Traditionally I’ve been running lighter desktops like opebox, xfce, or lmde. Last couple of years I’ve been using MATE with good results.

In my country that would cost me 20 dollars

The first RAM I bought (SIPP for a 386-16 IIRC) was $50/MB. Jay-sus.

part of Lincoln National Forest closed due to the the fires near Ruidoso.

I saw that on the news. Now the burn scars are causing runoff flooding. :-(

The closure notice described the designated area for closure in such a way it was very hard to understand and visualize

The NF districts really could do a better job of it. At least have an English major read the GIS wonk’s writeup before publishing.

We moved from Fort Stanton/Snowy River Cave NCA

That site is a gem; I try to hit it in spring/fall when I pass through. Too bad the cave is closed because of white nose.

BTW, water fills are free at the nearby paid campsite if one asks the host. Used to be a day use fee for it but they removed that spigot a couple years ago.

Sorry to hear it didn’t work.

nowadays Mint is Ubuntu with sane default settings that will run out of the box

There’s also an official version of Mint based on Debian (LMDE)

What’s on your “Everyday Carry” USB stick?

• scans of my DL and other licenses
• scan of my DD214
• system rescue ISO
• a TEMP dir with random things I need in the short term
• portable apps versions of putty, WinSCP, etc.

If employee vehicles are in danger perhaps the employer (or property owner) could hire a security detail? Might present this as a benefit to them to keep customers from getting scared off by crime?

I worked at a place in a ratty part of time once. Literal crackheads and prostitutes wandering through our lot. After a couple break-ins the company put up a fence.

people are starting to catch onto my patterns and hover around my vehicle like vultures. Please tell me the best security system you know of.

A free first step would be to have no observable pattern. And/or leaving that general area if possible.

I would think about the actual threat model and what I could do about it. If someone steals your doodad with an airtag on it are you going to find it and take it back from them?

Do normal people who don’t do this stuff for a living use Linux now, outside handheld gaming devices?

I run into folks using linux fairly often in tech hobbies. Ham operators, DIY solar folk, people dorking around with a RasPi, etc. And some Normals who want a lighter experience than Win.

Last dedicated windows box I ran at home was Windows NT 4, IIRC. Last time I had to use it at work was Win7 (?) before I retired. I do have a Win7 virtual somewhere around here I spin up every couple years to run something obscure I can’t get to run in WINE.

Was it mainly a hobbyist thing at the time

Yes, I’d say so. Lots of tech geeks were playing with it but no Normals. Getting audio running was not always pleasant…

I picked up a solar garden light from walmart. I pop the hood and trap the light in the lid so the light is under the hood and the minipanel outside it. I haven’t had a problem since then, but it it could be coincidence, or my being more careful scouting for mouseholes before pitching camp.

I put it under a secondary cover and used it for my outside DC outlet, and replaced my external solar panel outlet with a CNLINKO LP-28 2-Pin IP67 Waterproof Connector rated up to 50A.

That connector looks interesting. It addresses one of my unstated concerns, the panel wires pulling down on the connector. This one looks like it has enough “neck” to relieve the strain. If I were doing the van again I’d mount all the inlets in one place under a secondary cover as you describe.

When I was in the army the S1 desk jockeys were using dedicated word processors with 8" floppies. Get off my lawn! :-)

I have Visible (Verizon MVNO) for $25/month. I put the SIM in an LTE router I got off amazon (open box) for $42.

Could my 10 year old SDF account still exist?

Mine does. I finally remembered to log back in and there she is…

Caveat: the hostname had changed; I signed up at lonestar.sdf.org IIRC (no longer extant) and now it is on freeshell.org

I found my notes from ten years ago so I know what my username was

Another caveat: I think usernames were truncated to 8 chars in that time period. Don’t know if that’s the case now or not, or if extra chars are thrown away anyhow.

Wireguard self hosting

I parsed this as Wireguard self-loathing and thought “that’s a little harsh”. :-)

Is there a good online tool for calculating the cosign of solar Zenith

There are an online calculators like this one from NOAA. This fork adds the ability to update the time with a click rather than manually. There are others but I haven’t played with them much.

Since I travel constantly I’ve been on casual lookout for an app that does the calcs for us based on local time / position but I haven’t seen any. Several apps show the solar zenith angle and we can take the COS of that manually with a calculator with trig functions. The standard android calculator app will do it.

so I can know how much solar my my panels could be making in ideal conditions?

Yeah, it’s an imperfect tool for our purposes but better than nothing. Combining it with data from a solar irradiance meter would be great but right now I can’t justify ~$100 to devote to the cause. :-)

the stove over to induction next. I hate it when the batteries fill back up by 10am and I waste solar meanwhile I am still buying propane for the appliances.

It’s possible. For the 11 months I’ve been cooking from excess solar power (December is a little short). I still carry propane for heating and a few things that seem to work better over flame.

In the past I’ve aliased rm to a wrapper that showed PWD and the files to be affected, slept a couple seconds in case I wanted to abort, then shredded smaller files, rm’ed big files, or placed in a Trash dir for certain kinds of files (.conf, .cfg, etc).

I might try to find or rewrite it.

I have made countless mistakes since the 90s, mostly involving rm. The most recent one was yesterday when I was trying to rm files in a directory with lots of other unrelated files.

I don’t remember the exact failure, but I was shooting for something like rm *lng and typo’ed rm *;ng (those chars are next to each other on the kb). This happily rm’ed * (d’oh!) then errored on the nonexistance ng. :-(