Nope, programming is like a black hole – once you’ve entered the event horizon it’s too late and you’ll never escape.

What do you mean by “traditional cad designers” and why is that important? I’m not really sure why that is something that should matter to me?

Aww man, I knew it was only a matter of time before someone was going to “force” me to learn python. Thanks for the link, I’ll take a look at this after dinner.

Another consideration… If you are a programmer type then OpenSCAD is a language-based program. I’ve been using it heavily for the past week designing a dual-filament extruder for my Ender 3, and last year I designed and built a utility trailer. As with anything it has its quirks, but I’m much more comfortable writing code and I always found the other GUI-oriented programs to be unintuitive.

We should start posting that 3.2% of children watching Trump on TV have developed autism, therefor Trump is using subliminal messaging and is dangerous to their kids. They may not care that a pedophile is in office, but mention subliminal messaging and they’ll go crazy.

I think my suggestion would be to use the PC as a dedicated firewall, but you will need at least two ethernet ports for that (one to connect to the ISP router, and the second for internal network). This lets you learn network security and control the traffic that can actually get to your other computers. You could also set up KVM to start running virtual machines here. The idea with a VM is to keep services separate and isolated, so like one VM to manage security cameras, another VM to host a game server, another one to host sonarr/radarr/jellyfin… etc.

When you are able to expand, your second physical machine should be your NAS. Get your storage space started, share it over NFS or samba, and move your backup/security camera/sonarr VMs over to this machine for direct access to the larger storage space. Pay attention to system usage and move your VMs to balance the cpu/memory resources. Eventually you may want to get a third machine dedicated more for hosting the game servers, maybe a web server to view the security camera feeds, or whatever.

You mentioned backing up Wikipedia… Have a look at the Kiwix project, you can already get access to regular backups for a lot of information sites.

I guess this is how they solve their food shortage after getting so much blowback from trying to force children to replace migrants working in the fields.

Why does everyone think the term came from Star Wars? I know it was used in steampunk before then, and google suggests it goes back to a 1958 article about robots. Sorry, not trying to be pedantic, just feels like a lot of people give Star Wars unjust credit for things they didn’t actually create.

Amazon is so bad at coordinating their deliveries that I have seen three delivery vans parked on my block at the same time. Now I’m just waiting for them all to show up at the same house at once.

Don’t forget that managers think the same thing – if it’s free then it is somehow an inferior product but if you pay for something then that automatically makes it better. This applies forward as well… the more they pay for something, the “better” it must be.

For example… Cybertruck.

From my perspective, open-source products are greatly superior because you have the entire community of users and engineers working on a known issue, rather than a few paid engineers who may not even use the product. Even more importantly, the community will solve problems that a corporation has decided aren’t worth the effort or are “obsolete”.

At one time I worked for IBM, supporting a nationwide company. There was a top guy who (like in the above story) thought he was hot shit. I think he was something like the CFO, but his ineptitude was recognized and he was pushed out. This company allowed people to move to a lower position, and he always thought he knew more about computers than everyone else, so he took the position of CTO.

One day I got a call from him, ranting that Outlook wouldn’t open and these computers were hopelessly broken. The normal procedure was to remote connect into the caller’s computer to directly fix any problems, but he decided he was smarter than the tech support people, and refused to allow me to access his machine. Fortunately I had direct contact with the on-site tech guy, who knew what he would be facing and went to the CTO’s office.

When he got back a couple minutes later, I asked him what the issue was. “Outlook was already open, it was just minimized to the task bar.”

Actually I AM that guy with a small font size and super-packed density. The more information on the screen, the faster I can take it in at a glance and find what I need. Sorry your brain doesn’t work that way, but less clicking and scrolling absolutely does affect my productivity and my idea of usability. For example, I find it highly annoying when a website changes to a larger spacing on a drop-down list and suddenly something I used to be able to immediately click on now requires me to scroll down several times to find the option I want. I’m not sure how that’s supposed to increase usability.

Heh I just ran into the invisible icons issue recently, for whatever reason I am no longer able to accept Teams meeting. Yeah that’s definitely a shitty thing. But more whitespace? In other words, less visible information on the screen which requires more scrolling or clicking to other screens? Sorry, that just sounds annoying and less productive.

What do you find “old-fashioned” about Thunderbird? Do you not consider an interface “new” if they don’t change it and hide all the common features every five minutes like Microsoft does? It’s an email client, you read your emails in it. How would you do it better?