WTF. What could possibly go wrong. Flip phone here I come.

Ok I used to feel sorry for streaming box users, but this is in “one born every minute” territory. Thanks.

What the heck is this thing? Should many of us care?

I found the wikipedia article mostly incomprehensible but it says a few things. You are probably better off asking on MSE or Reddit, sorry to say.

At least here in the US, lots of mobile phone plans have free or cheap international calls, depending on the countries involved. Example. Some home landline plans also have that. So far that has been enough for me on the few occasions when I’ve wanted to make an international call. If more frequent, I’d use a VOIP provider, maybe Twilio (I’m sure there are others too, but I know Twilio supports this and has a decent API).

VOIP providers will often also sell you inbound phone numbers in the destination country, if you want the other person to be able to call you from their landline without it getting rung up as an international call for them. Those aren’t always so cheap, but there are obvious use cases.

Oh I see. Yeah DVD drives generally use the same SATA interface as hard drives.

If you mean a 2.5" drive (laptop sized) then yes you can generally do that. 3.5" drives are usually 1" thick and won’t fit in a slim DVD drive slot.

ToE is generally taken to mean a theory that accounts for all four fundamental forces in physics, 1) strong nuclear force, 2) electromagnetism, 3) weak nuclear force (unified in some way with electromagnetism now), 4) gravity. The “standard model” only handles the first three, with gravity being separate and very mysterious. I’m skeptical of this new paper on various grounds but who knows.

I think I would stay away from Synology in general these days, after this:

news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43734706

There are plenty of DIY NAS solutions available and I’d just use one.

The wikipedia article looks informative and I will read through it: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_(software)

Is spam a serious problem on other messaging systems?

It’s a substack (ugh), but you can click “no thanks” under the email field and it takes you to the article, which is by Ryan Grim. The article is somewhat hard to understand though, as it jumps between a few different topics.

Hope they are vegan zombies.

lemmy.ml/post/6635488

Do you mean the client side is open source? What about the server? If you’re required to use Signal’s server, how do you know it’s not disclosing metadata? If you can self-host it, why the phone number?

I get that Signal is a messaging system (not sure if “messenger service” has a specific meaning). What I don’t understand is why I’d want to use it instead of any of the million others that are out there. I’ve never used Signal and don’t have the slightest clue about how it operates, but apparently it tries to mess with the contact list on your phone? That sounds bad. I use Nextcloud Chat sometimes and its web design is ugly, but it works ok and you can self-host it fairly easily. It doesn’t do anything with your phone contacts. Jami is distributed but (maybe unrelated) I often have trouble getting it to work at all.

Is there a quick explanation of what signal actually does? I don’t understand the need for a phone number either. Jami doesn’t ask for a phone number. It has other deficiencies that make me not want to use it, but those are technical rather than policy, more or less. Similarly, irc (I’m luddite enough to still be using it) doesn’t ask for a phone number either. So this is all suspicious. There are a bunch of other things like this too (Element, Matrix, etc.) that I haven’t looked into and tbh I don’t understand why they exist.

External keyboard?

So, I’m sticking with Lemmy. It’s not perfect, but at least it’s real. Maybe we’ll get the true decentralization we’ve been promised one day

I thought we had Usenet since the 1970s.

ipv6 is fine for most things these days, but better check with the host that Tor is ok.

If you have a /64 address range you could bind a single random address from it (will be very hard to find by scanning) and then use it as a jump box for your other VPS?

Who cares? We don’t kink shame here.

If you have a hard drive, replace it with an SSD? And, can you add more memory?