The last time I posted I dumped a metric-ton of emotion, and it was a lot. If you can visualize Steve Spangler with his Diet Coke and Mentos, that was me and my emotions. It was messy, and it was unfettered.

This past week has been like a sunrise in the mountains, after a harsh thunderstorm the night before. Everything is calm, peaceful, brilliant and bright, and you’d be hard pressed to imagine the night before. IYKYK.

I seem to have fallen into a routine this week: work, personal breaks, personal projects, and even spending the evening reading before bed. Tonight I switched it up and went to a local bar for a couple of drinks.

Normally, I’d go, drink a few beers, and make my way home. Tonight, I was grooving to the music, and even made fast-friends with a couple of guys at the bar. We talked about high school (90s life), kids, and just shot the shit over the Yankees and Mariner’s game on the TV. It felt natural, and unencumbered. If I were a gambling man, I’d be playing the lottery right now.

I guess all of this to say that when everything feels like it’s lost, and there’s no end in sight, you gotta just let go of yourself and trust in the universe.

I’m in no way religious, and I have a hard time believing in higher powers. But, I do recognize that there are things out there that are beyond my understanding. Maybe, just maybe, giving yourself over to the unknown is not so bad. Whatever you call it, just know that you are not alone, and that there is something out there greater than yourself — whatever you want to call it.

Either way, right now I cannot deny the sense of gratitude I am feeling for the past 5 days. It’s been a very long time since I’ve felt so good, and I am not one to look gift horses in the mouth.

So, Mr. Universe, I want to thank you for everything I’ve been afforded this week. I couldn’t be more grateful for the reprieve you’ve given me. 🙏

Below is a letter I wrote to a long-time friend of mine; he moved upstate a couple of decades ago and we lost touch for a while.

I wanted to share it with you all as well. I guess I feel the need to reach out right now; to not feel so alone. And if someone else out there feels anything like I do, then I hope they can get something out of this too.

