The job numbers have been revised in a downward direction pretty consistently[1]. The year over year numbers from the BLS were revised massively downwards a few weeks ago, by 800,000 jobs.[2]

[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careers/the-biden-admin-has-overcounted-new-jobs-almost-every-single-month-this-year/ar-AA1jlasf

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2024/08/21/nonfarm-payroll-growth-revised-down-by-818000-labor-department-says.html

Just remember that of the last 12 months, there’s been something like 11 downward revisions. The bureau of Labor statistics has been doing an abysmal job with its preliminary numbers.

I’m not saying to completely disregard the data, but in a previous month I ended up making the mistake of listening to some of the old podcasts I used to listen to from NPR and APM regarding money, and I don’t remember which one but one of them was just going on and on about how good the numbers were with absolutely no mention of the fallibility of those numbers.

It actually saved my life a few months back, I had a dying windows server I needed to resurrect and the tools on there were perfect for it.

https://www.hirensbootcd.org/

Hirens boot cd is a great tool if you’re working with windows. You are not always going to need it, but when you do need it it’s awfully nice to have it.

“dad I’m sanic”

I tend to think that right now we’re in an era of Soviet-style hyperrealism because things are actually getting much worse for the common man in many ways, and nobody wants to be the one holding the bag and having to tell people that things actually are as bad as they feel.

I’ve seen quite a few politicians say it outright: “Don’t tell people things are bad, they’ll start acting like things are bad which will only make things worse” – sort of like George W. Bush’s stupid “The economy is crashing, keep spending no matter what” directions to the people. It’s really irresponsible, and one of the reasons why both the people and the state have gotten so much weaker over the past 20 years (They’re expressing more authority but the clock is ticking). Instead of pulling back which hurts the economy in the moment but helps individuals be more resilient and prepared, and instead of pulling back spending when times are allegedly “good” so you spend in the bad times and you spend in the good times, both parties shotgun money into the economy during the “good” times and then also during the “bad” times.

Bread and circuses, and the fall of an empire… Much like 1991 I’m sure.

Having a pair of default gateways could be an issue. On Windows (which I know, isn’t the OS here), you have to be pretty careful because if you’re straddling two networks, you need to pick one network to be the dominant one, that’s the one whose default gateway will get packets heading onto outbound networks.

People get mad at me when I say we need to be careful of the official numbers, this is the second largest revision of job creation in US history. The largest revision was during the great financial crisis.

Really, thanks to the superpower they have of using money that doesn’t even exist (Think you could make money if you could make money out of thin air?) it almost isn’t anyone’s money.

Except when the bill comes due, then it’s the taxpayer’s money. The middle class didn’t need that money anyway.

Always seems self-evident that equipment you don’t own and control isn’t going to work on your behalf.

When I’m using linux, I do something similar, I just sync’d my home folder as my nextcloud directory and that similarly made all my files available.

The way I’ve got it set up is I have a Nextcloud\Desktop, Nextcloud\Downloads, Nextcloud\Documents, Nextcloud\Pictures, and Nextcloud\Videos folder, and on each machine I use I point each of those points in windows to use the folder in the nextcloud folder instead of my users folder, then I run the official client to sync the entire nextcloud folder. By doing that, whichever computer I’m on I’ve got the same stuff in my main folders and anything else I have I can keep in the nextcloud folder. I’ve also got it on my mobile device just to automatically upload new pictures to the InstantUploads folder, but the app is a bit limited.

I live equally on the road working as at home, and I’ve got completely different computers for home and travel, so in this way I’ve always got all my files available since once I start up the computer it automatically starts pulling the local files. If you don’t want a full copy of everything on both machines, I think you can tell it to just create links of the files and the client will download the files from the server as they’re required, but I prefer having a local copy of the files myself.

I use nextcloud for syncing between different computers, because I tend to have different machines that are far separated geographically, and it works well. I put all my home folders on each computer into the nextcloud directory so I have all the same files everywhere I go and if I don’t have one of my computers I can still log in and access those files.

