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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • At the end of the day, you are the only one who is genuinely interested/invested in ensuring that your ass is protected with a rental vehicle. Rental insurance is one of the things you should neveral generalize; always investigate and fully understand your specific car rental. Never trust that just because you’re in province/state X that the rental vehicle must adhere to the local insurance requirements - rental companies often register vehicles outside a specific province/state (because its cheaper) and the liability limits may be very different. Vehicle rental companies generally offer add-on insurance - if you want to go this route then fully read the details and ensure that you are satisfied that you’re adequately covered; this is particularly important when you’re out-of-country.

    Personally, when feasible, I always pay for my rental with a credit card that includes rental insurance that I have confirmed adequately covers me. As a backup, my personal vehicle’s insurance also includes full rental coverage. In all cases, make sure to speak with the insurer ahead of time and discuss the limits of the insurance and what their procedure is if you get into an accident, particularly when you’re out of your home province/state or country.





  • I’ve got a Meebook M6 that I’m very happy with. Its basically an e-Ink Android tablet with and SD slot and Google Play, so you can load the Kindle app or whatever you want if you’ve got that stuff. Most importantly, I use the Moon+ Reader app and load .epub/.cbz/etc formats plus it does an awesome job of reformatting .txt/.pdf/.lit. Bonus for me: Moon+ also supports custom fonts, so I can use Dyslexie.







  • Yes. 50s. Canada.

    I taught myself. I was 19 and working for a small company (3 employees total) and had a van for work for hauling around equipment. My boss called me to his house one day and told me that he was taking the van for a six-week fishing trip. “You can take my BMW. You know how to drive stick, right?” I shook my head “no.” “Well, you’ll figure it out”. Fortunately, he lived in the country so it was all quiet backroads for most of the trip home. By the time I got into the city, I (usually) didn’t stall it at traffic lights.

    A couple years later, I took a three-day motorcyle (newb to driving licence) course. Three out of fifteen students knew how to drive a manual transmission car. Only the three of us passed and got our licence - the others were having trouble stalling 'cause it was the first time they had ever dealt with a clutch. (note: this was typical, the ones who didn’t pass could come back and try the final test again the following weekend).






  • Refurbished ThinkPads are awesome!

    • Availability - ThinkPads are very popular in corporate environments and are generally replaced every 2-3 years. Although mostly Intel CPUs, there is a wide variety CPU+GPU available from lightweight to high performance.
    • Tough + well built + last forever
    • Easy to upgrade/repair. They’re very user-accessible and its simple to upgrade RAM or SSD/M.2 drives. Plus, because they are so popular in the corporate environment, replacement parts (from batteries to WiFi+Bluetooth chipsets to trckpads) are very available and cheap.
    • Well supported in most (if not all) linux distros. Graphics just work, trackpads just work, WiFi just works.
    • Cheap.

    Sent from my ThinkPad T580 (with both an internal and removable battery, I get 10+ hours of battery life)


  • I wrote a bash script that runs daily which 7z (AES256) the databases (well… I dump the DB as text and then 7z those files), web files (mostly WordPress), user files, all of /etc, and generate a list of all installed packages, and then copy the archives to a timestamped folder on my Google drive (I keep the last two nights, plus the last 3 Sundays).

    TBH, the zipped content is around 1.5GB for each backup. So my 17GB of free GDrive space more than enough. If I actually had a significant amount of data, I’d look into a more robust long term solution.

    If there was a catastrophic failure, it’d take me around six hours to rebuild a new server and test it.