I don’t know. But it doesn’t hurt to try. 🤷‍♂️

~Trying is about the only thing right now that doesn’t hurt.~

> I appreciate you man. > > Some days/weeks are harder than others. Last night, and earlier today, has definitely been difficult. It shouldn’t have been, but it’s been two years this month since [my ex] and I decided to split; well, she decided, and I went along with it without much of a fight. 10 years ago, give or take, my dad died. My brother was being his usual ass self, and just couldn’t leave me alone, and we got into a fight. That was the last time I saw or spoke with my family. My kids, [my ex], and her family were the only family I had left. They were a great family too. They were the family I had always dreamed of having. > > Every year at summer time they get together at [local beach] for a beach trip. They rent a big house, and [my ex]’s parents, brother and his wife, sister and her husband, and their children, all get together and just hang out for the week. Shit, now that I think of it, the last time I went with them to the beach was on the 4th of July in 2023. It was a thinly veiled “last chance” for me and [my ex], but we had one argument and by the time we got home she set it in stone that we were done. So I started looking for an apartment and I moved out by August. Now, I get to sit here all by myself while they go off and have their fun adventures. > > I not only lost my adopted family, but our mutual friends eventually decided I wasn’t worth a damn anymore. Of course she’s still friends with them. It wasn’t for a lack of trying on my part, but they just couldn’t be bothered with me. So I gave up on them too. Not only was my family not mine, but neither were my friends. > > I love my boys so fucking much. I couldn’t bear the thought of hurting them. No matter how bad things get, I don’t think I could ever do it. I tell myself they are too young to deal with that sort of thing. Maybe in 8-10 years when they go off to college; maybe when they settle down with a family of their own. I don’t know. I think I’m just making excuses because I’m just a fucking coward. > > I cry myself to sleep more often than not. In between the sobs I pray and wish that by the time morning comes, I won’t wake up. Hey, I’m getting old; I have a family history of heart disease and cancer. It’s not too far fetched, and my kids won’t be as fucked up as they would if I did it to myself. Coward. > > So many times I’ve wished that the pain in my chest was on the left side, and not the right, where my anxiety lives. Maybe I’ll get lucky and someone or something will do the thing I cannot bring myself to do for myself. Maybe: That’s my mantra. Maybe things will change. Maybe I’ll meet the love of my life. Maybe, if I just hold on a little bit longer, I’ll finally be happy with what I already have and stop pining away for things I think I should have. > > I’m all alone in this world. You’re up there with your family, what’s left of my family is down at the beach. I am here in the middle, all by myself. > > I hope they think about me a little while they have the time of their lives. Don’t get me wrong. I know my boys love me. I can see it in how they look at me. [my oldest] loves laying with me on the couch. [my youngest] is always telling me about the games he plays. Both kids love having me lay with them at bedtime. [my youngest] did ask for me to come to the beach with them; if I could’ve, I would’ve gone with them. I have no doubt in my heart that they love me. But there will come a day when they no longer come to stay with me. They will leave here for the last time, and go on to live their own lives. Maybe they’ll stay in touch. Maybe they’ll visit from time to time. It’s that damn “maybe” again. Always giving me false hope. And I know from experience that false hope always ends up hurting the most. > > Yesterday was a good day. I spent all afternoon playing with my boys at my old neighbor’s annual pool party. [my youngest] was glued to my side almost the whole time. We ate dinner at [my ex]’s. It was a hold over from [my oldest]’s birthday earlier this month. We always give the kids a birthday dinner together. Her sister and husband were there too, so I got to hang out with my nieces a little too. We watched Grizzy and Lemmings on Netflix (the youngest niece is 6), and we had a good time laughing at the goofiness of the show. But then I had to leave and come home. My fairytale had come to an end. My world, once again, came crashing down around me. The tide had ebbed. > > I spent most of today sleeping. I woke up long enough to feed and water my dog and watch a movie. Then I went back to sleep for a few more hours. I woke up because the weight of my blanket made it feel like I couldn’t move at all. It’s a weighted blanket, but I felt panicked because I was being pinned down and it hurt and for a good while, I literally couldn’t move. I wasn’t paralyzed. I just didn’t have the strength to move. I did have a paralysis dream once. It was much different; much more frightening. At the time I dreamed I was in my bed, and a monster/demon was coming through my door. I tried to get up to move, but I just couldn’t. It was like when your arm falls asleep and no matter how hard you try, it just won’t move. Now that I think about it, I’ve had that dream twice now since my divorce. This time was different. There was no demon coming for me. I just couldn’t overcome gravity like I usually do. > > I’ll probably go back to sleep in a little bit after sending this email. I have no good reason to stay awake right now. I’m always biding my time between sleep. I have no motivation to do any of the million-and-one things I need and want to do. I have fungus (not the good kind) growing under my house, which I still need to vapor barrier and insulate after my hot water heater sprung a leak earlier this year. I have spiders throwing raves and orgies in my garage because there are absolutely no walls and a shit ton of holes and cracks that need to be filled. I still have over half a yard full of leaves from last year that need to be raked (that’s even after bagging 30+ bags this year). I’m in the middle of building a computer desk. I want to build a patio/firepit out back so I can enjoy the outside. The list goes on and on. I have all this free time, and no passion for anything anymore. I’m drowning. I am in a constant state of drowning. I’m just flailing away, gagging, and gasping for little bits of air here and there, but I never fully succumb.

PS. To my boys, if you ever come across this post, and I didn’t make it, please know that I tried really, really hard. I’m so sorry to have ever let you down.

… then I dropped the screw.

