dogcow

> NetBSD is IMHO the most beginner friendly nix out there.

I'd argue that OpenBSD would be worthy of that title, too. It is incredibly easy, elegant, and simple. The thoughtfulness that goes into all the base system utilities in OpenBSD is so appreciated.

FreeBSD is kinda somewhere in between Open/NetBSD and Linux in my opinion. Their docs are OK, but the handbook leaves a lot to be desired, and they don't seem to have nearly nice little quality of life utilities that OpenBSD has out of the box.

That's not really sufficient. It could still phone home if it falls back to IP addresses. You should be blocking it at the firewall level, not just with DNS.

But me personally, I wouldn't ever connect any of these devices to my network.

I was a long-time Fastmail customer for probably about 10 years. I had all my family members using it, but just finished migrating everyone away.

They changed their pricing plans several years back, but kept me on the grandfathered pricing, which was very reasonable. Then earlier this year, they more than doubled my annual price, at which point I felt it was no longer worth it. At a certain point, e-mail is e-mail.

For those who just want simple IMAP e-mail hosting, I can recommend mxroute.com and purelymail.com - I've used both, and both work well, and are very reasonably priced. The owner of mxroute.com can be a bit abrasive to uh, put it politely, but to his credit he is very dedicated and responsive. The community surrounding purelymail.com is also responsive and helpful.

I'd encourage everyone to take it a step further and self-host your own IMAP server. Doing this is very simple; use a script like getmail[1] to pull your new messages from your e-mail host and deliver them to your local IMAP server. If you have a VPN set up on your phone and laptops, you can access your e-mail everywhere. Been doing this for years, and it has been wonderful knowing that I have full sovereignty over my entire e-mail history.

[1] https://getmail6.org/

As a long time FreeBSD user, the Foundation has really failed to impress me in recent years. I lost faith in them back in 2018 during the "code of conduct" fiasco, when they wasted Foundation funds on a consultant for a code of conduct that nobody really asked for. Haven't donated since -- instead I redirected my donations to the OpenBSD project, which while less practical in many scenarios, is a technically superior product in my eyes.

That said, I am glad to see them focusing their efforts on something useful, like laptop compatibility. Regardless, this is a really dumb post. 10 minutes a day is not "daily driving."

Yes, same here. Very frustrating. It is almost as if the powers that be don't want lowly netizens controlling their own destiny.

For those who feel that self-hosting limits music discovery, a more traditional option is "radio" (traditional in the sense that you listen to a curated playlist made by someone else).

Radio Paradise [1] and Radio Swiss Pop/Jazz/Classic [2] are two great ad-free ways to discover new music. There are probably tons of others out there.

[1] https://www.radioparadise.com/ [2] https://www.radioswisspop.ch/en

Or, more likely, we're seeing the result of a generation growing up glued to cell phone screens and crappy social media every waking moment from their youngest years?

Luckily, this can all be achieved using a Wi-Fi or (even better) a Z-Wave thermostat that is 100% locally-controlled using something like Home Assistant or any number of other solutions.

This is spot on. Nicely written! I think many people forget what a great, unique, and exciting time those decades were. (Or many simply did not experience them).

There was a palpable sense of nearly unlimited potential for a brighter future, powered by technology.

As someone who experienced those decades, present day feels like a dystopia in comparison.

Not really true on modern digital radio systems. They are AES-256, but the voice frames are encrypted right after the vocoder does its thing, then the voice data is dropped into the stream just as if it were clear voice. It's all wrapped in the same same digital protocol (like P25 or numerous others), so the signal is very distinct in that encrypted and clear communications both sound the same to someone listening to the raw audio.

Pre-shared, static keys are unfortunately quite common. However, the P25 standard does provide for re-keying over they air through a process known as OTAR (Over The Air Re-keying).

To put it very simply, radios communicate with a central Key Management Facility (KMF) using a special key (UKEK, Unique Key Encryption Key) to securely transport the new key material. There's more to it than that, of course, but these features are heavily used by the feds and also by larger state and local systems -- because manually re-keying each radio is a huge pain.

Yeah, I know about the workarounds, but that just kind of defeats the purpose for me. Also, I've read comments from folks stating they were having a hard time getting a larger prefix from Comcast using PD... don't know how universally true that is.

Using DNS to resolve everything solves part of the problem, but firewall rules are another issue. The router would need to have the capability to update everything dynamically when the prefix changes. I think this in the works for pfSense, but I'm not sure if its actually supported yet. It looks like you might have to mess around with some 3rd-party script to make it work.

I guess I'm just generally disappointed that the whole process seems unnecessarily messy. I don't have a v6-compatible ISP right now anyway. I was thinking about trying a tunnel, but I'm not seeing the benefit in it right now.

