• 9 Posts
  • 118 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • I see roughly the same thing:

    Your post says there is a podcast at [url] and that you are working on a guide as a companion to it, but it doesn’t say anything about where the guide is or whether any of it is online yet at all. Ok, I see now that the link url is discuss.james.network which is a different domain than the podcast, but that is still not much help. If that’s where the guide is, you should say so. I’d expect to see a discussion forum on a domain like that, not a podcast transcript.

    Really, though you should just include the guide in the post. Otherwise you’re just promoting your podcast and discussion site.



  • Doing something like this “for real” on any scale takes a ton of anti-spam and anti-fraud effort. Look at how big a pain it has become to post on Craigslist, which doesn’t even do commerce directly.

    On a small scale it’s less of a big deal. If you want an actual sales and payments platform like Etsy, it would have to be done by an organization of comparable scope, even if offloading payments to Stripe or whatever. Lots of seller vetting, dispute resolution, etc. I don’t think it’s impossible but it’s not just a matter of software. It would need paid staff dealing with hassles all day, imho.








  • What does this question even mean (no I don’t want to listen to a podcast to find out)?

    Sometimes I think people have been using the term “self-hosted” to mean what we used to call a home PC. I have always thought of a hosted computer (whether self-hosted or hosted by a company) as meaning a server which normally would live in a data center, and sometimes even means a rented box or VPS on which you self-host by installing and managing the software yourself (as opposed to using managed hosting or cloud services). Of course if you have good enough internet, you can self-host a server at home, but the considerations are otherwise about the same. I.e. it would usually not also be your workstation or gaming box.

    So what is it that your friends are going to do with the machine? That would be pretty important in figuring out how to prepare it.



  • I’ve been using Vitelity (paid) but Twilio is a bit cheaper and has a better API. However, the more obnoxious confirmation code senders can detect all of these as being in data centers. IME it’s only a few senders that are snotty about that. You could always get a burner phone.

    Hmm, I don’t know what happens if you get a mobile burner phone, set up call forwarding to your VOIP number, then throw the burner phone away (i.e. shut it off so you don’t have to keep it powered and broadcasting its location). The cheapest mobile plan that I know of ($30/year redpocket) unfortunately went up to $45 a few months ago, but it gets you a usable backup sim.

    Added: 1) r/nocontract on reddit showed a $36/year infimobile plan with a 20% off coupon (so a little under $30/y) on amazon. Similar deal to redpocket I think. 2) Another idea: get cheap mobile plan, port number into a voip provider, cancel mobile plan. I wonder if the number then reports as data center terminated.

    There are now starting to be a few “free” mobile providers where you are required to keep a spyware app running. I don’t think I’d bother with those. textnow.com is the one I remember but there were others. textnow does NOT support call forwarding on free plans.




  • There are a bunch on computers.woot.com and I’ve been looking at some, e.g. x370 or x13 yoga. I know a guy who returned a framework. Idr the exact issues but it sounded unfinished at the time. I’ve been wondering about recent ideapads. Awesome specs and they supposedly run Linux ok, but to now I’ve stayed with thinkpads.

    What’s wrong with your current machines?

    Maybe look at some Dells?