It works the same way it normally works. You generate the certificate, give it to them, tell them who you are, they verify who you are, then they sign it and give it back to you. Very routine and straightforward, except for the challenge part that they use to verify your identity.

Think of it in terms of delivering a pizza. The signed certificate is the pizza in this analogy, and they don’t want to send it to you until they’re sure it’s going to the right place. Either the store can send it to you (you have to give them your address and have port 80 open for when they arrive) or you can go pick it up at the store (you give them your address, they verify it through DNS, no port 80 required).

There’s never been anything preventing you from establishing a conversation with the certificate-issuer. You don’t need port 80 open for that. However, unless you have port 80 open the issuer cannot reach out to you, and that’s how they verify you are who you say you are. DNS challenges avoid them having to reach out to you directly, instead they reach out to DNS on your behalf and verify you are who you say you are that way instead.

Hook it up to the TV and use it for big screen web/media/gaming/retro-emulation. Steam and/or Sunshine/Moonlight can be used for low-latency streaming to play games from another PC (in either direction). You can use controllers and keyboard/mouse through either streaming method or bluetooth/wireless. Also handy for occasionally streaming things that don’t have smart-TV-apps, or for services where the only functional apps are service-locked, shitty and/or “Freemium” (most IPTV apps for example). Set it up for Wake-On-LAN (or Wake-On-WiLAN if it supports it). Lots of things you can do with a PC in the living room.

This is good thinking, and you may still want something like this anyway, as there’s always room for additional documentation, but let me propose an alternative that takes this good way of thinking a step further:

Infrastructure-as-code means my code is my documentation. How’s it configured? Look at the code. What’s it doing? Look at the code. Don’t understand why it’s doing that? Use more descriptive names for things and write more self-explanatory code. Is the code out of date with the current state? Stop implementing things manually and make the code run automatically instead so it’s never out of date anymore.

I have complete confidence in my setup and life is easy now. Except when the IAC breaks. But that’s rarely a panic situation, just mildly frustrating.

rsync, SyncThing, or Nextcloud. I use all three, often on the same machine at the same time, for various purposes.

rsync is great for scheduled syncs (but intentionally not TOO frequent – where blowing away one copy would almost instantly blow away the other copy could be a concern.) and outstanding for one-off syncs. With the right command line options it can even create a rough approximation of snapshots with copy-on-write rolling incremental backups. I believe this is the original documentation for that particular trick although it has spawned many genuine backup tools which operate very similarly using rsync under the hood, like rsnapshot.

SyncThing is great for large, intensive datasets that you want to keep perfectly synchronized across multiple computers at the same time. One example is my saved games, so without relying on Steam “cloud saves” or anything, I can just save my game and hop from gaming on one computer onto my laptop and pick up right where I left off.

Nextcloud is what I use for keeping separate copies of all my documents, photos from my phone, etc. It’s easier than SyncThing to setup and manage in my opinion, it’s simple and reliable and reasonably user-friendly in most use-cases, and seems to be more compatible with a lot of software due to its similar design to something like Dropbox. It isn’t ideal for handling huge numbers of files or very large folders in my personal opinion, but it does work if you want to try it.

Heroic and Steam, don’t need anything else.

I donated a server to my brother across the country to use as his media server, it also doubles as my own offsite backup. And vice versa for his, although he’s not really tech savvy enough to care.

Sort of, for the time it was alright, it was open and moddable in a modest sense, but not enough to make it seamlessly open-world or anything like that or do anything terribly complex. The engine was very limiting to the kind of modding you could do. Skyrim is a much more capable and modern engine and the kind of mods available for it reflect that. I think by putting both together they better illustrate what I’m hoping to see at some point.

Yeah we need something like Neverwinter Nights with the moddability of Skyrim: something that falls somewhere in that hallowed middle ground between a beautifully designed campaign-in-a-box like Baldur’s Gate, and the silly janky overly melodramatic homemade adventure that only people crazy enough to volunteer to DM could come up with. Design it around the imperative to give the people the tools to make homemade adventures in the style of Baldur’s Gate and it could become the best of both worlds.