~This is my life now.~

Honestly, I’m not sure. Part of me wishes I never existed. There have been so many nights I’ve wished to never wake up. Other times, when my anxiety causes chest pains (right side), I wish it were in the left (heart attack). But then there are times when I see my boys working together to solve a video game problem (I grew up abused by my brother because he thought “that’s what brothers did”), or they make a casual comment about how much they want to do something with me (spend my birthday with me and take me to dinner, on their mom’s week), and I couldn’t be happier to be alive, and I wish I could just be happy because they are all I need.

~I’m sorry, I’m just so very tired.~

I currently use a Reyee Whole Home Mesh WiFi System, AX3200, and a 3 TB AirPort Extreme that I use for file sharing (mostly Jellyfin right now).

The router works fine, but it lacks an actual firewall. It lets me block all traffic from any device, but that also includes LAN traffic.

The AirPort Extreme is outdated and only supports SMBv1 file sharing. This means that I am limited to Buster for my RPI if I want to mount my Apple drive.

I will, of course, do my research too, but I am hoping you all can help guide my search and help me answer questions I don’t know to ask.

For a router, I want the following features:

• Multiple WiFi networks (e.g., home network, guest network, and an IOT network)
• Gigabit LAN networking (or higher) as I’m using Cat6 for my hard-wired devices
• List all connected/configured clients, and even be able to rename them (most IOT devices default to some generic common name like AiDot)
• Ability to easily assign static IPs to devices
• WAN Firewall, while allowing LAN traffic (i.e. allow HomeKit enabled devices to work locally, but not call home to some shady server); bonus points if there is port-specific blocking.
• Device traffic logging (optional)
• Supports mesh networking

For my RPI NAS, I want to utilize NVMe m.2 drives, and was looking to use the NVMe Base Duo from Pimoroni. But I’m not sure which NVMe modules would be best. I was considering a small system drive (250GB or less), and one large drive (4TB) for the network storage part. I don’t want the cheapest (i.e. generic) drives, but I’d also like to avoid spending several hundred dollars if possible.

One question I have is if I could still use the microsd card for the system and maybe double up on two large drives for file sharing? Reading the docs does not answer this question for me.

If I can run both the microsd as a system drive, and the NVMe as a secondary drive, I’d probably prefer the singular NVMe Base instead. My main goal is to maximize throughput for file sharing.

Thank you in advance!

Why YSK?

Because a lot of older games require immediate response from the controller (think jumping over pits).

Each TV is different, and may or may not have a game mode. For the longest time, I thought my lag was because of my Raspberry PI (model 4, 4gb). Turns out that turning on the game mode/game optimizer was all I needed. I also added a link to a post that has suggestions for Retroarch changes that can decrease input lag. Relavant content from post:

> 1. Set max swapchain to as low as possible, I think 1 and 2 run pretty similarly. > 1. Turn on hard gpu sync and set it to 0 > 1. Set frame delay as high as you can go before you get stuttering. On the pi 1, I can go to about 8 with NES core and 4 with SNES. On Pi 3 you can probably go higher, but systems with higher graphics like N64 and PSX won't let you go as high before you run into problems.

And:

> (when asked where the settings are) You need to access the retroarch rgui menu while you are in a game. You can do this by pressing X button and select at the same time. Once you get to the rgui menu, you want to click on settings, then video.

Re: https://lemmy.world/post/30867044

> John Morales, the actor who played the crime-fighting cartoon character McGruff the Crime Dog, was sentenced to 16 years in prison stemming from a 2011 arrest in which police seized 1,000 marijuana plants, 27 weapons – including a grenade launcher – and 9,000 rounds of ammunition from his home.

While my son played one season of T-ball five years ago, I still consider this his first season playing baseball. In fact, a lot of the players on his team have never played before.

They did manage to make it into the second round (out of three) of the end of season tournament. This is where my son made his first big play. He was playing short stop, and the kid at bat hit a pop fly that my son managed to catch.

He was so thrilled, and shocked, by the catch that he proudly stood there with both hands in the air. Unfortunately there were people on base, and he forgot to throw the ball back infield, but all of the parents agree that it was okay given how awesome the catch was.

