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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • USB OTG on android phones is severely underrated.

    • I can plug in a USB drive and transfer files around, I’ve used this to manage my retro handheld SD cards before.
    • You can tether your hotspot over Ethernet to your computer with an Ethernet adapter.
    • You can plug Ethernet into your phone to get faster connections.
    • You can plug a mouse into your phone and get a cursor on screen. Not super useful tbh, but kinda cool.
    • You can use your phone as an external webcam for your computer.
    • It’s a bit more annoying than it used to be but you can use your phone as a universal IR remote with a small adapter and free apps (I miss my built in IR blaster from my S3).
    • I haven’t used it much, but I can plug in a RTL-SDR dongle and get aerial TV on my phone, or a radio spectrum analyzer. I used it to discover that my garage remote is about to die and that’s why my car’s garage button won’t learn the signal.

    Definitely a relatively niche usecase but I have SSH clients, terminal apps, RDP remote access clients, and other networking tools as apps on my phone for quickly messing with things. Very helpful to not need to bring out the PC when I’m fixing my network.

    The ability to VPN into my home network to access my NAS. Honestly being able to access my NAS in general is already great for backups or just so I don’t have to think about what’s physically on my phone.

    With a cheap Bluetooth device I can connect to my car’s diagnostic port (ODBII) and check engine codes. No more trips to the mechanic just to get it diagnosed.











  • I’ve started to skip the mask for small groups for short time periods but I still mask up for the grocery store, and large gathering, and any time I’m in a smaller room with people for a long time.

    I get sick so rarely now, it’s great. And it’s so much less socially exhausting to wear a mask and be able to hide my face. I dont have to take a smile or watch my expressions nearly as much.

    And it helps support my friends who are immunocompromised by normalizing mask wearing.

    I don’t plan to stop for a long while. And I plan to always mask up if I’m sick, even just a cold, to avoid spreading it.




  • The Lemmy app we are using on our phones needs to download content from Lemmy so it can be displayed to us. Lemmy might just have one big file full of links, but that’s annoying to have to write code to handle. Or it might have a folder full of files where each file is a post, but that’s also a bit annoying to write code to manage.

    It (probably) uses a local SQLite database to store all of the cached posts.

    Conceptually, a database is just a place to store things, just like a big text file. The database just handles a lot of the grunt work for you and makes it easier to search, organize, and filter the data.

    So anywhere there is data, there could be a database.


  • I see you got your answer, but I’m adding on for anyone else that comes across this.

    For me, I learned the most when I had a disposable and replaceable system. When I was dual booted I was too scared to touch anything in case it fucked everything up. Once I started poking round on a Pi, LiveUSB, etc it was a lot easier to learn because I could always restart.

    Id start there with something like Mint or Ubuntu. Then set it up in a way where you can easily replace your OS so you can reset it often and fuck around. Then just learn as you go.


  • if you let complexities of a long term vision constantly be injected into the steps to take now, you end up putting the cart before the horse.

    This exactly. Honestly at this moment I don’t really give a shit about long term stability as long as a genocide is happening, but we keep seeing that thrown out as a reason to ignore genocide.

    (Not to mention the arguments of if it’s technically genocide or “just” ethnic cleansing. That’s a problem for the international courts, all that matters now is that whatever it is, it’s too damn close to genocide to be acceptable.)