I like RustDesk. If you’re worried about connectivity, you can even run your own relay server.

For many places, it’s operational inertia. If you’ve had a hosting account at the same place since 1998, you’re bound to still have username/password access to services like FTP even though other (and better) options exist.

And then there is the issue of sole control. Many greybeards like myself still run traditional username/password auth on services because,

1. We have whitelisted our IP address, and if dynamic, keep that whitelist updated
2. That outside of said whitelisting, the service is a quasi-honeypot meant to protect the machine as a whole. Any connection made from outside the address space of my ISP, by anyone else, is by default considered malicious, and is banned instantly as a precaution. They don’t even get the opportunity to attempt a login; merely connecting to said service is sufficient evidence of hostile intent.

So while my setup is not ideal, it is ideal for myself. if I had anyone else as co-admin, or even clients, things would get stupidly complicated very quickly. But since it’s just me…

I’m wondering whether Europeans the other 96% of humanity

There, FTFY.

And yes, the other 96% of humanity would very much like to see Imperial measurements die.

Hell, as a Canadian born after 1970, I wouldn’t understand almost all Imperial measurements even if they smacked me clear in the forehead. About the most I have ever used are inches, feet, and pounds, and only because they’ve hung on in tightly-linked-to-America blue-collar industries and (until about a decade ago) grocery stores. I would have zero clue how much a cup or a Florida Ounce is.

Am I unreasonably disappointed to not find “Correct Horse Battery Staple” - or some variation thereof - in that list?

OpenBSD does not have a docker engine. Can this be installed without docker?

Another reason why, while AI might be a fun toy, no one who is serious about getting work done will touch it with a dirty barge pole. The gratuitous hallucinations alone ought to be a sufficient deterrent.

I kept reading about people having trouble during the restore process.

It is Duplicati, and IMHO restores work best if they aren’t restores-in-place. As in, dump the restores in a central location then drag-and-drop the data into place. Most of the issues I have heard of involve restoring data and settings back to where it originally was backed up from, and restoring directly back to those places - other than fully user-controlled directories, such as Documents or Photos - seems to be problematic.

Other than that, I have been using it for nearly a decade and have done a number of restores - after total drive deaths, so not just accidentally deleted files - to great success.

The downside is that tweaking backups from within the hidden C:\Users\[username]\AppData\ directory involves many days of whack-a-mole to exclude untouchable normally-in-use files so you don’t get scads of errors in the backup process. Plus, there are a fair number of entries in there that don’t really need backing up. But once you get that to settle down, it’s largely smooth it’s-set-so-forget-it sailing.

As a security professional… yeah, nope. Nope, nope, nope.

Win11 has many usability issues, and Windows seems to accumulate more with every design decision, but reaming your arse open for someone else to bugger you via an exploit run under your own account is not one of them.

Yyyyyup.

And I self-host precisely because of the money I save using surplussed hardware. I have a symmetrical 1Gb SOHO fibre connection from my ISP, so I can host whatever the hell I want, I just need to stand it up. And a beefy older system with oodles of RAM is perfect for spinning up VMs of various platforms for various tasks. This saves me craploads of money over even a single VM on cloud platforms like Vultr. Plus, even if I were to support a “heavy” service sufficiently in demand to warrant its own iron, it still costs me less than a year’s worth of hosting to obtain a decent platform for that service to run on all by it’s lonesome.

My only cloud costs end up being those services which are distributed for redundancy and geographical distance, such as DNS and caching CDNs.

Will have to look into that, thanks.

One of my key implementation requirements, however, will be resiliency, which means simplicity will be a core feature. The more “moving parts”, the easier it will be to break.

flip phone

Almost all such phones are actually smart phones in a flip phone Edgar Suit. Especially if it has maps or YouTube or any kind of an App Store. I see a crapton of flip phones that run Android, which has all sorts of Google spyware piggybacking along.

I think there may be only two or three dumb flip phones or feature flip phones left on the market, and IIRC two are locked to specific networks.

If you want a bona-fide dumb phone, you might be limited to something like the rotary un-smartphone.

or toaster can’t do its basic job offline

pats my 1962 Sunbeam Radiant Toaster

Obligatory Red Dwarf toaster scene

Go for older laser printers. They’re bulletproof, cheap on toner, free of DRM, and even if they only come with an LPT port you can always build your own print server that gives you all the bells and whistles like AirPrint.

About 3-4 years ago I took a bit of a dive into the firmware of IoT devices. The utter lack of security and the amount of information being hoovered up to the mothership made me swear to never build anything “smart” into the renovations of my current home. Sure, there will be automation. There will be CCTV. There will be solar with battery backup for essentials. There will be conveniences of all kinds. But virtually all will be air gapped, incapable of remote rooting, and under my full control.

Hell, even my laser printers are HP models over two decades old - an HP 4050DTN and an HP 5000DTN - that are totally devoid of any DRM or “smart features” and can trivially take generic overstuffed cartridges that can do 20,000 sheets at 5% coverage.

For such an invasive piece of code (it seems to drop into my system with every major Windows Update), this would be a hilarious message to see.

Well, most of the fridge is already there. You just need to disassemble, sandblast the metal and paint (if the paint is in poor condition), replace the insulation with closed-cell spray foam, replace the refrigeration system with a modern Freon-free system, reassemble and put new seals on.

An old fridge can be quite simple, structurally speaking. It’s in the 70s and 80s when fridges started getting compact, difficult to repair, and disposable.

The fridge will likely operate far less efficiently than a modern fridge unless you have it rebuilt.

With that said, a rebuilt fridge - with a more efficient cooling system and better insulation and all seals redone, etc. - does not cost significantly more than a new midrange fridge.

My microwave is a 1977 Amanda Radarange. It can boil a cup of water in ⅕ of the time a modern microwave can.

Now granted, it has zero fancy settings and a simple number pad that does nothing but set how long you want the microwave to run.

But honestly, this simplicity is a large part of it’s charm. No connectivity needs, no features locked behind paywalls, no extraneous bullshit or never-used features. Just a tool that does only one thing, and does it exceptionally well.

I have an apostrophe

Scottish/Irish?

some companies see it as a SQL injection hack and sanitize it.

Which kind of apostrophe?

A straight apostrophe, fine - that can and does get used in valid SQL injection attacks. I would be disgusted at any input form that didn’t sanitize that.

But a curly apostrophe? Nothing should be filtering a curly apostrophe, as it has no function or use within SQL. So if you learn how to bring that up in alt codes (Windows, specifically), Key combos (Mac) or dead keys (Linux), as well as direct Unicode codes for most any Win/Mac/*Nix platform, you should be golden.

Unless the developer of that input form was a complete moron and made extra-tight validation.

Plus, knowing the inputs for a lot of extended UTF-8 characters not found on a normal keyboard is also a wee bit of a typing superpower.