Get a REALLY good on-site support deal for your hardware. You also may need to adjust TTL values on your network stack.

I assume he dreamt about starting 8 new wars but didn’t (or couldn’t or forgot) and thus they were ‘stopped’.

China doesn’t even need to really join. They can just announce “looks like US bonds are losing value and we’re going to sell crapload of them in order to secure our investments”. No need to mention trade wars or do anything else.

Things have been brewing for quite a bit longer than a year, but that’s not the point at least I’m trying to make. Organization has started (atleast based on news coverage around here) only now when things are really getting out of control. There was time, there was easier options but from now on it’s going to be more and more difficult, specially if orange toddler actually manages to stall midterm elections. So, due to the circumstances, the time is essential, and (again, based on news coverage and other limited info I have) there’s quite a few people, to put it bluntly, just talking that someone should do something, while wery little actually gets done.

I am from Finland and while our communities are fairly small I can understand how it takes longer to organize bigger masses, but the whole humanity is still pretty much just 6 handshakes away from eachother. As a member of local council I’ve at least tried to change local politics and from experience I can say that it takes an afternoon or two to individually call trough ~20 politically active people and organize something. Those 20 people can then each call to their contacts and (assuming there’s no overlap) just from those two steps of “pyramid” and few days you can get 400 individuals on board or at least informed what’s coming up. 3rd “step” totals to 8400 people, 4th 160k and from there the number is in millions.

Obviously things in real world don’t work quite like pure calculations, but with a pretty low precentage of active individuals it’s still absolutely possible to reach out meaningful portion of the whole country within a few months.

I have been on strike, I’m a active participant on local community and have been a part of local policy changes. But as I live in a civilized nation I have the leverage of previous generations who did organize and build foundations for strong communities so I didn’t have to start from nothing.

I mentioned it would not be easy as the easy way was voting for Harris. But with that mindset of yours I suppose there’s nothing anyone can do and the game is lost already.

Organization in todays information world is relatively easy. Spreading information and communication with different groups is a very much solved problem. Getting people on board should not be a problem either at least based on what I can see from the news, a lot of people are fed up on the current status and a lot of people are already getting organized. It’s small steps all the way. You get handful of people to join the movement and each of them do the same and not before long your pyramid has quite a lot of people and getting more to join gets easier on every step.

And for me personally, I’m not coming to the US. I’ll stay at home and continue to do my part on my community.

You don’t need to storm the capitol, just sit on your asses for a week. Nation wide strike will get gears moving pretty fast as production, transport, maintenance and everything shuts down. Get your community together, share food, have strong social bond with strikers so that those in need get help and so on.

One saturday afternoon doesn’t cut it, but it doesn’t take that long either until it starts to really affect everything in society, mainly company profits which seems to be the driving force for anything political around there. It’s not going to be easy, it’d been far easier to go an vote against for current situation, but that train is long gone and it’s not going to get any easier in the future.

Technically yes. A lot of international coalitions are built without mechanism to exclude anyone and that’s why Russia still has a seat on UN security council. With NATO that would be somewhat simple at least on agreement level, just have everyone to join NATOv2 and resign from current NATO and continue work without US. In practise it’s obviously “a bit” more complicated to arrange command and supply chains and whatever, but it’s still absolutely doable if member countries really want to.

You’re not worrying for nothing. Losing wall power will shut down the drives and as usb-cradle is generally slower than “proper” drive bus it’s more likely that some write operation is going on when power is lost and that’ll potentially cause data corruption. Obviously not every power outage will cause issues, but I’d say it’s a higher risk with USB-drives than with drives on a SATA/m.2 bus.

But no matter what your setup is, raid is not a backup. All kinds of things can happen which cause loss of data and you should plan accordingly. If all you have is two drives on usb-cradles I might choose to use one of them as a offline backup disk and one for ‘live’ data so that it’s more likely that at least one of the drives is functional even after power issues or whatever, but that approach has it’s own problems too.

I had a two (or maybe a bit less) bitcoins on my wallet back in the day. I sold them for ~20€.

Well, the touchscreen part and maybe a bit more, had the same reaction on many directors at Nokia at the time. I don’t know if they feel like an idiot, but at least you’re not alone.

Max Fosh technically won prizes too.

Cameras don’t stop anyone, but I still have few recording my yard. It’s more of a hobby and I’m planning to integrate person detection on those to home automation but for me it’s also a small piece of peace on my mind. Should someone steal my car trailer (or a car) I’d have some footage for the police and insurance. Also a while ago we had a decent storm around and we weren’t at home so it was nice that I could check for possible damages remotely.

But absolute majority of time I don’t even think about them. I don’t have any notifications enabled, I’m not interested about neighbors cat running across our yard or getting interruptions every time someone on the family comes or goes. And while Frigate has some AI things built in, the whole thing runs locally. There’s no way I’d install nest or some other camera which sends/stores data to anywhere which isn’t 100% in my control.

