voakbasda

My wife got a ticket issued by a traffic camera in Albany Oregon. We do not live there and had no idea they had started such a program. She is a ridiculously safe driver and was flowing with traffic. If they got her,…

As a consequence of my embedded systems work, I have a surplus of large M.2 drives (2TB each, in the 22110 form factor) that I would like to put to good use. There are several possibilities that I have discovered or…

The recent discussion about FedEx starting a marketplace to compete with Amazon reminded me that, once upon a time, people would host their own e-commerce sites. While not as popular as they once were, I imagine…

On a couple of different sites, simply visiting the Shop checkout page (to see potential shipping costs) was sufficient to subscribe my associated email address to a mailing list. I did not go further than viewing the…

I use graylisting on my mail server. For those unaware, this involves soft bouncing all incoming mail from new senders, requiring them to retry later. The idea is that most spammers will not retry, and this has seemed…

I just received the following from my telco: ``` Dear Member, At Telco, the security of our members and our network is extremely important to us. In order to protect our members from potential fraudulent activity, we…

I am working on a team to bring up and debug a new carrier board design for an Nvidia Jetson NX module. Presently, we are having occasional trouble with some of the differential busses (e.g. USB, PCIe, ethernet), so we…

At one of the stores that my family shops, cell service is virtually impossible to receive. If you walk a block in almost any direction, service is fine. Thus, it seems someone in the area is either intentionally or…

My wife wants to learn clawhammer banjo, and I want to add the dobro to the list of instruments that I play. These days, I figure there must be some great resources online for musicians to learn the basics (for free).…

My insurance agent recently made a mistake while fulfilling a request from a lender. In short, she added coverage to my home/farm policy for a piece of equipment that I already had on my auto policy, thinking it was a…

I am interested in creating a GIS database for my farm. Layers for plumbing, electrical, fencing, and more. What is the best was to get started on such a project? I have looked at QGIS, but it is somewhat overwhelming…

Is buying a used voice assistant from eBay a good idea? With modern code locking, I wonder whether any of these could end up being being bricks, in the same way many Apple devices become bricks when the previous owner…

I have been running Ubuntu on servers and desktops for around twenty years, but ongoing changes to their platform have shaken my faith in its future. The first serious breach of trust was forcing their users to use…

I received a gift from Amazon that I didn’t want, so I attempted to return it. Turned out to be “non-returnable” (food related), so I was directed to talk to support for a refund. During that chat session, I noticed the…

I run a small farm that I want to keep private. I do not want to sell to the public; instead, I want to cultivate a small group of loyal customers that participate in a CSA (community supported agriculture) program and…

The Mycroft project has begun to deliver their Mark II product, four years after their Kickstarter. They appear to be selling 90% of their production to new customers, allocating a mere 10% to their Kickstarter/Indigogo…

My wife recently noticed the iOS camera indicator on her iPhone 11 will turn on randomly while browsing her Instagram feed. I found some references to a “bug” from a couple of years ago, but nothing current to explain…

I have a single rural rental property that I want to market to SWEs or similar remote-only knowledge workers, particularly those looking to relocate from an urban location and get (far) away from it all. For context, I…

My remote employer has horrible communication among developers. Almost non-existent. In the long term, this hurts both the company and its employees. If it doesn’t change, I will be looking for a new position, as I am a…

I have a block of static IPs through my DSL provider, and these host all of my online infrastructure (because you effectively have no security at all when you give up physical control of your servers). This is a one…