• 0 Posts
  • 25 Comments
Joined 6 months ago
cake
Cake day: August 15th, 2025

help-circle

  • Funny how perspective changes things.

    Growing up we had dialup. Around 2009 we got 1.5mbps down, something like 300kbps up. DSL, for 8 people.

    We had that until… 2014? 2016? Then we got 10/1.5, mbps, down/up respectively.

    We had that until 2022 ish, when we got 30/10. And I started self hosting with ease, plenty of bandwidth for myself and my immediate family’s needs.

    Only last year, 2025, did we finally strike gold and get access to fiber. 8000/8000 available, but it’s spendy.

    I’m used to living with significantly less, so I opted for the lowest tier, 300/300.

    I feel like I’m legitimately living in the future right now, so fast.

    I feel for everyone who is stuck with slow Internet. But it’s all perspective. And from my perspective, 20 up is plenty for most things your average person wants to do. More is always better, obviously. But even then, you don’t need gargantuan pipes to self host.

    I will say, these days, anything less than 10/10 is criminal. 20/20 is slow but manageable. 30/30 is more than most normal people realistically need, though obviously, again, more is always better 🤷‍♂️





  • I’ve used random Linux based video editors in the past, like 15-17 years ago. They were… Not great.

    Later, I did a handful of projects with premier pro CS6, really liked it.

    It’s been almost a decade since I’ve done any video editing, until literally a few hours ago when I needed to make a simple wedding video for my friend. Cut together a couple camera angles, some PiP, do some color correction, a couple fades and one linear swipe transition.

    I’m running Bluefin, so I went the path of least resistance, and just checked the flatpack catalog for the highest rated and most downloaded video editor.

    That was kdenlive. I found it to be fairly user friendly, and powerful enough for my needs. The GUI reminds me of CS6, though it’s been awhile since I used it, so that may be less true than I’m remembering.

    Hardware acceleration for encoding didn’t work on my AMD 7840U, but… I didn’t try very hard. Maybe there’s a workaround, and it may not even be the programs fault.

    Take my recommendation with a grain of salt, because again, this isn’t my world, and I did zero research haha. Kind of funny that this post is the first one I stumble across after finishing that project.








  • That’s crazy to me. I’m on a phone too, and it’s… Just garbage content.

    Technologically speaking it’s amazing! Very close to real. If it was on in the background at a bar or something I probably wouldn’t clock it.

    But watching it? With my eyes? Immediately obvious.

    I wonder why some people can’t see it? Do you notice other AI stuff? Like even a lot of animated pictures and memes are AI now, as I scroll by I’m like yep, there’s more. And I’m sure I’m not seeing it all, and I’m getting fooled by some of it, but all the time I’m seeing it.

    Do you have a technical background? An artistic one?

    I just like tech, never been one for art.





  • Ah yes winmodems, what garbage. That’s dumb. I probably should’ve dug deeper when I got it. Honestly I hate printers. I asked the printer community on Reddit to recommend me a cheap printer that used cheap toner. I gave them my requirements and they even found a Craigslist listing for me. I think I’m only in 20 or 40 bucks, can’t remember, but I guess I can’t complain too hard.


  • Can you get modern laser printers that work that way?

    I recently tried setting up my hp p1102w to print from openwrt using p910nd, but can’t because it’s a “host based” printer, whatever that means.

    Even in cups, it needs a special driver to get it to behave. Doesn’t even work out of the box on my Fedora install.

    I bought it a couple years ago, second hand, because the toner is cheap, and if I don’t update the firmware, I can keep using aftermarket toner.

    It has Wi-Fi, but sometimes it refuses to print from Linux or my phone, just randomly. Always works on Windows though 🤦‍♂️

    My plan is to kill the Wi-Fi because I don’t trust it being so out of date anymore, and either plug it into my server or slap a rpi on the back with cups on the network. But it’s proving to be a painful experience.



  • This is an example of what an Internet service providers network might look like.

    They use many different types of specialized computers and devices to connect your house (one of the grey rectangles) to the greater Internet (the yellow rectangle in the middle).

    One person is arguing that instead of the Internet service provider owning all of the red green and blue computers… Other people would own them. And maybe the red computer for your neighborhood would physically be inside your neighbor’s house, instead of in a small building or box on the side of the road somewhere nearby.

    Functionally, it’s the same Internet, regardless of who owns the red box. Though theoretically, it could be less safe to give random people, potentially bad actors, access to the physical computer that is the red box, because they could do something malicious with it. But the point is, if the technology is working correctly, it doesn’t matter who owns it, everyone’s private home networks (everything downstream of your grey rectangle), are kept separate.

    Just like normal Internet, you can’t print on your neighbor’s network printer, just because you both have the same ISP and share the same red computer upstream somewhere. The red computer won’t let it happen.

    Does that make sense?

    Now, the concern of the other guy, it seems, comes from not understanding this. Not understanding that the red computers are specially configured by the ISP, or whoever owns it, to keep the grey rectangles separate.

    What he might be thinking, is something similar to sharing your Wi-Fi password. Or maybe running an Ethernet cable over the fence and plugging your neighbor’s router into your router. Things start to get complicated here, so I’ll gloss over a lot of things, but essentially… Your home router is not configured like the red computers are. So all of your neighbors data would be going through your home network, and you could very likely see what he’s doing, and he could potentially see what you’re doing (provided there’s no double NAT, but even then I’m not sure, maybe).

    Basically, if two or more neighbors want to share Internet, but don’t know how to do it safely, then they can expose their private network activity to each other and open each other up to a decent amount of risk.

    The solution, is to configure your router in a similar way to the red computers. It’s complicated, but not that difficult in practice. You could Google VLANs to get an idea of what would need to be done. Honestly you’d need more than that, some good firewall rules, and more things that I’m not qualified to comment on. I’m not a networkologist. But it can be done.

    The debate/argument stems from a basic misunderstanding of how these systems work. Or perhaps they both understand how they work, but the guy who doesn’t want to do it is just worried about his neighbors being untrustworthy with the hardware being in their house, worried they’ll be nefarious, but he’s just bad at communicating that idea to the other guy.

    At any rate, it doesn’t matter who owns the red computers or the green or blue, if they’re configured correctly, you’re safe. Unless you don’t trust whoever owns the computers 🤷‍♂️

    Hopefully that makes sense! Let me know if you have any questions!