I believe solokeys are open source. I use a solo v1 for sudo, ssh, and two factor websites. They either went out of business or are basically defunct as I understand it, but you can pick them up on crowd supply. I wouldn’t get the v2, supposedly they had problems and that’s why they shut down. You likely won’t see updates, but they do function for what you’re looking for. There are some that are shaped like a small thumb drive and some that sit almost flush with a USB port. Some have nfc, which is useful for phones. Buy at least 2 though, and register both for everything, because you don’t want to lock yourself out of something.

Thank goodness I had a newer monitor then, because I would definitely have toasted several.

I’m so divorced from normalcy I have no frame of reference. Do normal people who don’t do this stuff for a living use Linux now, outside handheld gaming devices? I figured they just used whatever came on whatever device they wanted to buy.

Did you ever dual boot Linux and windows, and also have VMware installed in both so you could boot the other one from inside whichever you had booted? Because I spent an insane amount of time screwing around with that for as excruciatingly slow as it was back then.

You never know when you’ll need to install period Linux on an old piece of hardware.

I think you need to qualify that having used or tried Linux in college was normal in the 2000s for someone in computer science or engineering, or basically my fellow undiagnosed autistics and autistic adjacents. In my experience it was fairly normal in college for most people to have trouble operating a basic word processor, and they would not have had any idea what Linux was at all.

“mailing list and Usenet support”. Yeah. If you’ve ever looked up some weird issues and the only thing that you can come up with is some Debian message group that looks like it was typed on a typewriter, is extremely difficult to follow the response chain, and is apparently from before Y2K… That’s what it was like to run Linux back then.

How wrong did you have to be to break your monitor? Because I’m positive I got it very wrong a whole lot of times and never managed that.

Nah, I had the kindle keyboard and it was great. Still is, if I don’t want to read with a backlight. My first one stopped working after at least a decade, and a couple months later I came across one in a thrift store for like 10 bucks and it still works great.

With as cheap as pen plotters have gotten, I’m surprised no one has come up with a reasonably small printer looking one for normal sized paper that functions like an actual printer. the ones you can get need special plugins and vector graphics to plot. There used to be many models several decades ago, and they can still be found and modified to use normal pens, but that’s kind of a driver nightmare. I feel like we’re past the point where people need to be able to print many pages relatively quickly, and I’d rather have a printer that took a while to print but I knew that it would work every single time.

I have a full beard, so I don’t know… Does it take more than 5 minutes?

Except that it’s great to homebrew and experience literally everything it has to offer. It’s the same with the 3ds. Turns out to be about the best handheld emulator out there, because of the extremely high quality buttons.

Have to add, I came across mine the other day in a drawer and the soft touch finish is sticky now, and the thing was so bad to begin with I feel like it’s that way on purpose just to be a dick.

I use a petzl zipka for that. The headband is a retractable string, so it has no bulk, and it runs on aaas. I don’t think they make them anymore, but you can still find them occasionally.

With bitwarden you can store and securely share files, store information for family members, card details, memos, etc

My favorite use for my phone was wabbitemu, which was a perfect emulator for the ti86 calculator I’ve used almost daily since 1998. Apparently my new phone uses a new architecture and the app doesn’t work, so that’s rather disappointing.

If the phone flashlight is so useful, try carrying a legit flashlight for a while. They’re loads better. I’d suggest one of the smaller offerings from rovyvon. Any of them are great, but I like the ones with two lenses and a rechargeable plus AAA battery compartment. It’s the size of a car key fob, lasts a long time, charges over USB c, and goes from super dim to insanely bright.

Yeah, and I assume future me will be even dumber than present day me, so I try to make it really easy for him to find out what he needs to know.

Another good tip is to put timestamps and increase the length of your bash history. That way when I log in half a year from now I’ll know what I was up to.

All of your issues can be solved by a backup. My host went out of business. I set up a new server, pulled my backups, and was up and running in less than an hour.

I’d recommend docker compose. Each service gets its own folder inside your docker folder. All volumes are a folder in the services folder. Each night, run a script that stops all of them, starts duplicati, backs up to a remote server or webdav share or whatever, and then starts them back up again. If you want to be extra safe, back up to two locations. It’s not that complicated if it’s just your own services.

I’ll have you know my neck beard is thoroughly covered by the rest of my beard.