I suppose I’m afraid that having a dog myself would be like a magnet for other dogs while on walks that I might be uncomfortable with or that my being nervous could make a normal meet and greet go poorly.

Yes. Also, your dog will pick up on your nervousness and either get nervous themselves or become defensive, neither of which are ideal and could make for a bad situation if you’re ever at a park or out for a walk. Dogs are little copycats when it comes to mirroring their owner’s anxieties and behaviors, and even if you deal with your anxiety, the dog may have adopted it in the mean time and you’d have to work to repair that damage.

Basically, you’re smart to be asking these questions before taking on the responsibility of adoption. I’d recommend waiting until you’ve worked out your issues before potentially passing them on to your four-legged friend.

I don’t really consider blahaj as an “identity politics” instance, but I think I know which users you’re referring to (or at least their style). I’ve probably had those blocked for a while now.

Edit: A few of those have older hexbear alts which kind-of explains things.

Don’t want to start any drama by listing specifics, but basically any instance that advertises itself as “a space for {insert flavor of identity politics here}”.

Excellent catch!

“Tell me how old you are without telling me how old you are” 😢

Don’t feel bad. I was able to distinguish by ear between a T.38 fax handshake and a V.34+ modem handshake which definitely reveals my oldness 😆

So many things wrong with that though:

1. That’s a fax machine handshake not a data modem.
2. That’s a LOT of data to be hissing over dial-up in a highly compressed GSM voice channel
3. She didn’t dial anywhere near enough numbers
4. The background noise would have had that handshake repeating over and over

The most nostalgic chiptune generator you’ll ever hear.

I was surprised by that, too. When I went looking for a way to decode them with RTL-SDR, I assumed it wouldn’t be parsing the audio but a narrowband data stream. TIL also.

Edit: It does kind of make sense with it being AFSK encoded in-band, though, or maybe I’m just so used to it being that way. I always thought the screeches were there to demand attention (and also be something that headend equipment can pick up and respond to). So it’s interesting they’re doing double duty as both an unmistakable audio cue to pay attention as well as containing the actual alert data.

Plus there are NOAA stations all over the country rather than centralized like the time signal transmitters. It was probably cheaper to do it in band at that scale.

I don’t want to repeat what others have already said as that’s all pretty accurate. As a rule of thumb, just look at the site sidebar for various instances and just avoid any that base themselves around any form of identity politics. Sadly, that’s a lot of them, but life is better without those kinds of attitudes in your face all the time.

Yeah, I may have to settle for woodworking. I could set that up in my basement safely enough but definitely can’t be welding or have other fire hazards.

Only limitation with woodworking in insufficient ventilation if I want to paint or varnish or something.

Metalworking. It’s not so much beyond my ability so much as it’s out of my price range to get into it. I just don’t have any of the necessary tools nor an appropriate workspace, and I’d basically have to build a workshop and start from the literal ground up.

They kind of do, or at least used to.

If memory serves, they would take higher-end chips that didn’t pass QA for that product line, disable some cores or whatever, and sell it as a lower-end chip.

I’ve always observed them to be the largely the same thing but on different ends of the ideological spectrum (libertarians holding a more right-wing stance to anarchism’s left-wing stances). Otherwise, they’re both essentially petulant toddlers stamping their feet and saying “I don’t want to, and you can’t make me”.

If the artist is constantly in the news reminding me what a POS they are IRL, then no, I can’t enjoy their works because that’s always in my mind. Otherwise, if they just fuck off into obscurity, then I can enjoy the works independently for what they are.

Last fall I bought a 1 KWh Anker power station, and I’m loving it. It charges from 800 watts of solar and powers all kinds of random stuff around the house each day. Useful for power outages, too.

That’s what I’ve done for years. Makes managing things much easier, and I run multiple APs (all with the same SSID/PSK) and you can just roam to the best one. One upstairs, one downstairs, one in the weird dead zone in my office, and one on the back patio (it’s not hardwired and uses the mesh connection for uplink).

These are all old Aruba APs running OpenWRT but that’s the plan for this Cudy Model. I may pick up a few more and just replace all of my trusty but very old Arubas.

I bought this one last month when it was on sale for $39: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BRK3CYY3

Haven’t deployed it yet, but it’s fully supported by OpenWRT. I would only be using it as an access point, though. My router is a USFF Optiplex with an extra NIC and runs OpenWRT.

I am probably the wrong person to answer, but I usually just get a light buzz going and work on stuff around the house or yard.

Mowing the yard, pulling weeds, or working in the garden with a light buzz is pretty darn relaxing to me lol. Doing the dishes, laundry, vacuuming, cleaning the bathroom? None of those are particularly fun but are necessary and greatly improved by having a light buzz.

On the rare occasion I accidentally get too buzzed and end up glued to the couch, the dogs are more than happy to take advantage and receive lots of pets and lap time.

Honestly, for me, it’s when someone knows when to keep their mouth shut or opinions to themselves. I could, in theory, consider the dumbest person in the world “intelligent” so long as they don’t open their dumb mouth and make situations worse.

Basically, any idiot can speak, but it takes intelligence and/or wisdom to know when not to.

I’d get a new weather app that only shows the weather. If you’re on Android, try BreezyWeather (F-Droid link).

The F-Droid (“freenet”) one only mainly uses OpenMeteo as the source (which is pretty good) but the releases on Github offer additional sources. Not sure why there’s a discrepancy, but I use the Github release and Accuweather as the source. YMMV which gives the best results for your area, but I often wasn’t getting severe weather alerts with OpenMeteo.