I bought 96 gigs of DDR3 for my server in December 2022. It cost $118.76; less than $1.24 per gig.

I do have brunch with my kids every day, but why would I say “data” during it? We’re still on Spock.

Should have known from the fact that the spine says “Quantum Entanglement”. This is the set my son was given. Looks like he actually has published a few more since then, but nothing Linux-related (yet). We love them!

NO WAY! They’ve got an LFS one now?!? My son got a bunch of them for his baby shower two years ago, and he’s been like super into them since he was like 15-18 months old. I highly recommend Bayesian Statistics; it explains the concept more clearly than any stats or data science class I’ve taken. His favorites are Optical Physics (because he’s into rainbows), Bayesian Statistics (because he likes cookies), and Quantum Computing (because he likes the word “data”, probably because he hears me say it in work meetings).

It’s certainly odd but my wife doesn’t mind it because she just makes me operate it 😅

Finally got sick of the FireTV so I plugged a mini PC into a dumb TV. It’s kinda sad to have to use a keyboard instead of a controller, but it was a minor tradeoff for a much better experience.

I’ve got two.

A lab freezer’s seal broke in the middle of a humid Michigan summer, so everything got encased in frost. In the process of chipping away the frost, the ink on many of the labels rubbed away, so we essentially had a bunch of mystery flasks. One such flask had a septum that was stuck really tight. When I yanked it out, the recoil caused some of the mystery liquid to splash onto my mesh shoe. Within a couple minutes, my foot started stinging. We later identified the contents to be acetyl chloride, so it was probably reacting with my foot sweat to make acetic acid and hydrochloric acid. I took my shoe and sock off and rinsed my foot in the lab sink.

I was putting sodium hydride into an empty round bottom and a good bit of it got stuck to the ground glass in the neck. Genius that I am, I turned a nitrogen line on with low flow thinking I could blow it into the flask. I didn’t realize that the nitrogen had to go somewhere and the only place it could go is back out, blowing NaH all over my face. There was very much safety-glasses-unless-there’s-an-inspection culture at my old university, but I was never more thankful that I made it a personal rule to wear splash goggles. Would not have liked for the moisture on my eyes to bubble off.

I uninstalled Tik Tok almost 2 years ago and have heavily restricted my other social media usage since. Programming.dev (and the extended Lemmyverse) is the biggest cheat I permit myself. I do still waste more time scrolling than I want, but through it, I’ve been exposed to things that I feel make my life richer. And it is a lot less soul-crushing than commercial platforms that are jam packed with AI slop and are designed to be addicting.

That said, with I no longer have a way to keep up with trends and my main source of news is my wife, who is still plugged into TikTok. And honestly, I think I’m better off that way. I have way more time to read (and engage in other long-form content) and spend with my kids. I’m exposed to way less propaganda and outrage content. Looking back on days with 9+ hours spent on TikTok, it feels like I was part of a hive mind. I like being an individual again.

After reading a bunch of books about our relationship with technology, I concluded it’s probably best that I greatly reduce my reliance on my phone. A big part of how I accomplish that is just by using my laptop for things that I can’t cut out entirely, like banking, email, web browsing, etc.

Most of the time, my phone’s browser is disabled. It keeps me from using my phone too much. I understand not everyone is in a position where they can do that though.

I use Minimalist Phone Launcher with network access disabled. I know there are libre alternatives out there, but I didn’t like them as much, and I desperately needed a digital detox.

Aegis works perfectly. My university used Duo and then Okta, and both worked. I was unable to get Authy to work, though.

Before Windows 11, I told people to switch to Linux because open source software is better for the soul. Now, I tell people because the user experience is just better. I used XP/Vista/7 throughout my childhood, and modern Linux desktop environments really do feel closer to that experience than Windows 11. I use Win11 for work, and I can confidently say that it has the worst settings menu I’ve ever used.

If you know the basics of using a desktop computer, most things won’t feel that weird or foreign to you. The hardest part will probably be learning Linux-compatible alternatives for apps that only work on Windows. What kind of programs do you typically use on your Windows system?