That’s exactly what I was thinking of, thanks!

Anyone know if there’s something similar/equivalent for Linux? I’ve been using inxi on the command line and it mostly does what I need, I’m just wondering if there’s a better option or anything more directly inspired by CPU-Z and GPU-Z.

No screenshots, but I had an old server with a pair of mirrored 8GB Seagates hosting a particularly specialized service on a very beefy and regularly maintained UPS and it had a server uptime of 21 years (had not been rebooted since somewhere around 1999) when I finally decommissioned it about 5 years ago, both disks would’ve been the same. It was on the public internet the whole time too, running Debian Slink with kernel 2.0.36, which had been awkwardly patched and rebuilt somehow to make the service (itself already obsolete at that time) actually work. I don’t know why I remember all this, but I do.

I do remember monitoring the SMART status at various points and the drive bearings must’ve been pretty cooked because those two drives were always running at 50-60C and I had a big old box fan pointed at the thing with the side panel off.

This example is also why I don’t always buy into the cult of “you must always regularly update all software immediately all the time”. Old software is not always bad software, same with old hardware. Sometimes it’s genuinely possible to have a bulletproof system. The problem is you never really know you do, until it either enters survivorship bias or becomes catastrophically proven otherwise. But you can make educated guesses, and if you’re going to naively assume that your old software must have exploitable security holes it seems equally naive to me to assume that updates must never have exploitable security holes. I think the risk calculus has to be done on a case-by-case basis.

deleted by creator

The solution to all the billionaires taking everyone’s money is not going to be solved by finding the right billionaire. Nobody with a billion dollars gives a shit about you. They aren’t going to help you. They don’t even have the personal human context to have any understanding of anything you need help with, and even if they can afford to have someone tell them, and have the empathy to bother, they’ll still end up trying to fix in ways that don’t actually help you. They don’t get it. They won’t get it. They can’t. They’re living in a totally different universe. Money doesn’t measure success, it measures privilege.

Revenue and profit/loss are not the same thing. Revenue only counts the money they bring in BEFORE any expenses or losses, and is used precisely to avoid the issue you raised. That said, it is still possible to get around it, but it’s not quite as trivial as just spending more.

So they’ve been working together and planning all this shit for at least 20 years, you think? *idly sharpens guillotine*

Because Microsoft is trying to use it to fracture and control the Minecraft community, divide and conquer. It’s a lazy ripoff of real Java Minecraft, locked down with DRM and restricted to platforms Microsoft blesses, and the only significant improvement is more graphical sparkles (not as much as modded Java though) and new modes (not as many as modded Java though) and new creatures (not as many as modded Java though) and new blocks (not as many as modded Java though) and new dungeons (not as many as modded Java though) … are you sensing a theme yet?

It also has all kinds of paid DLC and microtransactions and advertising shoved into it which they want you to believe are somehow “better” than the countless variety of mods that have been developed for free by the community (they’re not)

Oh I think I used it to unlock some extra characters in Skylanders at some point too, but I don’t really play those types of games anymore.

And here I am just using my flipper zero to turn my fan on and off since the remote that came with it sucks.

It is explicitly intended to be, you only have to listen to them talk about it for that to be abundantly clear. Fuck, even ask an AI themselves and they’ll tell you about the dangers of how it’s being used. The only people saying it’s not are the utopian dreamers who are expecting it to be something it’s currently not and likely has no hope of ever being. This is not a utopia and the people creating these technologies are not utopians in the slightest, they are mercenary capitalists and they will instantly grind you into a paste without even a shred of remorse or even an acknowledgement that they’ve done so, if it helps them get their next dollar. Some of them only think about you in the abstract. Most of them don’t think of you at all.