I used to use nextcloud as my solution for everything, but a big problem with photos is it isn’t really very navigable, and a problem with nextcloud as a general platform is everything is a plugin so if the plugin doesn’t get updated you can be stuck on an older version of the software which carries its own risks. As well, given the interface, You have your media but you can’t really go back and look at it. What I did instead is I set up a library in jellyfin with all my photos sorted into directories, and you can scroll and navigate through them fairly intuitively. I pulled my data out of google and facebook before deleting the accounts and so had many many photos but no way to really enjoy them, but that solution worked really well for me and I’ve been able to look at my old photos easily.

I wonder if you’ve ever used a Chromecast based on this criticism.

For a standard Chromecast, you open the app on your phone, then press the cast button, then the device you want to cast to, and the the device begins to stream the media independently of your device. You can shut off the device you used to start casting and it doesn’t matter because Chromecast is pulling the data on its own.

On some websites such as YouTube on PC, you also have a cast button and you can press it, select the device and it’ll start playing. you can get this button to work on all kinds of sites, and a lot of open source software supports it to a degree such as VLC, Peertube (through a plugin), and Jellyfin.

Using google chrome you can cast your current webpage or your desktop, but that’s not the standard use of Chromecast.

It takes some finagling, but you can cast from Jellyfin to a standard Chromecast right from your phone.

The latest version out is Chromecast with Android TV, which is really nice (for now). It’s running a version of android and has the play store, so you can set up the Jellyfin android TV app, and stream from your home server without requiring a domain name or https like you do to stream properly on straight Chromecast.

The big issue with Chromecast in my view is that it’s a Google product which means 3 things:

1. it’s proprietary, which has many risks coming from that nature and a crappy largely hidden API
2. it can be shut down any moment if they desire (see google graveyard), and being an always-on device it’s possible they just brick it on the way out
3. it will suck up as much data as they can from you to try to sell you more crap

How so? It seems like chromecast does exactly what it says it does, even if it’s a suboptimal solution for not being FOSS.

Not sayin nothin, but you might want to look at Matrix Conduit. you won’t want to keep it open, but it’s much easier to set up and it uses a tiny amount of the resources. Synapse kills the server I’m running both conduit and lotide on just fine.

Imo the future is federated and self-hosted. Maybe not for everyone, but for me.

I’ve got a 2013 MotoX, and it’s been many a moon, but I’m pretty sure I was able to get LineageOS onto it. It’s a small, thin phone with voice recognition built in. Quite distinct looking from any Moto Gs we’ve bought. Took Motorola forever to port Android M to it, and then the port was actually really shitty, so it was nice to eventually find a port.

I think I found the good version on xda. OTOH, I don’t think it was a cdma phone. I think the one I had supported LTE

I’m running nova, and the thing that sets it apart from rootless (as I recall, it’s been a while) is that you can set up whatever search engine for the search bar you want. I don’t use google, I only use my own searx instance on brave, and nova let me set everything up exactly the way I wanted it. Most other launchers assume you want google, and I think they assume you want chrome too.

I always debloat my phone, the difference is too massive to ignore.

My last 2 phones were a Galaxy S9 and a Galaxy S10, and I really found the samsungs to be insufferable at first, but with a strong debloat removing a bunch of ‘features’ nobody asked for and redundant apps, as well as changing the launcher (I use novalauncher, but rootless is also great and also FOSS) had a notable effect on the feel of the phone. I recall that some of the “features” specifically slow down responsiveness to button pushes because for example it ends up waiting on a home button press to see if you’re going to do a double or triple press.

If you mess it up too much, a factory restore will undo everything you did anyway, so don’t worry too much about it.

I’ve used the same technique on a number of different phones as well. My dad loves his LG phones, but it comes with a bunch of stuff he didn’t want, so we were able to disable it. His latest phones are rugged china phones, and he swears by them, especially once we were able to get rid of a bunch of stuff they added that you really don’t need.