Thanks, I appreciate your explanation. I was aware that there are workarounds, but to me that defeats one of the core tenants of IPv6, which is that we're supposed to be doing away with this NAT and NAT-like nonsense by giving everything a globally rotatable IP.

When I was reading up on everything, I also learned that your router can request a bigger prefix, but I ran across several posts from various folks stating they could only get a /64 from Comcast no matter what they tried, so I'm not sure how universally supported DHCPv6-PD requests are.

Please offer a good TrackPoint keyboard. Please.

I recently decided that it was high time to stop ignoring IPv6 after 30 years of computing and actually learn how it is supposed to work.

So I started digging in, and there's definitely a lot to like.

But I see two big problems that are showstoppers in my opinion, at least for my home network (not even considering the fact that very few residential ISPs even support v6 at this point):

1. Generally speaking, the IPs of your LAN are based on the prefix assigned by the ISP. Most residential ISPs don't offer static prefixes. This means that every time your prefix changes, the IPs of all your devices on your LAN change. Seems like this "feature" was developed in a more idealistic era when people probably thought everyone would be getting static IPv6 addresses, since shortages would never be an issue. Unfortuantely, they failed to foresee the fact that most major ISPs are terrible, greedy organizations that either outright refuse to offer static assignments, or continue treating them as if they were scarce IPv4 resources, charging a premium or requiring business-class service to even get them.

2. The ISPs that do support v6, like Comcast/Xfinity in the USA, are only allocating one /64 prefix. This means you can only have one subnet (VLAN) on your LAN! Why are they being so stingy?

I would love to migrate to IPv6, but these two issues alone make it feel like a clown show for home users.

This is such a dumb problem with IPv6. Unless ISP stop being crappy and start offering static prefixes to regular residential subscribers, then I just don't see how v6 would ever be practical. This seems like a big oversight in the design and implementation of v6.

Doesn't using ULAs kind of defeat the purpose (or one of the main intents) of IPv6, which is every device having a globally rotatable IP address? It kind of puts us right back in the IPv4 with NAT situation, only with longer, uglier addresses.

I personally think it is absurd that the ISPs that do actually support IPv6 are being so difficult and stingy about assigning static v6 prefixes.

This is amazing. Thank you so much to the authors for putting the time into this and sharing it. I would love a way to download a local archive of music like this.

Also, I hope this site doesn't disappear if/when the rather unpredictable .tk TLD operator decides to do something dumb.

This is nothing more than another data harvesting scheme thinly veiled as a useful service.

Anyone looking for a commercial-free, listener-supported "radio" station would be remiss not to check out https://radioparadise.com -- it is truly a rare-gem in our over-commercialized world.

And we can't talk about music streaming on the Internet without mentioning one of the originals -- https://somafm.com -- still going strong.

I support both of these stations because their "business model" is so refreshing, very much in the spirit of the "Old Internet," which I miss dearly.

Somewhat related:

Previous, an emulator of NeXT boxes.

https://previous.unixdude.net/

Came here to echo this. Also, it always amazes me how many people respond to warnings like this (as seen in this thread as well) saying lower-resolution displays look just fine. I returned a M2 Mac Mini solely because it looked so awful on all of my monitors -- I tried 2 different 32" 2k displays, plus a handful of 24" displays. Everything was fuzzy and awful looking. Not something that could be tolerated or ignored... Completely unusable. I feel like this fact is not well known enough.

The fact that so many seem to tolerate "low-res" or "mid-res" displays on the current M-series Macs is really puzzling to me... maybe my eyesight isn't as bad as I thought it was and everyone else's is a lot worse!?

This new M4 mini is tempting enough that I might try a Mac again... but this time I am definitely going to have to budget for a 4k/5k display.

It's a shame that the .us locality namespace and delegated manager infrastructure has been allowed to languish. GoDaddy (and Neustar previously) have intentionally made it difficult or impossible to register new locality domains under namespaces managed by them (read: the majority of namespaces).

The delegated manager system truly represented the distributed, decentralized nature of the old Internet. That said, it is not completely dead; there are still a handful of delegated managers out there, and you can even convince some of them to "register" a new domain for you in the locality namespace!

Doesn't matter - Fastmail's response is just PR bunk.

Two big isues:

- Fastmail pays taxes to the Australian government. By supporting Fastmail, you are supporting this lunacy indirectly.

- Their rebuttal revolves around requiring a warrant for any of this, but what good is that if the process if flimsy and there is basically no friction/verification involved in obtaining a warrant?

I am a long time customer and I love Fastmail's service. But Australia has just gone nuts, and I think this is the last straw. I'll be working on a plan to slowly migrate elsewhere.

Thanks for this.

Additionally, it might be beneficial for folks to file complaints with the Washington, D.C. Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs [1], since the Internet Society is incorporated in D.C., and with the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services [2], since its principle place of business is Virginia and is registered as a foreign corporation there.

