Lesson from South Africa: by the time they are at your door it’s too late. Perimeter fencing, preferably a 2m high wall with razor wire AND electric fence on top (including on gate). Garden: floodlights, motion sensing alarms, beams, AI cameras. All doors and windows: bars and security gates. Inside: separate living and sleeping area with lockable gate in the hall between. Panic buttons…

None of that is going to stop a legal intrusion, each just buys you time before the paid security company arrive with guns to chase away intruders. Given time, any determined attacker will get in eventually…

Refurbished an electric guitar on my own. I found a Washburn (decent make) for next to nothing in a junk store and got a kit from Temu for the electronics which were totally shot.

Total cost was 1/4 of the price of the same guitar second hand in working order. YouTube tutorials sorted me out - only one of the pickups actually works well but it’s the humbucker which is the only one I like anyway.

Context: 12 years ago I used to play professionally but sold my equipment when I had a kid (musician job does not pay well).

I actually like my new home made electric guitar better than my old one. Also, I now play for fun which is nicer than rehearsing repertoire all the time

That old huh? Amazing!

You are right, this was 30 years ago for me. I do remember the absolute feeling of helplessness, hearing someone else’s positive experience is less than helpful. But I stand by my advice to communicate, I had no idea at the time just that one thing can turn it around

Professional magician here - when I do my show for kids I always get them to shout out “Boom!” and explain that it’s like a special effect in the movies.

Whenever I say I’m going to teach my favourite magic word, some kid always chimes in with “Abracadabra”. I think it’s from Vaudeville - some magician made it up and everyone copied them ever since.

Not a single positive comment?

I used to be depressed, somehow pushed through. There is hope ppl.

Therapy is a real solution. Talk about it, don’t bottle up your feelings.

Do something, anything is better than nothing. Do the dishes, make the bed!

Long ago now - ex but in the same friend group so we ended up going back to her place one night. It was all nice until we had an argument, she kicked me out but KEPT MY CAR KEYS.

I ended up walking many Kms (this was before everyone owned a cell phone) to a mutual friends house, eventually they managed to convince her to give the keys back. Apparently it was all my fault.

I run pi-hole in docker in the background of our libreelec (Kodi) home entertainment system and it works great. It’s a MUST if you have kids, my son has more freedom to use the internet since I know he is mostly covered by extensive block lists. Using raspberry pi 400, we watch Netflix, play Nintendo games, watch YouTube and have a family hard drive for shared photos and files.

Smart TV is such bs.

At home we have a computer monitor connected to raspberry pi which can do literally every type of content including games while running pi-hole and device backups in the background, VPN included. Ain’t nobody tracking my family…

I have a paranoid fear that some day I will be required to write an ampersand…

I have two accounts that went dark. The main mastodon website with the list of all instances really needs to filter by popularity and longevity so people can make an informed choice!

I’m voting for manjaro here too, it’s been working great for me for years. But noobs should 100% go for mint

I can’t speak about Codex - I have tried OpenCode, gemini-cli and claude code (with DeepSeek)

I will have to look at Codex also - only so many hours in a day, though! Aider-CE is still a bit buggy but the chief maintainer is someone who you can talk to, and somewhat of a genius imo. The new grep based search/replace is increadible in Agent mode. I think the main drawback is lack of documentation but we are working on it!

When windows XP went away I got 12 more years of updates on my old dell laptop - with Linux of course. The laptop died before 32 bit support did.

Or 3 branches…

I prefer to just delete the whole .git and start a new repository with the new version. We are pivoting the project, new name and new repo

The great windows 10 shutdown is coming in a couple of weeks and I still haven’t upgraded my wife’s laptop! The main holdup is backing up, it turns out that hibernation need to be disabled in Windows 10 to do a proper backup, otherwise there is some sort of encryption on the backup. I wasted 2 days on this already copying 500GB just in case upgrade fails.

Upgrading to mint of course!

I’m guessing not - Google probably wants the data for itself.

Does this apply to Android studio?

One of our neighbours has his set to “SAPS Surveillance Van” - “SAPS”, South African Police Services.

Ours is named after my son’s YouTube channel… free advertising!