qjkxbmwvz

joined 8 months ago
[–] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 8 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago)

It can be daunting to get into the hobby, there are a ton of niches.

To start: where are you? I'm in the USA, so that's where my experience is.

License: required to transmit on the ham bands; you can listen without a license.

Range: are you looking to talk to people in your city/region? If so, a cheap "walkie-talkie" style (called "HT" in the biz


best avoid "walkie-talkie") is a good place to start. These VHF/UHF (very/ultra high frequency) radios are affordable


something from Baofeng(~$30) or similar will work just fine, though they are often looked down on (I have one


for the price, it's great). You will have the most luck if there is an active ham scene in your area, in large part because they may have a repeater, which can greatly extend your range. Many regions will have scheduled "nets" where you just go around and chat.

If you're looking for the ability to chat with folks on the other side of the world, you'll want to look into HF (high frequency). This is much lower frequency, thus longer wavelength, than the handheld VHF/UHF HTs. So...the antennas take up a lot of space. Mine is 52 feet long, in the attic. And the radios are much more expensive (more like $1k new). ICOM 7300, Yaesu FT710 are popular entry level units (but you also need power supply, cables, and antenna).

That said: if you just want to listen to HF, the antenna doesn't matter as much at all, and you can use an SDR (RTL-SDR probably works?) for listening. You can probably also find a used shortwave radio that covers some of the HF ham bands.

[–] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 23 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

As a long-time Debian user, I'd have to throw my vote behind Slackware for the title of most UNIX-y, which is I guess a bit different from most Linux-y.

Debian got me through grad school, but Slack got me through undergrad on a hopelessly underpowered old ThinkPad


Volkerding is a legend, and Slack will always be dear to my heart.

Nah, no hard feelings towards the retail folks, they're doing what they're supposed to. It's just that I wish the corporate incentives were different so it felt more like the staff were trying to help.

[–] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

My only complaint with microcenter is that the commission in incentives come off as extreme. Like I will be walking around with something in my hand and a rando will come up to me, say "hey there boss, lemme just slap this on that for you," and proceed to put a sticker on it with their ID. Not a big deal, but palpable, and makes it harder to just browse.

[–] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 12 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Yeah, I get that people feel like they have so little control over their lives that they feel the need to generally be passive aggressive assholes to people they deem unworthy, but this is just an overall dick move. Having working public/municipal plumbing is a good thing.

[–] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 8 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

This happened to me when Debian switched from SysV to systemd. I am not the only person who experienced this (e.g., https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=147478 ).

This is not to say the systemd behavior is wrong, but it essentially changed the behavior of fstab. Whether this is Debian's fault, Arch's fault (per the above link), systemd's fault, or my fault is a fair question. But this committed that most egregious of sins per our Lord and Savior Torvalds


it broke my userspace.

[–] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 22 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (8 children)

My favorite was when the behavior of a USB drive in /etc/fstab went from "hmm it's not plugged in at boot, I'll let the user know" to "not plugged in? Abort! Abort! We can't boot!"

This change over previous init behavior was especially fun on headless machines...

[–] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 52 points 1 week ago

If you're OOTL, it's a reference to the Republican posting about being a black nazi on a porn site https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/mark-robinson-black-nazi-porn-forum-1235107129/

[–] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 18 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I think they mean just the domain name, but not positive.

[–] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 2 points 1 week ago

Getting TLS certs will be complicated

I just use Let's Encrypt with a wildcard domain


same certs for public and private facing domains. I'm sure this isn't best practice, but it's mostly just for me so I'm not too worried :)

[–] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 3 points 1 week ago (3 children)

I'm guessing it wouldn't work for a variety of reasons, but having cameras digitally sign the image+the metadata could be interesting.

[–] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 1 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Yeah I don't expose Jellyfin over the Internet, so it doesn't matter for me, and wouldn't work at all over WAN (unless VPN'd to home network).

Also, it's all reverse proxied, and there's nothing preventing having two Jellyfin hostnames, e.g., jf-local.mydomain.com and jf-public.mydomain.com.

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