Can code awesomeness for my clients.
Can drive traffic to almost any website.
Can turn half-baked ideas into money for clients.
Have absolutely no game at all with the opposite sex.

Sometimes the tradeoff of being a geek sucks.

On my personal journey to better privacy!

Wanted to change to Qubes, but since I wind down with games, that won't happen sadly and it seems windows still doesn't support proper gpu passthrough either, so might eventually change to linux host and windows guest or create a VM I use for everything else that isn't gaming, since I still really love the idea of having a snapshot backup system.

So since that isn't quite in my timeframe right now though: first move was to move to firefox, already done the change on mobile (love having dark reader and ublock on mobile!), now setting it all up on desktop, pleasant surprise was for sure that firefox finally seems to have chromes devtools pretty much mirrored, even the mobile suite of tools.

Loading of pages is also finally fast and much snappier than chrome from the first testing I could do (on desktop, on mobile it still kind of sucks in comparison, but I can deal with that).

Please suggest me all sort of privacy tools you got, especially with firefox in mind, but also host tools, be it windows or linux (e.g. some sort of traffic obfuscator that visits random pages that are SFW but make automatic traffic filtering hard, could probably make my own, but if there's something like that already, why not), I'll save all I can use.

This is why I started studying programming. You have to be able to work remotely.

How lawyers fuck up technology!

I rented a car today, given that I don't want to go by train currently. That was some VW Golf, and it had a lane assist which can't decide whether to be helpful or obnoxious:

Either I kept the steering wheel and still steered myself, in which case the lane assist's actions made the steering feel somewhat wobbly. Initially, I suspected a worn out control arm bearing, but that's a long term damage in aging cars, not in new ones.

Or I just rested my hands on my upper legs, as I usually do (palms facing upwards and holding the wheel lightly), then the lane assist worked by itself. It was even smart enough to deactivate itself upon blinking before changing lanes.

However, it complained after about 15 seconds that I didn't steer. I said, shut up and do your job. The warning intensified, and I said, fuck you. Then it initiated some stutter braking to wake me up. Annoying like a reincarnation of Clippy.

I ended up giving the steering wheel a slight tip to the right every 15, 20 seconds just to let the lane assist know I was still there, relying on the lane assist to correct it again. On a long trip, I would have had to deactivate that crap.

Obviously, the VW engineers did their job, but the legal department feared law suits should anything go wrong and ruined the feature!

What was also annoying is that there is no real hand brake anymore in many modern cars. Sucks when pulling off against a hill. Plus that at red traffic lights, I usually put the gear out (manual transmission) and pull the hand brake instead of keeping my foot on the clutch. That's not the same with this pseudo hand brake!

(In case you wonder why anyone would do that:
it's an anachronism that avoids lengthening the clutch wires, decades after cars switched to hydraulics.)

## Building my own router

IT HAS ALREADY PAID OFF!!!!!

So I (with my fam) have evacuated from the capital of Lithuania into a distant place - much smaller, where average age is prolly >30 or even >40 years. I live in a village now. In a house with very good neighbours. In fact these neighbours own that house :D

Back to the point.

So these neighbours used to share their wifi (w/ internet) between the two houses. They have the line, the mian router has quite a strong antenna and that other house has 2 repeaters: 1 on the outside wall and another one -- indoors. Sepeaters are connected sequentially, i.e. the indoors one is repeating the outdoors one. ikr....?

The first day was alright. We settled in, got everything set up wifi-wise. Peachy.

The second day repeaters refused to issue a DHCP IP. That's something, right? Alright, nvm - I don't mind setting up static IPs. In fact I prefer them over the DHCP magic!

And by the noon both repeaters were connectable but neither of them could provide internet connection... We that sucks! I restarted both of them a few times, neighbours restarted their main router -- still no luck.

Here comes my router [God am I happy with this purchase and the whole idea of a customized router!!! Thanks @hakx20!].

I brought it outside, plugged it in. Connected to it through it's hotspot, used nmcli to connect to neighbours' main router with an internal wifi card (that shitty mPCIe operating in USB mode. yes, the same one, manufactured in 2003. Yes, in g mode.). A couple of iptables rules for traffic forwarding et voila! I have built my own repeater! And tomorrow I can WFH w/o any issues.

Yes, hardware routers are faster and easier to maintain. Yes, hardware routers are cheaper and usually have nicer bells and whistles. But when hardware fails you and the last thing you want is going to the public (shop), soldering rod won't help you. A software solution becomes the easiest to set up, considering you know how to.

Boi am I so happy about my purchase! CentOS router FTW!

