I remember this too. Somehow, despite all the laptops I installed it on I got VERY lucky and only had a couple of WiFi issues, one totally incompatible laptop, and one that would not boot until I got the boot parameters right. I heard plenty stories from other people though. All that said, it’s so much smoother and easier installing Linux nowadays that the Windows install where I worry the whole time that MS is trying to reverse psychology me into agreeing to sell my unborn children into slavery.

I would check out Recallbox. It’s quite polished feeling and looking. It can run on a raspberry pi, or something more powerful. You mention accessing the files and I liked the SMB access because I could just cut and paste my new ROMs over from the PC or phone. I imagine you could set up a script to do this automatically or just expose a read only SMB server for your friends to access. If your games are older, like Atari or Sega Genesis this would work great. If you have big ROMs like Gamecube or Xbox, then you’ll probably need a different solution since copying entire romsets to the device itself may not be practical.

I have seen a DIY Steam-ish software floating around, hopefully someone pitches in to get you that link as well.

I hope your project goes well!

Same, once I got PWM set up right on my fans, my desktop former gaming PC server has been 90% silent. Even when under load, it only kicks up a notch or two. I’m under the roof, so my summer temps will be the real test.

Thanks for the reply. At this point, I’ve decided I’ll need to try both. Fortunately my old router still works. I just need to make some hardware decisions now as I don’t have any hardware with multiple lan ports to try it out on. I don’t want to buy twice, so I’m trying to figure out what I’m going to need to overshoot my requirements a bit but not go crazy overboard and overspending for unused specs. My current router is the GliNet Flint 2 which has an open-WRT advance mode that I’ve messed with a little bit.

Sounds like you are pretty far along in your networking journey. I can appreciate the vLans and the 10G backbone, but a lot of the hardware you mention is over my head. :D I’d take the miniPC route, but like you, I’d like to attach my 4g router as a failover.

Glad to know I’m not alone! Sometimes it feels like everyone else has either figured it all out, or I’m charting new (and potentially silly) territory and nobody knows wtf I’m doing.

I’ve been doing Linux stuff for a long time, but I was still living under my parent’s roof back then so I never had to network anything, I just had the wifi password. After school, out in the world, I still didn’t have my own network for quite some time. Only in the last few years have I really started to grasp how it works well enough to actually do something useful with that knowledge. I’ll take a look at ipfire too. Luckily my current router is still functioning okay, so I have time to play around and see what software will work for me. Right now I have to make some sort of decision about hardware because I don’t have anything with dual ethernet on hand.

I have the fiber ONT straight from the wall. The tech support guys at my ISP gave me all the details I needed to configure my own current router (GLInet Flint 2). I’ve just been not trusting corporate solutions lately. I’m almost completely degoogled on my phone and the recent router banning drama is encouraging me to do this now instead of later when I had originally wanted to do it.

This is good info. I remember hearing a little bit of that and someone set me straight on DDWRT vs OpenWRT as well. I think I’ll take OPNsense for a spin.

Thanks for the reply.

I have devices I could use, but they’re earmarked for other projects. I’m looking at acquiring hardware specifically for this project. I could acquire it at a garage sale or a classified ads site. I don’t really want to spend more than $350 if I can help it and even then, I have to be able to justify that to myself somehow. (since that almost enough to add another 2TB of SSDs to my server). Having said that, if the features I want are only present in pricier hardware, I want to find that out now.

I have a 4g WiFi router I carry around when I travel that I call “the hocky puck”. It also has an ethernet port, so when I’m home, I take the battery out and attach it to my router as a backup in case the fiber fails. If I want to do the same thing on OPNsense, I would need to add an expansion card with more network ports, right? That would steer me from miniPCs to barebones router hardware or a small-form-factor PC build where I could add as many NICS as I have PCI slots.

Does wanting a 2nd WAN pretty much rule out mini-PCs for me?

Even in my God Tier build-dreams, I only have 2WANS a LAN and a management LAN. :D

They should have sent the manager and crew to the thrift store with a corporate CC and a box truck for furniture. Instead it’s bland, depressed, “I can’t believe it’s not cardboard™.”

Chipotle is still the king of food poisoning. They have a proven track record in toilet-related war crimes going back many years. Guess I’m adding BK to my no-go list now too.

I’m happy to drink a $2 coffee from the gas station (probably a half gallon of it 🙂) and set the remaining $7 aside. Then again, I only get drip coffee and not any of the milkshake-y stuff Starbucks specializes in.

Yeah, America would rather enforce with tickets than with good engineering and reasonable rules.

My city, medium-sized and in the US, used to post 85th percentile speeds and quartiles whenever they did speed studies. Sometimes they overrode it, rarely did they explain why, but at least they showed that they had gone out and observed that actual section of road. We have a different mayor and probably a different council at this point and I haven’t seen a speed study on the city website in some time, though they seem to be paving and doing a better job of making car friendly and bike friendly routes interact better. I am a firm believer that road design is 2/3 of how people drive and only the tiniest portion is fear of enforcement. We should keep in mind though that speed doesn’t have to be the enemy. Germany has speed too, but their 30kph neighborhood roads don’t look like wide open airport runways. That’s why I’m baffled by the freeway speed cams some states are doing. The freeway is statistically the safest place for an American to drive (except maybe on their gaming console). Suburbia and rural roads are much less safe because of higher speeds, intersections, 2 way traffic, and unprotected turns across oncoming lanes.

