I’ve already been creating a unique email address for nearly every service, for many years. That probably complicates something like Incogni, which is a good point, thanks. It’s also amusing and telling when the phishing emails start coming into equifax@mydomain (true story).

This is a very helpful anecdote, thanks!

Yes! Read a book out loud, preferably to your kids, recording each chapter as a file. Then use m4b-tool to combine all the chapter files into a full audiobook.

They have updated it so that you don’t need to use your phone number as the identifier you share with other people so that they can message you. You can now give out a username and your new contact will not be able to learn your phone number.

As for Signal itself knowing what your phone number is, I don’t see that as much of a problem, because they intentionally don’t know anything useful about you. They publish redacted subpoenas and their responses so you can see just how little data they can provide. They don’t know who your contacts are so there’s no social graph to be drawn.

Signal is actually trying very diligently to pioneer a novel financial model for a sustaining long term. Here’s a lemmy post from a few month ago about a Wired interview with Signal Foundation’s president covering it in some depth (and a current archive link to the article). They seem to be one of the few actually good entities left in a world of surveillance capitalism and pervasive domestic government espionage.

Whether they succeed or not in the long term is certainly still unclear, but I expect they have many years of financial runway remaining.

Traditional lithium rock ore mining is a dirty, polluting process that also uses huge amounts of fresh water. But that’s not all necessarily inherent. There are several projects around the Salton Sea in California that promise not only to extract lithium cleanly, but also to generate a lot of GHG-free electricity along the way, because the ore is hot salty corrosive water extracted from deep underground. optimistic podcast episode 1 podcast 2 website article

Water Cycle 101: The oceans are salty because rain water has been flushing salt downstream for billions of years. Salt also collects in endorheic basins such as the Great Salt Lake and Mono Lake, for the same reason. Rain clouds form primarily from evaporation of ocean water, which leaves behind slightly increased salinity, although its effect is widely geographically distributed.

There’s a difference between that distributed evaporation and the concentrated salinity increase of effluent from a reverse osmosis desalination plant or a hypothetical hydrogen plant, but the basic answer is yes, leave the salt in the ocean. It will be fine.

Good thing people have been able to use untreated ocean water as the feedstock. It looks like it needs to be scaled up, but the economic advantage should help incentivize that (seawater is free; treated water is expensive!).

It’s about the exact combination of extensions you have installed, along with all of the other info that a nosy website can obtain from you (installed fonts, User Agent string including exact version numbers, etc). It doesn’t come down to any one particular piece of info, but every bit adds to the overall picture. Here is a good overview and their main page runs an active test on your browser.

I needed this, thanks! For the lazy, it’s here.

https://flagsforgood.com/pages/about-us

I was on a flight that passed over Los Angeles last night [OC]

Second this, including buying from Costco. I don’t love the Lorex interface, but they’ve been around for a long time and can’t really compete on the modem Ring-style features so they’re now advertising the privacy benefits of their local storage.

PoE (Power over Ethernet) cameras are the way to go, connecting the camera wires directly to the NVR box, which doesn’t itself need to be connected to your network. The NVR box has a hard drive and an HDMI port. If you do optionally connect it to the network (but just don’t), then their app will facilitate connecting to your box either locally or over the internet so that you can stream your video directly from your hard drive, not their cloud.

If you want it protected against power outages, you just put the NVR on a UPS and you’re done.

Of course, if a burglar finds your NVR and takes it, then all of your footage is gone.

It sure says gal there but based on your annual chart and common billing in the US I’m guessing the actual billing unit is 1 HCF, which is 100 cubic feet or 748 gallons. You could call and ask your utility company to be sure.

go through the normal login process and login with empty credentials. It will prompt you to connect as guest.

Thanks for this tip - I never would have thought to try that if I hadn’t found this comment through a search. It’s a very unintuitive process, and it also seems buggy (I can’t do guest browsing on a server where I’m also logged into an account; instead of the guest option I get an error message demanding that I supply a username and password).

Have you considered making the guest browsing workflow more obvious at the join/login screen? Or perhaps better yet, providing a mechanism to see the list of default communities a server recommends? By that I mean whatever shows up in the communities list when browsing a server anonymously (such as viewing https://vger.app/posts/sh.itjust.works on the web).

But even that wouldn’t cover what I really want, which is to see a list of all communities on a server, so that if I notice one interesting federated community I can easily browse what other communities exist on the server that might also pique my interest. Maybe the thing I want is being able to put an empty “@server.tld” into the search box and be shown all communities registered there.

Why have you never been able to do it? I set up a full mail system years ago on a Xen/Linux VPS with stuff like Postfix, maildrop, Courier IMAP, a custom set of MySQL tables for aliases and such, and at one point migrated my TLS from CACert to LetsEncrypt. I enjoyed some aspects of the huge pain in the ass that all of that was, and having it work nicely was great. Spinning up a new email alias was easy and free, so I created a new one for damn near every site I interacted with, which later turned into a form of lock in having to continue running my server.

The continual server maintenance was a pain in the ass, requiring me to remember in substantial detail how it all worked so that I could appropriately integrate new things I had to learn like SPF and DMARC. I’m glad to have had some detailed sysadmin experience, but I was so glad in the end to finally migrate away from all that and just pay Fastmail instead.

I still have nearly the same flexibility with Fastmail and my custom domains, but they’re the ones that need to do all the maintenance. I can’t scale across unlimited domains for the same zero marginal cost, but I can make it work for a reasonable price with a few domains and scale arbitrarily within that. I’m sure there are other hosts out there that do a similarly good job, and Fastmail hasn’t been without its own troubles, but it’s been a net win for me.

I don’t recommend running your own server. I won’t do it again. I do recommend building an army of custom aliases all at your own custom domain(s).

Here’s a ~30 year old excellent law article on jury nullification by James Joseph Duane, who is also somewhat well known for his excellent “Don’t talk to police” lecture on YouTube. Click through the SSL warning in that first site to get the pdf - I think that’s better than the JSTOR library-login-wall link but you can see it there too.

It’s a pretty comprehensive positive treatment on jury nullification, with a bunch of history and context, well worth your time.

Leaders at Allied Universal, which provides security services for 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies, said their phones were “ringing off the hook” on Wednesday with potential clients. Allied covers a wide spectrum of services — including stationing guards outside offices, chauffeuring executives, surveilling their homes and tracking their families.

Protecting a chief executive full time costs roughly $250,000 a year, said Glen Kucera, who runs Allied’s enhanced protection services.

NYT article

For $4.2 million, the administration had just sold off the first 561 acres of Blue and Gold, an estimated 83,259 trees.

They’re selling off rights to log (miscategorized) old growth forest for an average of Fifty. Fucking. Dollars. Per. Tree. That’s damn near free.

Actually I’ll agree with you that a spreadsheet could do a lot, but that’s a niche solution. Building a good one requires a fair bit of technical know how, and even using one well requires a lot of understanding.