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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Any regular hex nut works just fine as a jam nut. Basically, a jam nut is when you jam two nuts together. (It is gay, because the nuts do touch.)

    And note that those nylon inserts kinda only work once. The bolt carves a thread into the insert when you insert it, so it will be weaker the second time you insert it.

    Honorable mention: cage nuts. A square nut, permanently attached to a fastener that can snap into a special square hole in a 19 inch server rack. When you tighten the bolt against the nut, it tightens against the fastener, so that the nut, bolt, and fastener are secure against the square hole.














  • Doing good cryptography is hard, and a lot of work. Designing a good key escrow system or other back door is more cryptographic work, so more chances to get it wrong, and more chances for the corporate overlords to demand corners be cut for cost savings.

    Even if the software has meticulously perfect cryptography, the government definitely won’t. The feds will:

    • give away keys to other feds, or local cops, for bad faith reasons.
    • give away keys to other cops for good faith reasons, though the other cops are not authorized. This increases the attack surface.
    • misuse keys themselves for bad faith reasons, like spying on their ex-girlfriend.
    • have poor security from the start, and get their keys stolen by hackers, both foreign and domestic.




  • Unfortunately this won’t happen until October 31st 2600. Starting on March 1st in the year 2600, the Julian calendar (popular in centuries past, and still used in a few places) will differ by 18 days from the Gregorian calendar (the current worldwide standard calendar).

    It happens that October 31st in the year 2600 lands on a Friday, and so the Julian October 13th, which lands on that same day, is also a Friday.

    There may be a sooner Friday the 13th that lands on Halloween, if you know of other obscure calendars like the Hebrew, Islamic, or Chinese calendars. I don’t know enough about those to check.


  • The easiest way to disable unnecessary services is to uninstall them with aptitude, or whichever package manager you like. Try terminating services one by one, and see if anything bad happens. If nothing bad happens, you can probably uninstall it. On the other hand, if the system does get wonky a reboot should fix it. Or, you can research the services by name and decide whether to uninstall them. (avahi-daemon for example is a good idea to uninstall.)

    To make the GUI not run, uninstall your display manager (gdm, xdm, nodm, or whatever) and uninstall your xorg server or wayland server. There may be GUI programs remaining after that, but they will only be consuming disk space, not RAM or CPU.

    If the battery is old and holds little charge, you may save a few watts by removing it and throwing it away, instead of letting the system keep it topped off.

    Get a power meter, such as a Kill-a-watt device. Then, experiment with different settings. If it’s consuming less than 30 watts, you’re probably fine. If you live in the US, one watt-year is about one US dollar (or a little more), so for every watt it consumes, that’s about how much you will pay per year for its electricity.