Building off of this, the PDF standard supports all sorts of craziness. It can have embedded math and logic similar to excel files, to the point there’s templates available for banks which will automatically calculate entire loans (including weird ones like balloon mortgages and variable interest rate stuff) without leaving Adobe Reader, and the recent Doom PDF and Linux PDF projects exploit the fact that pdfs support embedded javascript.

There’s also an actual market for enterprise PDF templates like the banking ones I described with automatic calculations and whatnot. So some people literally make their living selling PDFs to businesses that businesses actually use

I used it briefly in a class around 2015ish. It worked about as well as any Adobe software does, but honestly it was really difficult to use and quite frankly it probably would take just as long to learn the HTML and CSS skills necessary to make a decent website as it would to learn how to make one in Dreamweaver

Randall’s done several about climate change, more back when climate change denial was more widespread

https://xkcd.com/1321/ Cold https://xkcd.com/1379/ 4.5 Degrees https://xkcd.com/1732/ Earth Temperature Timeline https://xkcd.com/2500/ Global Temperature Over My Lifetime

Or just check the tag for “politics” on explainXKCD. Randall’s endorsed political candidates before as well as generally shown a general libertarian and later left-leaning bent

Oh also this one relatively recently was pretty fun

https://xkcd.com/2515/ Vaccine Research

I’m not OP, just a rando chiming in

Personally, I don’t trust 13th/14th gen chips period. I’m sure I’m overreacting but I’ve simply seen too many dead computers due to Intel’s CPU bugs in last 12 months that no amount of microcode updates will make me feel comfortable selecting one of those processors, especially when it’s my own money on the line

Y’know what that was terrible writing on my part. Where I put “physical vlan” I just meant specifying each port be a specific vlan rather than a trunk port that has multiple clans on in

I should probably proofread more and write less when tired

Physical wire tapping would be mostly mitigated by setting every port on the switch to be a physical vlan, especially if the switch does the VLAN routing. Sure someone could splice an ethernet cable, which would really only be mitigated by 802.1x like you already said, but every part of this threat model makes zero sense. You ultimately have to trust something (and apparently in OP’s case that’s a third party VPN provider that charges extra to not block LAN access while connected and they remain entirely on the free tier of)

But at the very least, not trusting everything on the network is a very enterprise kind of threat model, so using standard enterprise practices of network segmentation, firewalling, and potentially MAC-binding and 802.1x if so desired isn’t a bad idea, if for no other reason than it might lead to a career in network administration. And honestly I mostly want to get OP to not think of VPNs like a magical silver bullet and see what other tools exist in the toolbox

Wait you’re seriously using a free VPN?

Sounds far more likely that either someone misunderstood that residential IPs change frequently/may be shared by multiple subscribers or the ISP made an error when responding to a subpeana and provided the incorrect IP. Unfortunately both are all too common with privacy enforcement

If you really think the ISP router is snooping and can’t by bypassed you could simply double-NAT your network with a trusted router and call it a day. Much less VPNing and much less unusual decisions of trust and threat model involved then

But supposing you absolutely do not want to tack on additional costs, then the only solution I see that remains is to set up a private VPN network, one which only connects your trusted devices. This would be secure when on your I trusted LAN, but would be unavailable when awat from home.

Traditionally this would be performed by creating a dedicated network of trusted devices. Most commonly via a VLAN for ease of configuration. Set the switch ports that the trusted devices are connected to to use that vlan and badabing badaboom you’re there. For external access using Tailscale or one of the many similar services/solutions (such as headscale, netbird, etc.) with either the client on every device or using subnet routing features to access your trusted network, and of course configure firewalls as desired

Generally desktop hardware is surprisingly power efficient, especially with lower-midrange components. Right now my home server is running on an ewaste HP Elitedesk.

For software, I’d really go for a config that uses ZFS over EXT4 for the data storage. ZFS is so battle-tested that anything you might find you want or need to fix or change, someone else has already documented the same situation multiple times over. Personally I went with a config like Apalrd’s with using proxmox for a stable host OS with good management and to create the zfs pool, then a container running cockpit for creating and managing the shares.

Currently that server has a 800GB Intel Datacenter SSD for boot and VM storage, and 2x 4TB HDDs in a ZFS mirror for NAS storage, an with a i5-4590 it’s running 6 Minecraft servers via Crafty Controller, Jellyfin, the Samba shares and I’ve spun up other random servers and VMs as desired/needed without trouble. Basically all of the services which run 24/7 are in LXCs because running Debian VMs on my Debian host seems too redundant for my tastes.

LLMs have been trained so heavily on Linux documentation that you can even have it hallucinate a Linux terminal at you!

The “support” most importantly includes security updates. You better bet every hacking group has been working at finding fresh zero days for Windows 10 and is stockpiling them to start hammering any PCs that can’t be upgraded this October

I’ve just been using the site in my browser for the couple of years or so I’ve been on Lemmy. I’ve thought about trying one of the apps but meh. The web interface is so well mobile-optimized as it is

I’ve talked before about how hilarious Verac’s Brassard, a pretty dang good piece of Armor from RuneScape is. Visually it’s a giant shoulder plate with a couple of leather straps to hold it in place, but it’s somehow a very competent armor stat-wise especially when considering the cost to purchase it or work to acquire it as a drop. (The wiki page indicates it’s basically useless, but back in the day it was a common budget selection for armor because anything better costs at least quadruple, if not orders of magnitude more than what the brassard would cost)

It hilariously has more coverage on the feminine model than on the masculine model

See I’m able to find comedy in the boob armor, but I’d much prefer to see feminine armor be designed to look equally as epic as the masculine armor designs

I’ve been listening to the audiobooks of the Witcher series and honestly it’s a series far more about Ciri than it is about Geralt. Garalt is only important because of his connection via destiny to Ciri (and of course he was the main character of the short stories that preceded the longform books) but as Ciri grew up and became capable of protecting herself he became less important until even destiny stopped caring about Geralt.

Also Ciri never received the full Witcher mutations because the process for performing the mutations was lost not long after Geralt became a Witcher. She received a partial mutation via a witcher’s diet at Ker Moren (i imagine that’s like HRT for trans people in that the hormones are what does most of the heavy lifting, and the surgeries just round out the transition) but that’s it. The rest is all her being a bad-ass on her own. I’m excited to play as her and see the kinds of bad-assery and moral quagmires she finds herself the center of

That’s one of the features Google should have stolen from Cyanogen/LineageOS long ago which had permissions differentiated between precise location and approximate

There’s a double-i in “settings” in the documentation screenshot

Yeah there’s a reason I didn’t even call that one out and just called it a bait. It’s in flathub, frequently featured in flathub, and in the same article they spoke with a nonprofit that stated they preload older computers with Linux Mint now, which has a graphical software center that covers both Flathub and the Ubuntu repos