Wow. I’m sorry to hear about your illness, but I’m really happy you seem to have thoroughly enjoyed living and have made your peace. I have such a hard time enjoying life sometimes, so I really do appreciate hearing your perspective.

I think the best thing you can do in life is appreciate what you have, and not worry so much about the things that are out of your control, and you seem to have this all figured out.

I hope you do go through with these notes and don’t decide to delete them or anything. Genuine perspectives from people are a rare treasure in this world, and I think if you’re comfortable sharing them you really should!

If you want to hold yourself accountable, maybe the easiest thing is to upload to a GitHub repo or something, and I’m sure some of us would be happy to download it and mirror it. I’m sure many of us will happily run a script to fetch it every hour or so, and then you wouldn’t be able to delete it from me and other volunteers. If you gave us contact information we could make sure it gets to whoever you wanted. Might be a bit of an awkward email to send, but I guess it would be for the best 😅

The abysmal adoption of DNSSEC is just embarrassing, and I haven’t heard any good arguments for why we shouldn’t do it. There’s one blog post that gets passed around as justification for not adopting DNSSEC, but it doesn’t really go into any technical detail and is mostly just the author saying “I’m scared of governments and TLDs”… which is maybe fair, but you still have to trust them for regular CA certs and everything, so why not make thr base secure?

Honestly, I might care slightly more about DNSSEC than IPv6 adoption… IPv4 exhaustion and NATing everywhere sucks, but the fact that you can’t trust DNS is like… insane.

DNS setups can get fairly complicated with enterprise VPNs and stuff, but the main thing is probably just that DNS is built entirely around caching, so when something does go wrong or you’re trying to update something it’s easy for there to be a stale value somewhere. It’s also really fundamental, so when it breaks it can break anything.

Overall, though, DNS isn’t terribly complex. It’s mostly just a key-value store with some caching. Running your own nameservers is pretty cool and will give you a much better understanding of how it all fits together and scales.

That’s very different than every grocery store, though. Might also be different in Canada.

I’ve got bad news for you…

Sometimes your place of work might have electronics recycling bins or something, but for the most part you’re expected to go to a special eco centre to recycle large electronics and batteries and stuff like this. Often you even have to pay a fee for them to take these items, which seems incredibly stupid to me because it just encourages everybody to throw them out with the normal trash.

You may find some stores in some places that will take this stuff, but as far as I know this is not commonplace in much of North America. There are also some services where you can pay a fee for somebody to collect an item. We did that for a swollen lithium cell recently.

Every digital system is also secretly analog.

This is such a weird take to be honest… it’s weird to want CS lecturers to work in their free time, it’s weird to expect their applications to be better, and it’s weird because this is something that many lecturers and programmers already do… so I don’t get it, and it feels disrespectful to all of the volunteer foss maintainers?

There’s something kind of funny about one of the largest expenses being SMS and voice calls to verify phone numbers when one of the largest complaints about signal is the phone number requirement. I wonder how much this cost factors into them considering dropping the phone number requirement.

I think this comic might have been from the era when you did have to pay for new versions of OS X… they stopped doing that around Lion I think in 2011 or so.

AM transmitters / receivers are far easier to construct than FM ones, though. If I was in an emergency situation where I couldn’t communicate with anybody I think I might be able to at least make an AM receiver, even if there aren’t very many components around… But I would need a reference to have any clue how to approach an FM one, and you’d definitely need more components available. Frequency modulation is quite a bit more complicated. If you want to transmit, CW is probably your best hope?

Realistically, though, almost anybody in an emergency situation is doomed if the only thing that would save them is building any kind of radio. It’s not a skill set that most people have… Which I guess is why you might advocate for everybody’s phones to be able to act as FM receivers in case that’s the best way to get an emergency broadcast, because then they would have a device that’s capable of it on hand. You’re probably better off if you have a dedicated emergency radio, especially if you might lose power for an extended period of time, though.

It’s not necessarily clear cut for one being more reliable than the other. FM broadcasts are analog and more likely to be subject to interference (interference will directly impact what you hear, but not as badly as with AM radio) and as the signal falls off it will be harder to hear. Digital radio will be perfectly clear as long as you get a signal, but may become distorted or just cut out if the signal is weak and there are too many errors in the data being received. There will be error correction for digital radio signals, but eventually you won’t be able to receive reliably enough that it will fail. If I had to guess, assuming all of the equipment is working, digital is probably going to be more reliable than analog radio in more conditions and over a longer distance, and it probably needs less bandwidth in general because you could compress the stream.

So… Are you just unaware of fruits, vegetables, and legumes, haha? In my opinion there’s a huge amount of food that fits all three categories. One of the best example of cheap, delicious, healthy, and easy is beans and rice, spiced up however you like.