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Well said.

I have a normal PC...

I'd love some kind of external tape drive that I can connect with USB-C, or USB-3...

But everything is SAS? And no way to convert SAS to SATA?

Recommendations?


The cheapest option is to get a SAS pcie card and a new drive like https://www.ebay.com/itm/198052084090 or try a much cheaper used drive.

LTO drives are expensive but they are very well designed and it is the most reliable portable storage format available. Full LTO tapes in a good fire rated safe really provide a fantastic sense of security. The cost of the drive is amortized over the total bytes you store.


Those tapes in a fire rated safe give a sense of security before the fire.

After the fire, it is likely that the tapes and the papers in the safe are a pile of ash. Fire-rated safes often don't survive fires especially if you live in wildfire country.


I mean a UL 72 Class 125 rated safe or file cabinet with a 2-hour fire endurance rating

No recommendations, just brings back memories of the “good old days” with QIC-80 tapes and ZIP drives, both of which came with “desktop” in mind.

I still have a ZIP drive around with a parallel port connector. I haven’t owned a computer with a parallel port in 20+ years.

I probably also have a QIC-80 tape drive around somewhere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarter-inch_cartridge

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_drive


It would be neat if someone resurrected Iomega and launched the 2026 version of the Zip drive for local backup. It'd be something like $200 (same as the original Zip drive) and it would take 20TB WORM tapes that cost $20 each. There would be some kind of horrible limitation, like it would take 2 months 24/7 to actually write 20TB, but it would come with simple software that rapaciously grabbed your whole cloud life and local data, and the tapes would last forever.

I just looked, and iomega.com seems to be some kind of malware site. Sad.


SLR100 for life!

No recommendations, but you can get a thunderbolt to SAS adapter; they aren't cheap though.

Try searching for thunderbolt lto.

I know MagStor has one with usb-c presentation.


It'll be nice to see how quickly I burn through this free money with auto-reload off.

Unless they somehow say, "You owe us $181,902, bucko! Turning off auto-reload just meant 'Don't add more money to pay off your debt!' It didn't mean, 'Don't incur more debt!' SUCKER!"


The World Factbook wasn't prone to hallucinations, intentional omissions, the whims of billionaires, or the unstated goals of astroturfing groups.

If the government has somewhere to tell you what it thinks is true, you can use that to double-check another part of the government that's misleading you on that same data. You can also double-check it against other sources of truth to gain insight about potential manipulation in one or more of the systems.

Here's one hot take:

https://tcf.org/content/commentary/a-well-informed-electorat...


I suck at electronics, so -

Could you possibly make a modern cell phone that runs off of rechargeable AA batteries?

How many would it take to have roughly the same amount of screen time?

ChatGPT says it's a bad idea, but roughly I'd need 10 AA batteries and a boost converter.


It depends on the AA battery, but you'd need 6 - 8 to get equivalent performance.

The Google Pixel 9 has a 4700 mAh battery at 3.9 volts. The total energy is around 18.3 watt hours.

A high capacity rechargeable AA battery is 2500 mAh at 1.2 volts, or around 3 watt hours. If you wired 3 AA batteries in series, and then 2 of those series in parallel (for a total of 6 batteries), that would give you 3.6v at 5000 mAh. 3.6 volts falls within a normal discharge curve for a lithium ion battery, so you probably wouldn't need a boost converter.


4 AA NiMh would get you 5V, the same coming from the slow charger. Let's say each AA battery holds 2000 mah. To reach 5000 mAH you would need 2.5 AA. Now multiply 2.5 x 4 = 10

The dumb AI read a good estimation.

Carrying 10 AA batteries strapped to your cellphone is not sexy. On the other hand, falling phones would land with the screen up - batteries down.


I made an Actually Portable Executable web server out of this. You download one file, and it can run on many different systems.

https://github.com/MattCruikshank/emu_ape

I'm trying to set it up so you can add roms to a folder, and it'll use them. (Remember Actually Portable Executables are ZIP files, too!)


I desperately want to write C/C++ code that has a web server and can talk websockets, and that I can compile with Cosmopolitan.

I don't want Lua. Using Lua is crazy clever, but it's not what I want.

I should just vibe code the dang thing.


You should, it’s fun.

I have a devcontainer running the Cosmopolitan toolchain and stuck the cosmocc README.md in a file referenced from my AGENTS.md.