To your point about little towns, I’m still irritated with Wyoming State Patrol in Rawlins, WY for giving my a ticket for passing a Semi at 79 in a 70 on a clear and sunny day, safely, and carefully. It’s just the ticket lottery. Set a low enough limit and you can pull over Mother-fucking-Theresa for breaking the law.

They’re building to a place where they could do this remotely and that’s ripe for abuses of power. The AI will see that your social karma is low and use parallel construction to develop a reason for suspending your driving privileges effective immediately. Appealing it will probably involve talking to an endless string of clankers on the phone. Ultimately there will be no humans in the chain to accept any kind of responsibility.

Yeah, Cities Skylines had traffic that was reactive to design. I’ve played some CS2, and while some things are improved (like lane connection), it feels like the traffic is just simulated sprites based on a traffic congestion variable for the area or something. Upgrading roads sometimes helps, but providing better routes doesn’t always help like you would expect. It feels very disconnected and rewards linear progression rather than skillful or smart gameplay. I still play CS1 and I check in on CS2 once or twice a year to see if it still sucks. I did enjoy the bike patch to some degree, but the gameplay in general just seems artificial and lame. CS1 may be old with mediocre graphics, but it’s still a 9/10 game in my opinion and you can buy in cheap nowadays to get caught up on DLCs and such. I have nearly everything except the radio packs. The menus are inconsistent and the way they organize things doesn’t always make intuitive sense. I think they would be better off recreating CS1 on a more modern engine than trying to reinvent a masterpiece. For me CS2 was the biggest disappointment of the gaming decade. With that said, lots of games sucked on release. Fallout 76 grew into it’s shoes, Stalker 2 was panned at release and is now much more highly regarded. I hope CS2 finds its way back into sync with the community, but I’ll be enjoying CS1 and other games until that happens. Thankfully MS hasn’t completely destroyed Minecraft. I practice city design on a much smaller scale on there (more “place making”, less traffic management, more roleplay, less mechanics).

I can’t see the pic in your comment, but I am gonna guess Broadway and Lincoln between 19th and 20th?

Interestingly enough, Denver has 3 main grids:

The range and township grid as the typical NS/EW grid, the Araria grid by DU which is largely built over, and the downtown grid, the last two of which are aligned to Cherry Creek and the Platte River, though I’m not certain which one to which waterway. If it wasn’t for one-ways, that area would be screwed up beyond belief. As it stands, it just looks a little odd and everyone needs to try to pick their lanes in advance. :D

It was my dream to throw one of these off the theater roof and watch it go splat. We never did that, but we did do syrup shots.

Agreed. To elaborate:

Sure, the developer is a bit of a Judas for complying in advance, but our anger should be aimed at the people with power and reach promoting these laws in the political sphere (the metaphorical Pharisees).

To those saying “it’s just a field”, please consider that the timing is a more significant statement than the addition of the field itself. Why now? If you don’t support fascism, don’t build the frameworks that support it and don’t let fascists use YOUR platforms or software to make THEIR point, make them fork it and let them fail. I don’t think many members of the senate or house would be capable of adding this themselves. I’d be surprised if they could code hello world in TI-83 BASIC. If they ask you to do it, stub your toe and call in sick. Make it really shitty. Leave in a bunch of bugs that crash the program then blame the age attestation feature to turn users against it. Use copywrited code that they’ll have to remove later due to license incompatibilities. Report your boss to HR for every indiscretion that you might have normally overlooked. Or do nothing; that’s still better than complying in advance.

We have to break the narrative that this is inevitable. There’s enough of us, with concentrated enough knowledge and influence (aka, you folks are a bunch if nerds and I love it!), that if we collectively stop, the whole train stops or derails.

I hear you 100%. This sort of shit comes back with a different name each year. I am SOOOO sick of voting down abortion bans every election cycle.

26 US states, including mine, have initiative or referendum processes allowing citizens to place an issue on the ballot. In some states, that’s how the anti-abortion laws are ending up on the ballot, but we an use their own tools against them. In many states, these initiatives failed so we know we have a minimum of 51% support if it’s a law, and at least 33% support if it’s an amendment (depending on that state and their rules). Polling shows, an even larger percentage, most Americans, do not support these laws. The numbers are on our side.

https://ballotpedia.org/States_with_initiative_or_referendum

If we can collect enough signatures, the voters can put an end to this. If we add it to the state constitution, where the process allows this, we can completely prevent laws doing this from being considered because the only thing that can overrule a constitutional amendment is another constitutional amendment.

I’m gauging interest to do this in Colorado to foil age attestation laws, but we could potentially end the back and forth bullshit in multiple states.

There are worse hobbies. There’s also no shortage of items to try.

Ideas:

• eyeglasses
• braces
• bra underwire
• Freddy’s hand
• Edward Scissorhand’s hand
• fake flowers with a wire core
• bread bag ties
• beer cans
• tire tread reinforcement
• a knight in chainmail
• Christmas tree tinsel
• photoframe
• tie clip
• tooth fillings
• a bicycle
• a tricycle
• chain link fence
• chastity belt
• hammer
• aluminum wrapped baked potato