IMO, the biggest problem with timezones is that the people who initially created them were fairly short sighted.

That and there have been way too many changes to who lives in what timezone. The one that boggles my mind is that apparently there’s a country in two timezones, not like, split down the middle or anything, but two active timezones across the entire country depending on which culture you’re a part of, or something. It’s wild.

I still don’t know if there’s any difference between GMT and UTC. I couldn’t find one. They both have the same time, same offset (+0), and represent the same time zone area.

I use UTC because I’m in tech, and I can’t stand time formats, so I exclusively use ISO 8601, with a 24 hour clock. Usually in my local time zone, via UTC. We have DST here which I’m not a fan of, but I have to abide by because everyone else does.

My biggest issues with time and timezones is that everyone uses different standards. It drives me nuts when software doesn’t let me set the standard for how the time and date is displayed, and doesn’t follow the system settings. It’s more common in web apps, but it happens a lot. I put in a lot of effort to try to get everything displaying in a standard format then some crudely written website is just mm/dd/yy with 12h clock and no timezone info, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Version 1.0 released in 2016. I’m pretty sure my process pre-dates this tool.

Looks good, but my collection is already ripped and converted, so I don’t have a need for it anymore.

I’ll keep this in my pack pocket if I happen to ever buy physical media again.

I use a private streaming application. I don’t want to say which one, but popular examples include Plex, jellyfin, emby, and Kodi.

It’s not really compatible with the DVD menu systems, though, that would be really fun if it was.

My bad, it’s been a while.

No lie, a large amount of my digital media was pulled from physical disks.

I set up a system with a ton of space and two optical drives and just cycled through, disk after disk, pulling the content off. Once I had it, I ran it through handbrake and converted it to H.264 (AVC/AAC), and then put all the disks away and forgot about them.

Whenever I see a SATA optical drive that someone doesn’t want, I grab it and tuck it away. Shit is rare now.

I’m sure I could go to a shop and just pick one up, but honestly, I don’t have a reason to. Give me an opportunity to snag one for free and I will not pass it up.

I have an external Blu ray drive at this point.

I’ve always wanted a good quality 3.5" external drive. I rarely have an internal disc drive (cd/dvd/BR) on any of my computers. A few years ago I had the need to pull some files off of a 3.5" floppy, I had to boot up an old Dell PE 2850 server that had a 3.5" drive on it to get the files off the drive. Luckily the copy of Windows server 2003 still booted, and the raid array was operational. It was like a miracle getting that stuff off that disk.

It was late at night and I couldn’t wait until morning to go buy a USB 3.5" drive to get the data.

I work in IT and people question my sanity when I’m walking home with SCSI interfaces and corresponding SCSI tape drives. I even picked up a zip 100 usb drive at some point.

I never used it for it’s intended purpose, but as soon as someone needs data off of some archive, on an outdated storage format, I become the MVP.

Iron man.

I think the third one?

That’s Tony’s dad, in a message he recorded for Tony.

I’m generally more of a Debian user, when I use Linux at least, so anything red hat based doesn’t even occur to me to recommend. I generally don’t get involved in distro discussions though.

My main interaction with Linux is Ubuntu server, and that’s where my knowledge generally is. I can’t really fix issues in redhat, so if someone is using it, I’m mostly lost on how to fix it.

There’s enough difference in how redhat works compared to Debian distributions that I would need to do a lot of work to understand what’s happening and fix any problems.

I dunno if I’d say any distro of Linux is really beginner friendly.

It takes quite a bit of learning the ins and outs of operating systems before Linux makes sense in any capacity.

If you’re just looking to run a few basic apps like discord/slack/teams/zoom, and run a browser, then sure, just about every distro can do that without trouble, and can be configured to be as “friendly” as Windows, with a few exceptions.

But anybody who wants to do intermediate/advanced stuff with little to no prior Linux knowledge? I’m not sure any distro is much easier than others. Again, with a few exceptions.

The exceptions are distros that are almost intentionally difficult to use, or that require a high level of competency with Linux before you can attempt to use it.

There’s always a learning curve, that learning curve is pretty much always pretty steep.

I’ve been using Linux for dedicated servers for a while and I don’t use Linux as a desktop environment, in no small part because despite having a fairly high level of competency with Linux, I don’t feel like I know enough to make Linux work for me instead of the other way around.