[1] https://dcra.dc.gov/ [2] http://www.vdacs.virginia.gov/about-agency-directory.shtml

I've been a user of SDF for many years, and even though it may be irrelevant form a technical standpoint, even with all its faults I am thankful for its continued existence.

At least in the case of SDF, it can be a "social" community just as much as a platform for various hosted services.

It features a custom BBS of sorts called 'bboard' - which lets users post messages about any and all conceivable topics - from Unix to ham radio to philosophy and old telephones.

It also has its own chatroom called 'com' in addition to various channels on its own irc.sdf.org server.

There is an active ham radio "club" within SDF, and there are regular "partyline" voice chats (conference calls) offered through its VoIP service.

It also hosts a huge gopher/phlog community - where users not only post interesting and unique content, but often make a point of writing posts in response to other users' posts.

As someone who first got online in the mid-1990s via AOL on a Macintosh, I largely missed out on the early days of the Internet, before it came to be dominated by the WWW. I truly appreciate SDF because it is a nice space for folks to get a small taste of what life used to be like on the net, before it became dominated by commercial interests, relentless invasion of privacy, and proprietary services.

I'd encourage all to create an account and take a look around. The one-time $36 donation to get lifetime ARPA membership status is well worth it, in my opinion.

I am sharing my experience because I know how awful sleep problems can be.

I'm in my 30s and eat what many consider a very healthful diet - virtually no sugar, just veggies, high quality fats and proteins, and minimal fruit. I spend 7-9 hours in bed; yet wake up feeling exhausted every. single. day. I'd love to exercise, but I'm too continuously tired to get started.

Melatonin, when taken via dissolving sublingual tablet (1-3 mg), makes me feel a bit sleepier, but doesn't often keep me asleep through the night. When swallowed via a capsule, it makes me feel like I've been hit by a bus for the entirety of the next day, even if I slept the night before.

My own research led me to magnesium glycinate, which helped to some degree (maybe I wasn't taking enough?), but didn't solve the problem. My biggest trouble is falling asleep - I can be dead tired, but as soon as I'm in bed, my mind goes nuts, and I lie awake for hours. Then, by the time my body is in nice deep sleep, it's time to get up, and the deep sleep is disrupted.

I recently had an appointment with my physician (who practices integrative medicine and is not your typical MD), and he told me to try a relatively new formulation of magnesium called Magnesium L-Threonate, commercially known as Magtein.

It is apparently the best type of magnesium for crossing the blood-brain barrier, and thus, likely the best at addressing sleep issues.

I've been on it for about a week now (taking 1000mg 2 hours before bed and 1000mg upon waking in the morning), and have slept better in the last two nights than I have for a long time. Here's to hoping it keeps working!

I also use a couple other hacks to help me sleep - at night, about an hour after the sun sets, I wear "blue blocking" glasses (the UVEX S0360X fit nicely over my prescription glasses). Sounds (and looks) goofy, but for me it creates a noticeably stronger "sleep pressure" than I'd experience without them. I also wear a mask over my eyes when sleeping, to block out any ambient light, and I just started making an effort to listen to music while waiting to fall asleep. I think all of these things help to some degree.

Also, check out the book "Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker.

XMPP - federated instant messaging

Check out the search engine at http://wiby.me

From their about page:

Search engines like Google are indispensable, able to find answers to all of your technical questions; but along the way, the fun of web surfing was lost. In the early days of the web, pages were made primarily by hobbyists, academics, and computer savvy people about subjects they were interested in. Later on, the web became saturated with commercial pages that overcrowded everything else. All the personalized websites are hidden among a pile of commercial pages. Google isn't great at finding those gems, its focus is on finding answers to technical questions, and it works well. But finding things you didn't know you wanted to know, which was the real joy of web surfing, no longer happens. In addition, many pages today are created using bloated scripts that add slick cosmetic features in order to mask the lack of content available on them. Those pages contribute to the blandness of today's web.

The wiby search engine is building a web of pages as it was in the earlier days of the internet.

Gopher is a great protocol. I never really used it back in its heyday; I'm not sure I knew it existed at the time (I didn't really get "real" Internet access until 1995 or so). I recently discovered it after having similar sentiments as the author of this article concerning the state of the WWW.

After you get your Gopher client set up (lynx in the terminal works great), a good starting point is gopher://sdf.org

There are many active "phlogs" published on SDF.org; there is also an aggregator that tracks some 20-odd phlogs at: gopher://i-logout.cz/1/en/bongusta (though it seems to be down at the time of this posting).

The "Gopherspace" is a refreshing wormhole -- with a surprising amount of present-day activity -- into the Internet of yesteryear. I highly recommend checking it out and perhaps publishing your own content on Gopher if you're tired of the dumpster fire that is the WWW.