Here’s January of this year. San Francisco, so pretty moderate weather — typically don’t run heat during the day, and low 60s at night (if at all) during the winter. Large temperature gradient throughout house, typically.

South facing windows gives kitchen and living room a greenhouse effect, particularly in the winter, hence the large daily temperature swings:

Good point — it is “incrementally free,” although I guess if you count tire wear and tear that’s not even true.

Your local city college may or may not offer free classes (in San Francisco, you just need to show proof that you live in the city with some legal status).

Some public transportation is free for certain groups (youth and folks experiencing homelessness can get free passes here).

“First X of the month” at the zoo/a museum/whatever — lots of venues have free events.

A jog, bike ride, hike — lots of great stuff outside!

The bank doesn’t own the house, they just have a significant lien against it. Maybe a potato potato situation (how are you supposed to spell that phrase 🤔), but it is an important distinction.

Landlords can get pissed if you paint the walls/change appliances/remodel/etc., but so long as the property is properly insured (and you make your loan payments on time) the bank probably isn’t going to bother you.

Landlords can — and do — place restrictions on quiet hours, guest policy, who is allowed to live there, etc. Owning is definitely different.

Fail2ban config can get fairly involved in my experience. I’m probably not doing it the right way, as I wrote a bunch of web server ban rules — anyone trying to access wpadmin gets banned, for instance (I don’t use WordPress, and if I did, it wouldn’t be accessible from my public facing reverse proxy).

I just skimmed my nginx logs and looked for anything funky and put that in a ban rule, basically.

I’m gonna try to guess the most likely LLM response to your post, trained on reddit data:

“This.”

How’d I do?

Brother deny the claims: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/03/brother-denies-using-firmware-updates-to-brick-printers-with-third-party-ink/

No love for us Dvorak users :(

If you exclude blocked instances, you’re a lot higher than #5…

Isn’t universally funny.

hopefully someone will appreciate it 😋

Not sure if wholesome, or wants there to be a car crash…

(I know what you mean, I just found it humorous.)

Our experience is that basically the only really expensive thing is childcare. Are you eligible for subsidized, or free, care (or have trustworthy and willing relatives)?

As for gear, babies don’t need much. But for what they do need, reach out to friends, neighbors, and family! We’re fortunate that we could have afforded everything new, but we really only bought a few things because friends and randos alike gave us so much free kid stuff (we bought a nice stroller, a baby basket, and an IKEA crib — basically everything else was a hand-me-down). Join local “buy nothing” groups, or parent groups (sadly they’re usually WhatsApp, but whatever). Most people hate throwing away stuff, and would rather it go to a good home.

Look at programs for subsidized/free necessities like diapers. There are lots of resources out there, especially in cities.

As everyone else said, no one feels ready. We certainly didn’t!

UPS and American companies in general

But this is USPS, which isn’t an American company, it’s a US independent agency.

Their mandate isn’t (AFAIK…) to make a profit, but rather to serve the mail requirements of a very large country.

Personally, my experiences with USPS have been generally positive, from passports for infants to free change-of-address forwarding service to tracking down quasi-scam products from Amazon. YMMV though.

The network gear I manage is only accessible via VPN, or from a trusted internal network…

…and by the gear I manage, I mean my home network (a router and a few managed switches and access points). If a doofus like me can set it up for my home, I’d think that actual companies would be able to figure it out, too.

I’m holding out for Aperture Science, if for no other reason than that their AI has a dry, dark sense of humor.

IIRC Torvalds uses Fedora.

(Debian for me.)

Open to discussion, but since 2008, the Democrats have won every election where the leadership didn’t “put their finger on the scale” in the primaries/picking the candidate. Obama, Obama; Clinton arguably shouldn’t have been the nominee and Sanders should have; Biden was (?) properly primaries; Harris was picked — obvious pick, but still, not primaried.

Or the other reason, that the US is too sexist to elect a woman. It’s depressing either way of course.

The Democrats, in hindsight, fucked up with the economy and/or the messaging.

Did inflation happen because of the groundwork that Trump laid down in his term (not to mention global pandemic)? Sure — but did inflation get really bad under Biden? Yes, absolutely. That doesn’t make it his fault, but it makes it a problem that the Democrats probably needed to address more aggressively, an all-out attack on rising cost of living.

At the start of the pandemic, for me to carry $100 of normal weekly groceries home from the supermarket was a real challenge, but I could do it. Now, I carry $100 no problem, with a toddler on my shoulders. The money doesn’t really matter to me, but from what I’ve been reading, it really mattered to a lot of voters. Again: I think his will be worse under Trump (if it does get better, it’ll be due to some shady tax rebates to supermarkets or big ag or something, IMHO).

So while the Dems are talking about first time home credits and whatnot, Vance is out there lying about the price of eggs — but it’s a lie that “feels” right to a lot of people, and anecdotally, has some truth to it in that inflation/cost of living increase is real. Nevermind that the R policy is…what, exactly? But they say they’ll fix it, and they point out that Dems are currently in power, and that’s enough for a lot of people.

Remote backup server would be my suggestion.

Configure it with a VPN to talk to your home network and set it up at a trusted friend’s or family’s place.

I do this with a raspberry pi and an external HDD that takes daily/weekly/monthly snapshots, with daily rsync. Works nicely for me.

I don’t have a problem with folks being outraged at an illegitimate vote; but what I can’t get behind is this outrage while at the same time being (at best) unconcerned with legitimate voters being turned away.

One is bad because it’s a vote counting when it shouldn’t; the other is bad because it’s a vote not counting when it should. It’s essentially the same functional outcome, it’s just that one of these…you know…actually happens a lot and the other doesn’t.