I haven’t tested lvm on arm-based systems, but if it doesn’t automatically locate them you could try pvscan/vgscan/lvscan.

We still have handful of those around at work. 2000, XP and maybe some embedded variant of 98 too still somewhere. They are controlling some non-critical but still useful industrial stuff with stupidly large price tag to replace.

Specially XP is still going to be around for quite a while in industrial settings where the production line is controlled via single computer and replacing it would mean replacing the whole line with price tag potentially in millions. And those aren’t even that old machines, their planning and manufacturing just takes “a while” due to certifications and everything.

If you’re talking about just moving the physical volumes (as in the actual hard drives) as is to another computer they’re automatically scanned and ready to go in majority of modern distributions. No need to export/import anything. This is obviously assuming your boot drive isn’t a part of volume group and you have healthy drives at your hands. You can test this with any live-distribution, just boot from USB into a new operating system and verify your physical volumes/volume groups from that.

If you want to move the volume group to a new set of disks simplest way would be to add physical drive(s) to volume group and then removing the old drive(s) from it after data has been copied. Search for pvmove and vgreduce. This obviously requires a working system, if your data drive has already failed it’s a whole another circus.

I don’t know about ‘most’ tasks, but even current LLM/video generators generate “economic value” by throwing all kinds of slop around the internet which is then paid by the advertisers and consumers. Sure, It’s stupid beyond imagination obviously, but in the end someone gets paid and apparently pretty well as everyone and their dog are on the bandwagon.

And then there’s ‘real’ jobs in medical applications and material science where field is apparently moving pretty fast. But those aren’t on everyday headlines like the glorified text generators.

Microsoft deserves all the crap they’ve ordered, but skipping 9 on versioning was pretty smart move on their part. There’s still a ton of older software which just checks if windows version matches ‘windows 9’ to include both 95 and 98 (and all their variants). If 8.1 was released as 9 it would’ve broken a lot of compatibility which at least then was a big deal for Windows. And it still is, but now it seems that they’ll happily break everything from their most known product.

I’m not in the US so any comparisons are pretty much worthless, but 30k/year sounds just ridiculous. Myself and my wife make slightly above average by local standards but if we’d need to cough up another 2k/month for insurance that just wouldn’t happen. With mortage and other living expenses with kids there’s practically nothing left from what we make. Sure, we could cut our expenses a bit, we’re living pretty comfortably, but there’s no way we could squeeze 2k/month out of our “non necessary expenses”.

But, again not being in the US, that’s taken care of via taxes. 30+% is a lot out of salary but at least I don’t have to save for college fund nor worry about visit to hospital/doctor.

Even if your router acts as an DNS proxy it shouldn’t overload any pihole installation unless you have a crapload of devices doing millions of queries per hour. My pihole manages all my devices (20-30 individual things) without any problems and even if I hit some rate limit it’s going to be a change to default configuration, not a immovable object on your way. Based on quick glance over that reddit thread a new router might be a good option, but that’s another easy-ish task to accomplish. I use mikrotik device and I’m pretty happy with it but there’s a ton of good options.

For hiring someone to coach you I can see quite a few of potential issues. People who claim to know what they’re talking about but don’t really have the knowledge, straight up scammers obviously, mismatch in personal chemistry which will make learning unnecessarily difficult or even impossible, some people just aren’t good at teaching even if they do know their stuff and so on. By all means, use your money however you like, but I personally strongly advice against it unless you can get some courses on (preferably local) reputable vendor. You can look for online courses too, cisco has a ton of courses on networking, redhat has plenty of linux courses and other big players have their own training and even certificates if you want to go that far.

For pihole you don’t need support from router. It’s convenient if you can adjust dhcp-server settings so that pihole will automatically cover your whole network, but it’s not a requirement, you can just manually set each device to use pihole as DNS server. All you need is a static IP address outside your DHCP -pool. For spesific router configurations, you can ask those too, just include spesific model and possibly screenshots from your router interface.

That iMac of yours is more than enough to get you going. If you plan to run multiple things on it it might be good idea to look for hypervisors like proxmox or ovirt, but basic qemu+libvirt -setup on pretty much any linux-installation will work just fine too.

For the 3rd part, your concerns are mostly about networking and setting up pihole/other servers on your local network will gain you knowledge on how to manage that as well. Also, you can set up nextcloud/immich/whatever locally at first, get familiar with them and then allow access from the internet either via bitwarden or other tunneling or directly over public network. Latter has obviously way bigger threat models than using VPN and accessing stuff that way, but gladly the networking side of things is somewhat it’s own beast from the servers so you can build everything local only at first and then figure out what’s the best approach for you with remote access.