Bahnd Rollard

Its almost as if they dont pick vice presidents, they pick insurance policies.

There is still a pretty solid divide between us and our technology (for now). We still type on keyboards with our hands and make prosthetics. It gets blury when discussing things through a medium where technology is the means of communication. I could be an AI, you could be a robot, we “humans” already cant really tell the difference most of the time. I think your prediction would hold true when the integration between meat and machine starts being physically indistinguishable.

That is one of the things that irks me so much about the lower 48… The farther south you go, the better the food gets, but the worse off people are…

I was in El Paso for a wedding last year and even a simple road-side BBQ chain was lightyears better than a fancy steakhouse in New England.

Dito, most major outlets and companies that used to do fun things in the past for marketing or for fun have stopped. It used to be my favorite holiday, now adays… Its dry and the humor just isnt there anymore.

Fairphone4

Im jelly of people who can run GrapheneOS, I can lead others to water but can not drink…

Im on there too, been to fanfest a few times. Its a beautiful city. Learned the hard way, you can not survive on beer and hot dogs for 5 days…

Knowing FEMAs relationship with the business, this should be a shock to noone.

Its Cast Iron!!!

Sing me a song about shitty copper.

Better countries have proven they do not need to be the way they are. The EU Shengen area let the policies of the era of empires and kingdoms fall away while preseving a countries identity. The current US system can be described as “cruel by design” and needs to be removed and its facilitators barred from civil service.

Some expirence on some self-hosted VOIP solutions from my EvE online days and I self-host a Teamspeak instance (my nerds like it, get off my lawn).

Mumble in terms of its UI and user expirence, the worst of the major VOIP projects (looks very 2008), however it is by far the best in terms of server stability, plugin compatibility and security. To quote my old EvE admin “Mumble will take the team two weeks to set up correctly, and drive them mad, but once thats done they will not need to touch the config again”. Plus it not requiring a license allows large orgs to use it freely. Ever have a need 2.5k+ VOIP users all trying to talk over eachother? Mumble is the only free application that will handle that without issue.

Teamspeak3 is what I run, and for small communities its perfect. TS5 exists, and the devs keep trying to make “We have Discord at home” and its just a UI fork, they all run the same server backend. As for features, TS3 has the best of ease of set up and granular permissions with API tools to allow for remote or automated managment. For user counts, anything beyond that of a small guild in any game will require a license, they are cheap (I just renewed my 30$ a year license and didnt have to reboot). Its drawbacks are that it struggles after several hundred users (its heavier on server hardware than mumble is) and user accounts with permissions can break the server. Fortunatly settings are managed by a local database so backups of server state and files are easy.

I remember Ventrilo existing, thats about it.

Hardware wise, a new pi should be fine, older models might have issues based on expected user load. Network load is not significant for normal hobbiest user counts, security is not any different than normal homelab internet services.

Let me know if there is anything I can help with.