damaging and hostile to the Internet.

I just want a small […] phone that fits in one hand.

How bloody small are your hands??

Mine are just average for a man’s, and the iPhone 15 Pro Max is eminently usable with just one hand.

Most dumb phones aren’t.

Dumb, that is. Virtually all of them have some version of Android or KaiOS or some other full-fat OS cosplaying as something “simple”. Litmus test: does your “dumb phone” come with a map app? A Facebook app? Can you install apps from an external source? If so, you don’t have a dumb phone.

The hallmark of a dumb phone is the lack of an OS that boots. You turn it on, and everything should be instantly and immediately available, loaded from ROM. No boot sequence, no waiting for anything to load.

The only truly “dumb phone” out there - as something “new” and not actually vintage - is the Rotary Un-Phone.

When the Parasite Class objects so vehemently to something that is impacting their obscene profits and sociopathic control, you know that something is being done correctly.

I don’t care about any new tab features except making Tab Mix Plus work effortlessly in the current Firefox.

Right now it’s a game of restriction-whack-a-mole in trying to canopener Firefox into making TMP work again.

TMP is one of the main reasons why I still use any variant of Firefox.

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

Fail2ban bans after 1 attempt for a year.

Fail2ban yes; one year, however, is IMO a bit excessive.

Most ISP IP assignments do tend to linger - even with DHCP the same IP will be re-assigned to the same gateway router for quite a number of sequential times - but most IPs do eventually change within a few months. I personally use 3 months as a happy medium for any blacklist I run. Most dynamic IPs don’t last this long, almost all attackers will rotate through IPs pretty quickly anyhow, and if you run a public service (website, etc.), blocking for an entire year may inadvertently catch legitimate visitors.

Plus, you also have to consider the load such a large blocklist will have on your system, if most entries no longer represent legitimate threat actors, you’ll only bog down your system by keeping them in there.

Fail2ban can be configured to allow initial issues to cycle back out quicker, while blocking known repeat offenders for a much longer time period. This is useful in keeping block lists shorter and less resource-intensive to parse.

Do either of the options you mentioned provide custom nameservers? As in, the ability for ns01.yourdomain.com to resolve to your account on their DNS servers?

Finding woodworking plans have never been a problem.

Finding metric woodworking plans for the 94% of us who aren’t Americans, that has been my problem. Everything out there seems to be in imperial, which makes things 100× harder than it has any need to be.