You rich folks can keep making fun of me for being poor, but I've got some skills you'll never have. That's $42.45 saved on a grocery bill that ended up being $110. Almost 30% off, and I was already buying the basic stuff, store brands, etc. Related: I bought 15 more lbs of apples at 80¢/lb after tax. Going to make more apple chips tomorrow.

I'm leaning toward the 90° headers for the RTC and the battery sandwich. To keep things consistent, I'll have a block of wood or plastic to hold the boards a specific distance apart. View quoted note →

If you advocate for decentralized, encrypted systems and then block everyone who uses privacy software, you are a charletan. I'm looking at you,

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They're not blocking bots, AI scrapers, or attacks. Just Tor users. There should be a wall of shame for these faux allies

The v2 boards came in and I'm weighing my options on how to stack them. vs The main challenge is the LCD. The back of the header pins are going to short out against thr USB-C connector if I'm not careful. And the components on the back of the screen risk connecting with the header pins connecting the Nice!nano (on the bottom) with the connector PCB (in the middle). Finally, there's tolerances of all these headers pins & case alignment. Things like the boards not being perfectly parallel, the batteries beimg different thicknesses resulting in an extra mm of space for the battery. If all the cases are the same, all the things going in them need to be the same as well. Image descriptions have more detail on what you're looking at and what trade-offs are being made. Thoughts? Previous post about v1: View quoted note →

Do not bother signing up for Strike. Can't deposit money, support won't say why, whether it was an error on their end of the bank's end, and then they just closed the support ticket on me without fixing the issue. If Jack Mallers knew how new customers were treated, I bet he'd get the support staff trained properly or let them go if they can't perform their duties of answering questions and getting bugs reported to the developers.

This battery is so cute! The US dime is there for scale. For those curious, this is a NiceTOTP device.

"Every facet, every department of your mind, is to be programmed by you. And unless you assume your rightful responsibility, and begin to program your own mind, the world will program it for you." --The Crystal Method, from their Community Service album, more specifically: "Cake Hole" PS Yes, I know they sampled it and the quote is older than that.

It's interesting to see the pendulum swing back to having servers be bespoke, custom configured one-off instances instead of being set up in a deterministic, repeatable manner where they can easily be re-created in the exact same way. People have gone back to treating servers as puppies again instead of treating them as cattle. And with that comes all the old problems of not having tested backups, possibly not having any backups at all, requiring a lot of work to figure out what's going on when something needs changef, having to re-do lots of work when it's time to spin up a new server, and so on. Of course, gen Z and even younger millennials have never experienced those problems, so these are all issues that are invisible to them. All this is fine until you need to recover from a disaster and rebuild everything from scratch.

Probably going to go another direction on this and switch registrars to one that accepts lightning. Thank you to all replied with solutions so I could better understand how unusual this capability is, despite being such an obvious use case.

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View quoted note →

Another round of apple chips, incoming. This time McIntosh

First day of SeaGL is done. Got another full day tomorrow though:

SeaGL 2026 :: pretalx

OK, can one of you bitcoiners help me out here? If someone has some sats in a lightning wallet and they want to use them to pay a company who only accepts on-chain transactions... Do they have to find someone to trade the lightning sats for on-chain sats as if it were an altcoin trade? Assume they don't run their own lightning node, they're using LNBits, hosted by someone else. Is there some service that can do this for people, ideally with minimal trust involved? I'm asking for a group who is new at this and jumped straight into lightning, but njalla doesn't accept lightning, only on-chain (with no plans to start accepting lightning). So some solution that involes 20 steps, installing a desktop app, and jumping through a bunch of hoops is a non-starter. Going to a clearnet website, zapping someone, and having the on-chain address get paid, that'd be doable. Better if the software just handled this for a nice UX, but that seems unlikely based on what I've read.

I'm a volunteer sysadmin for a non-profit community center, and I just got 5 backup sysadmins to back me up and jump in when I am not available. I feel like the richest guy on the planet.

Apparently my Mastodon posts have been going into a black hole for the past couple weeks. Surprise! And the instance is shutting down in less than 30 days. Double surprise! No wonder I thought it was quiet over there. My instance was basically shut down, ergo the lack of any new content. Before you jump in my replies to dogpile on ActivityPub, maybe consider staying humble instead. 🤷‍♂️ Your call. I've already migrated all my followers to a new account. I have my old posts exported to a file, but I'm going to let those disappear with the old server. New nym, new server, same troublemaker. 😝 Let the good times roll.

Last batch... until I go shoping again.

Another batch of apple chips, ready for storage. View quoted note →

Another batch of apples into the dehydrator, but this time it's apple rings. Much fancier. This batch is thin and plain. The next one will probably be cinimon apple chips.

Super disappointed with Strike. Tried to sign up via the website, pushed me toward an app that is exclusive to the Google Play store, which I don't have on my Android phone. Saw I could email support@strike.me for help, so I did, and explained my trouble registering. What do I get as a reply? That I didn't email them from the same address I used when I registered. JFC. Jack Mallers has some work to do, starting with making it possible to get help on-boarding. I hope there is a metric for how many people click sign up as compated to the number of people who are successful at signing up. If that were the scorecard, I bet it would be a failing grade.

Food for thought for you bitcoiners about marketplaces & adoption. Getting existing marketplaces to accept bitcoin would help adoption far more than setting up bitcoin-only stores & marketplaces. Yes, keep doing the bitcoin only thing. That's valuable too. But having customers see bitcoin as a payment option causes them to think about it again. It reduces the stigma that it's something that only their crazy uncle uses. It makes it a boring solution to paying for things online. If any of you who make handmade things are willing to do the proof of work to put this into action, consider signing up for artisans.coop (it doesn't cost any money to open a shop). They currently only accept credit cards, and through PayPal at that. If you want to see that change, consider being a member. Members are the ones who make the decisions like this. If you're really in it for the long haul, volunteer to be on a team (e.g. Team Tech, Team Money). While members make the decsions, teams are the ones who decide what goes up for voting. Let me be clear though, membership and being on a team is optional. Even if you just open a shop, make some sales, and then (after establishing yourself as a seller who actually makes sales) you ask if they enable bitcoin payments, citing thay PayPal supports bitcoin. You can also ask to be paid out in bitcoin. I am telling you, a dozen or two sellers doing $100/month would move the needle on this one. Yes, this does take some effort. Yes, you do have to accept fiat initially. Thr bottom line here is that if you expect someone else to do the work and then you get the benefit, that's very fiat thinking. This isn't a high time preference activity. It's a one time setup, send out orders for a bit, and then make a few requests. And if I am wrong, you can close up shop and walk away. In fact, being willing to do so it what will give you leverage down the road. What do you say? Are you a producer who has what it takes?

It turns out 2qt dried apple bits wheigh 1 lb View quoted note → Interestly, the yield was not as good for this batch. The sale was on some smaller apples (by modern standards). This means the core is a higher proportion of the apple, which means there's less usable apple per pound. I have the last of the hydrated apple cubes in the dehydrator. Will be done tomorrow.