He’d just be an idiot faster.

It depends. If you’re forwarding a lot of ports then maybe, but just a home gaming server? Probably not a big deal.

Just don’t forward ports for remote control and you’ll be fine, especially RDP (3389 IIRC), and SSH…

Well, I’m probably going to try to get my ccnp for kicks. I’ll re-do my CCNA, then do my ccnp. By the time I go for my NA cert I’ll pretty much be ready to go for the np cert.

I’ll build a new resume emphasizing my network stuff, though my resume is already fairly heavily focused on networking as is, and try again.

I’m pretty happy with my job in almost every way, I know most of the things I would need to know to be successful, despite it being a more generalist position, and my co-workers are cool. Management is better than most, and the pay is more than the last two generalist positions I’ve worked, plus it’s work from home, so I’m pretty comfortable where I am for now. The pay, despite being higher than I’ve gotten previously, is a pretty far cry from what I probably deserve, just way too low, under $55k USD (I’m not in the US, but the conversion puts me under 55). From what I’ve seen online, median salary for a systems admin, which is basically what my job mostly entails, is around $73k USD… So I’m around $20k/yr shy.

I know network admins are similar, depending on the complexity/importance of the network they administrate. I’m aware of people in networking that are making more than 100k USD a year; and right now I consider that to be where things start to cap off for networking. I’d be pretty happy with $73k USD.

Yep, I’m sure they do.

Realistically, does any average consumer know what’s on which circuit?

Spanning the split phase will screw you up, across breakers won’t be fun but shouldn’t pose any serious problems, as long as it’s not in different sides of the split phase.

I’m pretty sure they say this because actually explaining what will work and what won’t either requires significant prior knowledge of power systems, or a couple of paragraphs of explainers before you can get a rough picture of what the hell they’re driving at.

Everyone I know who has used powerline, just plug it in and see if it works. Those who were lucky, say it’s great and works without issue, etc. Those who were not lucky say the opposite.

I’m just over here watching the fireworks, eating popcorn.

IMO, billionaires are a symptom of the system in which I’m underpaid, which is the cause of a nontrivial number of my concerns.

Financial stress has been a constant companion for me, money doesn’t solve all my problems, but it certainly would relieve my financial stressors.

If billionaires were less common, it would be because they invested more into their workforce, and paying them appropriately for their contributions to the business. Billionaires exist because a large group of people worked very hard for less money than they deserved, so that they could become a billionaire.

The reason we should be angry at billionaires is because they’re usually the one dictating how much our contributions are worth (or rather, how much they’re not worth). They make the rules, set the goal posts, and determine how valuable we are (how much we are paid).

They’re a symptom of a broken system, they’re also the reason why the system is broken.

So I disagree with the initial assertion that my problems are not because someone is a billionaire. A nontrivial amount of my problems are exactly because someone is a billionaire. They stole the wages that I deserved (along with untold numbers of my co-workers), so they could become a billionaire, and I can be drowning in debt trying to make it through, paycheque to paycheque…

Fuck billionaires.

What, like the CCNA? Which I achieved and it expired last year, and got me nowhere?

I prefer linkin_park_numb.mp3.com

It just hit different

I feel this, especially since I’m more into networking, but my work is more generalist.

I open my mouth about networking and people’s eyes glaze over. Even very experienced senior people can’t really understand what I’m talking about when it comes to some of the more intermediary networking concepts. Meanwhile I tune into a podcast that’s networking focused and they’re basically speaking Latin for me.

There’s so much that I don’t know. I get the broad strokes of things but I’m hopelessly lost on so many of the more nuanced bits of networking.

I really want to break away from generalist work and get into a network focused position, but after 10 years as a generalist in various MSP companies, most places won’t take me seriously as a networker and won’t even sit down for an interview.

I’m good at other stuff, damn near expert level with some things, but my passion is networks and the workplaces I’ve been at just don’t care to help me learn any of it. My current place barely has any networking more complex than a profile based L2L VPN… Switches are basically ignored, and VLANs are rare.

I facepalm every time I discover that the guest network is just bridged into the same subnet as the LAN. I’ve raised the issue a few times and never been given the green light to fix it, often because the network isn’t able to be managed remotely.

You kids. Got off my lawn. Leave me in peace with my scour.net.

I don’t think either answer is wrong.