Spyke

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Classic Midwestern "salads"

I’m from small-town Iowa originally. My grandma made many of these “Midwest Salads”.

I went back for a funeral a few years ago. The was a reception/lunch at our old church. I got a serving of something that looked like jello with cream cheese on top, seemed interesting. But no, it was jello with mandarin oranges in it, and it wasn’t cream cheese, but about a quarter-inch of Miracle Whip on top, sprinkled with grated carrots. I took a bite, smiled, turned to my wife, and said, “I’m home again!”

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Jitsi meet...what are the advantages of self-hosted in this case?

During the pandemic, I stood up a Jitsi server on Linode and we ditched Zoom for our weekly family get-together calls. Sometimes the audio was not quite as good as Zoom.

If you set up SSL with LetsEncrypt, your call is encrypted “in flight”, but is apparently unencrypted for some portion of its travel through your server.

If it’s a one-on-one call, the two parties are connected directly and skips the server.

I haven’t used it in a while, but end to end encryption was still experimental a couple years ago. It didn’t work on all devices. Something to look at.

Jitsi Server works pretty well on a $5/mo Linode Nanode, so it’s worth trying. Especially if you get their $100 credit on sign up, you can try hosting it for free for a couple months. It’s available as one of their Marketplace apps, so it’s easy to set up.

That sounds like a commercial. I’m not affiliated with Linode, except for being a satisfied customer.

books

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Just read Project Hail Mary

Yes Yes Yes! I loved Hail Mary! I also enjoyed The Martian, both the book and the movie. I liked Artemis, but not as much as the other two. Weir does a good job telling a story from the first-person point of view. The sarcastic tone of the main character in each story may not work for everyone, but I enjoyed it.

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Why do Slide Rule Sellers do this?

I have a followup to this. I just got an Aristo 868 Studio. I hadn't noticed until it arrived, but its CURSOR is upside down! You can see it in the attached picture: The word "Aristo" on the cursor is upside-down.

Also, the screw heads were all gummed up with dirt etc, so it has been that way for quite a while. I cleaned it up a bit before I took the picture. So I don't think I can blame the seller in this case.

It wouldn't matter at all on a Pickett rule, but Aristo adds the extra hairlines for kW and HP, so turning it over puts the extra hairlines over the wrong scales.

I just thought it was funny. It's not a big deal, since I'm going to remove the cursor to clean it anyhow.

linux

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Brother printer questions

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This. If the printer supports IPP Everywhere, you should be good to go.

You also might check Brother’s web site to see if they have Linux drivers for the printer you’re looking at. Installing the drivers is a bit of a hassle, but once installed, they work great. But IPP Everywhere is easy and also works well.

linux

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What is your go-to Linux distro and why?

In general, Ubuntu is my go-to when I just want something that works and is reasonably stable. Just pick the spin with the Desktop Environment that you like. I'm using KDE Neon (I realize Neon isn't an Ubuntu flavor or spin) on my daily driver laptop, and Ubuntu MATE on my desktop. I also have an old netbook that usually gets Xubuntu, but currently has Fedora 37 XFCE as an experiment.

It sure is nice that we have to option to distro-hop, either on bare metal or in a VM.