I jumped up so fast, and was screaming/cheering so hard, that I literally fainted (i.e. got dizzy and lost the ability to stand). I couldn’t be more proud of him.

Why do I get a sense that maybe the Breen could be related to the Ubese?

For anyone who doesn’t know, a clock movement is the mechanism that causes the hands of an analog clock to move around the clock face. The “with pendulum” part means that it also swings a weight back and forth to act as a fancy second hand:

!

Now, there exist clock movements that are “smart” and are network enabled to adjust the time automatically. I’m also okay with an atomic movement. The idea is to adjust the clock twice a year for DST. However, I am having a difficult time (no pun intended) finding a smart/atomic movement that also supports a decorative pendulum.

I was hoping to enlist y’all’s help to see if one exists and where I might find it.

Edit: add comments about atomic clock movements.

Surely the Founders can understand, right?

Edit: title

In older versions of Debian I used to be able to pass sec=ntlm,vers=1.0 as options to mount.cifs (and fstab) and it would allow me to mount my shared disk from my AirPort Extreme.

In Bookworm, due to the bundled kernel version, I am now told ntlm is a bad security option. If I try to use ntlmssp, I am told Unable to select appropriate authentication method!. If I use ntlmv2 or remove the sec option, I get Status code returned 0xc000006d NT_STATUS_LOGON_FAILURE.

Funny thing is, if I use smbclient, I can browse my shared drive just fine.

Using a newer version of Samba protocol is not an option since Apple gave up on their products just like Linux gave up on ntlm.

Aside of throwing everything out the window, what can I do to get this working on Bookworm?

Edit: I gave up. Because the maintainers of the kernel decided to remove ntlm support, the only option I had was to downgrade to buster, as it was the last distro to use a pre-6 kernel. Suffice it to say, I'm very disappointed; both in Apple for abandoning their Airport's to use SMBv1, and the kernel devs for further eroding Airport support by removing ntlm. Yes, I get ntlm "bad" (both from an FOSS and security standpoint), but it's still disappointing to be punished simply because I do not wish to litter the landfill with still useful hardware (nor do I wish to spend more money on something I shouldn't need). Anyway, /rant over.

I’m watching S7E20 right now and the entire scene before the Defiant undocked from DS9 had that cinematic vibe you only get from a bonafide Hollywood movie.

And if that is too vague, here is some more context:

!

~I have a sneaking suspicion someone will still figure it out.~

I am using an Ender 3 Pro v2, and I have followed multiple guides (they all say the same things) for setting up a print to prevent stringing. I’ve also switched between two filaments (Creality and Amolen) and the stringing doesn’t change at all. I have noticed that when heating up the horned, the filament just oozes out like ectoplasm even before the print starts.

I have never had this problem before, and could use some human advice.

I have upgraded/replaced the following parts in the past:

1. Bowden Tubes
2. Printer Nozzles
3. Dual Gear Extruder
4. Heater Block
5. Heater Cartridge
6. Thermistor Temp Sensor

My Tweaked Settings:

!

I have cut my teeth on the Ender 3 Pro v2 printer by Creality. Neat little printer; it works wonders when/if it’s perfectly dialed in. The thing is, I don’t have the interest to dial it in like it needs to be. I just want to turn it on, send it a print, and walk away. I do t want to spend all morning (like this morning) trying to “auto-level” 🙄 the bed, just to not have it be level.

When I try to manually level the bed it’s worse: I can measure one corner 5 times in a row, and get 5 wildly different heights each time. And I’m even using the Creality BL Touch sensor!

I have upgraded the springs, and I’m using the wide knob’s, and spent days trying to tune in my printer. I’m also using the Jyers Marlin firmware (15x15).

It’s exhausting and not fun. Help me Make Printing Fun Again. 😩

I waited for deeper into the episode and cut the closed captioning in hopes of increasing the difficulty.