Claude does a decent job. You have to stay on top of it when it’s writing C, easy to turn to spaghetti.

Also the fat binary concept trips up agents - just have it read the actual cosmocc file itself to figure any issues out.


I've got it working. Used Mongoose. Unfortunately Actually Portable Executables seem to not play well with WSL, and the suggested fixes didn't work. I'm able to play with it in a VM. Not as portable as I'd hoped, but I'll see how it goes.


If I'm not mistaken, there was not supposed to be a standing army.

If you have a standing army, that creates a whole rats nest of problems.

And ps, I've talked to people who think we shouldn't have a standing army, and I frankly think they're insane.


Standing armies create structural problems. Many countries in Asia are constantly having civilian governments being overthrown by the army.


Not having standing armies also creates structural problems (mostly getting invaded). There are only 21 countries without a standing army, and they're almost all micronations with <200k population (mostly tiny islands). Iceland is the only one of them with a GDP per capita worth mentioning, but it's also part of Nato, the largest military alliance in the world.


Switzerland has no standing army and they have a respectable GDP.

You could pull off a “Switzerland but with defensive nuclear second strike capability” model in this era and it’d work fine.


Switzerland has a standing army with ~150k active personel, upon which they spend 1% GDP, and which includes a half year conscription https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Armed_Forces.


Right, but it’s a citizen militia rather than a permanent professional army.


It's a permanent professional army, where are you getting this stuff? Switzerland has an air force and everything. They also have a large trained citizen militia but it's supported by a backbone of a professional standing army.


> They also have a large trained citizen militia but it's supported by a backbone of a professional standing army.

Less than 10% are full timers, the vast majority are conscripts and volunteers. Even officers generally aren't full timers[1].

All I'm saying is, there's a spectrum of 'Complete citizen militia, as envisioned by the framers of the US Constitution' all the way over to 'Standing army as it exists in the US today', and Switzerland is obviously much closer to the former than the latter.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Armed_Forces#Personnel


This is why we originally instituted mandatory military service here in Sweden. To ensure that the army isn't representative of some special class, e.g. the nobility or the burghers etc.


Please, sell me a USB-C device that gives me mesh networking on my phone.

I'd like a Small, Medium, and Large option. Ideally, each would have a passthrough charger, so I can charge my phone even with the device plugged in to my phone.

The Small is just the device, and I guess it would drain my phone's battery. The Large would have a 25,000mAh and be just small enough to legally take on an airplane in the United Stated. The Medium has a smallish battery, maybe?

Give me what you can. Wifi. FRS. CB. LoRa. The ability to switch between those? The ability to broadcast across all of those in some spread-spectrum broadcast?

Make me use your special App that I have to install on my phone.

Make the device also act like a storage device. The Small has usb storage big enough to store the APK for the app for me to side-load.

The Large has enough usb storage for, I dunno, all of Wikipedia and medical texts, and open maps, and a few other things, and the Kiwix app to side-load.

Make the Medium and the Large also be able to be a hotspot, for other people nearby to be able to connect to, so they can download the app and browse Kiwix, and send messages through my phone? Or just let my phone be that hotspot, I guess?

And most importantly, give me messaging. Secure point-to-point, exchanging keys by touching our phones together, or using QR codes, or something.

Or broadcast messaging. With configurable repeating.

And then make the Base Station version of this, which has solar panels, and a battery, and it's just a repeater. You install and forget.

If you're only going to build one thing, build the Small version I described. Next, I guess, would be the Base Station. Next would be the Large.

Where is the Kickstarter? I'll back it right now. I'll buy 2 Large, 6 Small, and 4 Base Stations. Right now.


https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0F7LD3BQG

Meshtastic is the name. It works today. Many cities have them. They aren’t useful in antigovernment scenarios because they are trivial to jam and deny use of.


Worth checking out meshtastic and their ecosystem of much longer range mesh tech.

https://meshtastic.org/docs/hardware/devices/


Pragmatically, cost and ease of access is especially important in suppressed countries or ones with unstable infrastructure. While the devices you're talking about has lots of conveniences, distribution and price dominate in lower income regions.

For a side project, sure. But in first world countries, the odds of infrastructure breakdown or suppression of Internet is incredibly rare. In Iran's case, suppression is a weapon so phone only makes a lot of sense.


I'd like to start with something that works, and then make it affordable.

Rather than start with something free, that demonstrably doesn't work where it needs to.


Fuck cancer.


Well put


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