P.S. even though we've fled the city we are responsible citizens and we've self-quarantined ourselves for the 14 days period. No local person any closer than 10 meters for the whole period until we're cleared. Being away from the city gives us sooo much freedom! Especialy now, when cities are shitting bricks in fear.

How do you guys monitor website traffic?

I was looking of a solution for a long while. Google analytics sucks these days. In the beginning it was an awesome system! Long, I've searched an alternative that was LIGHTWEIGT. That last part was the issue. What the fuck do people with their software? Finally, I've found umami. It's amazing. It shows even the city name from visitors and it shows a nice world map including statistics. Browsers used / desktop / laptop / phone / OS. It also shows debounce ratio (amount of people that run directly away after visit) and users currently online. It's all I could've ever wished for. Using it since yesterday and it's so decent and fast!

It's one of those products that makes me think "This is how I would've written it myself too". Happens sometimes. Same for gitea / cogs. Also such perfect products. There's still hope.

The only reason I don’t drive a car is because it has windows and I am a Linux user.

Yay my first day back and I'm 1 hour and 15 minutes late because the main road I take into work was a parking lot. And then I have to go directly into the world's longest meeting. And I have a peer review to do so I guess no dev soon for me today.

For the past one week I have been getting late for work due to this fucking traffic. This shit sucks. And I am stuck solving shitty bugs in a fuckghetti code. I feel burnt out as fuck and now I have to work Saturday as well.

Future01

Click, click, click, click.
Tap, tap, tap, tap.
Swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe,.
Scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll.

I’m tired of living on popularity driven planet among animals, where number of clicks on likes, subscriptions and links are worth more than iq, education and experience.

Let’s face it - AI is showing us traffic driven recommendations that sucks. If you’re hooked up to social network and can’t disconnect from it you’re half way to matrix. You probably also disagree with me cause you’re serotonin junkie. You can’t stop like you can’t stop eating for a day. Bubble have you in your hands and whatever you do you probably won’t wake up. To be honest most of us won’t. It’s already to late.

I’m waiting for meta so they can put you in virtual world where you can have what you want and at the same time own nothing. They will put you in some small empty space and give you something to eat how many times you want so you can feel safe and click, tap, swipe, scroll more so they can own this planet.

You will be living only to deliver corporate metadata and you will be happy, cause they will make you happy with giving you emotions that you want to feel at exact moment.
If you get out, you won’t be able to interact cause you won’t know how to behave, you will become wild animal.

By going out you will break the law, cause outside world will be long gone. To move to bar or visit family you will travel with autonomous vehicle that have screens instead of windows.

Eventually you stop going to bar cause it’s unhealthy, you stop going outside cause there’s deadly virus and you can die.

They will take you last thing later with birth control so you can have baby whenever you want and with who you want as long as both parties agree by signing baby nft contract, you don’t have to take care of your baby and be pregnant cause it will be robotized, you will see your baby in meta. You will think you feel it using robot hands.
You will never meet your baby in person.
That’s how matrix will start. We’re half way.

There should be a ***rant for every aspect of life, such as socrant (rants on society and politics), famrant (rants on how much family life (or to all singles out there, the lack of a family) sucks (or rocks) sometimes) and conrant (rants on all sorts of consumer products/services). Not to forget, the most important of all, trarant (traffic rant, about the rich diversity of stupidity among both drivers and pedestrians).

Will start work probably next week after lots of searching. Few months without work was good life relatively. Wake up whenever you want to, browse reddit how much you want to, way more time to do things that want. Now in new job especially on trial period I will have to learn lot, also that rush to work if I do not want to end work late makes life worse. Full time jobs suck. Half day work would be better but to get even little shorter work week is a big challange. At least when was fired from previous job. Fuck that.
Also probably will take a non remote position because they claim it is low stress. But I believe their codebase sucks, they do not write tests. But they say they are planning to start writing tests. But still most important thing is low stress, but question is how in reality will there be low stress. Or will they fire me quickly even without causing me stress. It would be ideal to learn at least all the tech they are using, so that I would not lag too much because of this, but I have no idea how to quickly learn, I thinik I would need 2 hours after work for learning, which sucks that I will not be able to enjoy at least after work time.

Plus the fucking traffic jams. Why they can't have remote position. Especially when covid cases are growing.

Got offered a new job with a 50% pay increase after 3 interviews, which only one of them was more technical, and it didn't involve any leet code or anything.

My friends coworker tried applying and failed
multiple times previously, so I'm feeling wayyy under qualified because my OOP knowledge sucks, I'm a self taught developer. They asked me more about engineering web solutions - how I would handle a lot of traffic , how I've designed a system where it holds a lot of requests, what do I know about databases, what engines I used and why. I'm very scared to accept, and I like my current company. What do?