Coming next week – Hamster Ball Desks!

One can hope, but I suspect nobody will be announcing a victor on Tuesday night.

I’ve been reading some discussions this week about fake polls claiming Republicans are winning to make Dems think there’s no point in voting. Apparently it was a technique used in a previous recent election? It would explain all the results I’ve seen in the last few days showing them with a strong lead, where a week or two ago other polls showed an even race. Doesn’t really matter though, everyone should remember that the only thing that counts is getting out and casting your vote no matter what the polls might suggest.

I’ve got another ten years or so before I consider retiring, but I’m close enough that this kind of stuff has been on my mind lately. Retirement itself is easy – just don’t ever get sick, have any accidents, or reach the age where the insurance companies decide it’s cheaper to pay your family for a wrongful-death suit than to pay for your medical costs. The bastards will choose to murder you every time.

I’ve seen the opposite being true… A loved one dies after a lifetime together and the other person no longer has the will to keep going. I think you can keep going as long as you have the desire and your body doesn’t give out on you (and your insurance company doesn’t deny you a life-saving procedure because they think you’re too old and need to die).

My best lens for capturing the sun and moon is a Canon EF 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6, which sounds like pretty much the same lens you have with a different mount? I found a Kenco doubler that doesn’t seem to produce any artifacts (this one goes on the back side of the lens) which has worked really well for grabbing sunspots. Wish I’d had more ambition to get out this Summer, there’s been a LOT of sunspot activity that I’ve missed.

On the other end I have a Sigma DC 17-70mm f2.8-4 which I’ve been using for model trains. I paid $233 for that one so it’s my most expensive, but getting a faster lens really helped with those low-light shots. Sometimes you find great deals, sometimes you find Chinese garbage. Luckily I never paid much for garbage.

When you say old gear is not cheaper… I take it you’re looking for some pretty modern stuff? When I decided to get more involved in photography I picked up a Canon Ti4 used from ebay. It was about 6 years old at the time and I picked up a good one for around $250. The same thing with lenses, everything I have is from ebay and everything was relatively cheap (although I’d love to get one of those Sigma 600mm lenses, but oof!). Yeah my body is closer to 12 years old now but I still use it all the time and it’s done well for me, plus the EF mounts are common as hell, and all of my lenses have image stabilization built in.

If you’re having trouble getting trash photos, maybe check back with this group on what lenses match the shots you’re trying to take? There’s definitely some garbage lenses out there, and early-on I discovered Canon’s own 300mm EF lens have two different models that look identical, but there’s a huge difference in the quality between them (which is why the good one costs twice as much, even used).

One good thing about Canon is that you have Magick Lantern available. Most of us can’t afford the functionality that this software provides for free! If you want to stick with Canon and get the best bang for your buck, check to see which bodies ML is compatible with to narrow down your selections. After that I would check the lens mounts to see what other mounts can be adapted to fit a body to give you the widest selection of lenses possible. This is usually a one-way street due to focal length so it might pay to choose a body with greater adaptability.

What’s your fear of editing config files? They’re just text files, and manual edits certainly allow a degree of customization that you’ll never find in a GUI interface. My own config is set up with domain name folders under /home/ to contain the many domains I run, that’s something I’ve never seen handled by a GUI and yet it makes so much more sense for keeping files organized.

sudo apt install apache2

Did you really need a GUI for that? The web folders are under /var/www/ and you can browse to it from another computer by typing the IP into the address bar. As long as you’re not using Chrome you might even be able to type the computer name into the address bar.

“He doesn’t think that elections are a real thing. He doesn’t think that elections are legitimate, and he doesn’t want an American form of government in which elections decide whether or not he’s in power because he doesn’t believe election results should be binding.”

– Rachel Maddow

Green felt top hat with a size tag stuck in the band. Oof that’s been about 20 years ago now.

According to Buttigieg they are waking up thinking “Oh shit I don’t want people talking about that… what other fucked-up shit can I spew to distract the rubes?”

OK yeah, I wasn’t sure if it had a way to collect debs from other sources. I’ve been using it for years to locally cache the standard Debian repos so I don’t need to re-download packages every time I update my various servers and VMs, but I haven’t really tried using it for anything beyond that.

Sorry to ask, but isn’t this basically the same thing as apt-cacher-ng?

That connector looks exactly like the round 7-pin plug on my trailer. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the T-handle support on a flat-four plug? And as for brakes, you wouldn’t see any difference as the brakes would sit inside the wheel rim anyway. I currently have a four-wheel trailer and am taking a break to eat some lunch before I go back to welding on the new 5x9 trailer I’m building, so I’ve done a few calculations on the space needed for trailer brakes. 😄

Ugh I bet.

Oh I agree it can be a friggin’ furnace. My complaint was that I’d never had that happen before so why is it happening now? And if I can’t keep my driving glasses in my vehicle, where am I supposed to keep them? Maybe keep them at my desk just in case my monitor suddenly gets really far away?

Just an FYI, I had that happen to my driving glasses a couple years back. My optometrist said that’s because you cannot leave glasses in a hot car as the heat destroys the coating… OK thanks for telling me AFTER the fact, where do you THINK I am keeping a pair of glasses that you designed specifically for my driving vision? And by the way, I’ve been wearing glasses for over 35 years and always had the anti-glare coating for night driving, what did you change that is suddenly making them self-destruct when they are stored where I need them???

Yeah they had no answers for me. But OP, if you left your glasses in your car, that’s probably what happened to the coating.

“We don’t know what it is, so let’s kill it and see what happens.”

I’m not sure about anything that does rolling backups of full disks, but I have used rdiff-backup for years for rolling backups of individual files. The format for the backup is similar to (and based on) rsync so it’s fairly easy to script. For complete servers I just keep a copy of the install image on hand, in a catastrophic drive failure I can do a new installation to a new drive (creating the partitions, grub setup, etc), then restore the latest backup. An alternative might be to use dd and create a full drive image file to use as your starting point in a full recovery.

One thing to keep in mind though is that the backups should NOT contain any system folders like dev or proc that get generated at boot. If possible, when making a starting image with dd, you want the drive to be separate and not part of the running OS, because some folders like dev and var have a basic set of files in place needed for the boot process which may be different than the final version you see after the OS is up and running. That’s why I find it easier to just plan around a clean install to new drives when needed.