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Watching with a big public group of people you mostly don't know but maybe should is a special experience. This may depend on region, but in the US there used to be frequent midnight openings for superfans like myself. People dress up in costumes, local shops hand out prizes and it's an event. Saw Phantom Menace this way, LOTR, Watchmen, and maybe others, but I haven't seen a midnight opening offered in years. Maybe the theater managers are swimming in the pool on the roof.

In San Francisco, DNA Lounge has an annual event where they decorate the whole place as Cyberdelia. I never miss it if I can help.

A couple years ago my friend and I dressed as FBI agents. It was great fun.



Why would you think that? Solar and wind are both far cheaper than fossil fuels even ignoring the problems caused by coal and methane.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source


Fuel cost for gas/coal can be rounded to $2/MWH - so then you need to amortize the cost of the plant over all the energy produced and you get to roughly 2x fuel cost for nat gas plants and 3x - 5x for coal ones. See page 10 here for sensitivity to fuel costs though;

https://www.lazard.com/news-announcements/lazard-releases-20...


No, Lazard estimates the fuel cost is $22-$23/MWh for Gas Combined Cycle, and $13-$18/MWh for Coal. See pages 39-40 of https://www.lazard.com/media/0sopmth5/lazard-releases-2025-l...


I've been thinking a lot about organizing an installfest sometime in the next year or so, which would be my first time in over 20 years. To anyone with current experience running one, do you have any advice?

I'm also interested in smartphone operating systems like Ubuntu Touch and postmarketOS etc.


This is my third install fest and I planned to write some check list that I compiled in these years. I can share this:

- make sure bring extension chords, and make sure you have enough fast wifi for all participants

- bring enough USB-s. Installation on older laptops can take time

- ventoy is useful

- for beginners stick to Fedora/Debian. Popular distros come and go, but these two are constant and will be supported for a long time

- don't give options to beginners if they don't ask for it. You will induce paralysis of choice

- automatic dual boot setup by Debian installer works very well. Partition shrinking on Windows isn't scary as I thought before

- sometimes you can't install BIOS/UEFI drivers without windows (on older devices). You maybe want to do that before installing Linux

- i think it is good to have a windows installation ready. At least for windows boot loader recovery if anything goes bad

- bitLocker can be PITA. Don't lock users device

- after installation update system

- write some material, what-to-do-after-installation guide, and give to participants. Maybe create group on some social network or messaging app


So .. if you want to keep it simple and reduce the chance of scaring away interested people for good because of failure, don't offer dual boot, unless you know all the tricks. Too many ways this can go wrong in my experience and if it goes right, it likely means they just continue using what they know - windows.

For a risk free just trying out, have linux live usb sticks prepared.


I have never been to one of these "fests" but wouldn't be easier to just bring a small PXE server with an SSD and 10G NIC with an 8-port switch for net booting/install? Are the machines so old they can't boot off the network? The PXE server could easily handle 5-6 install clients via the 10G NIC.


A 10G NIC is unnecessary. I've used iVentoy with a dozen laptops installing Linux simultaneously with no obvious slowdowns hosted from a Dell Optiplex Micro 7050 (7th gen i5, 1G NIC, SSD).

https://www.iventoy.com/en/index.html


Yes, I have used iVentoy very much in the past as well. However, running a dozen (+12) simultaneous installs of Linux seems a stretch for 1G NICs. Using a small PC with a 2.5G NIC could probably do just as well as the 10G one - just slightly less expensive. The 2.5G NIC hardware has really come down in price; you can get an 8-port 2.5G switch for $45, and many mini-PCs have 2.5G built-in.


Depends on what the main goals are.

First time users might appreciate seeing the USB drive method since that's probably what they'd attempt next time at home.


Yeah the USB stick enables the participants to replicate it more easily at home or with friends etc. Encouraging that the participants are in the driver seat also helps with this.


Thank you for posting this - I had to disable Lockdown Mode because of this issue.


You can disable it per-site buried under two levels of menus in Safari but it's annoying.


> Also maybe of interest is that the new cdb subdomain is using pqconnect instead of dnscurve

This is not correct. There isn't a cdb subdomain because cdb.cr.yp.to doesn't have NS records, which is where DNSCurve fits in. If you have a DNSCurve resolver, then your queries for cdb.cr.yp.to will use DNSCurve and will be sent to the yp.to nameservers.

From there, if you have pqconnect, your http(s) connection to cdb.cr.yp.to will happen over pqconnect.

Maybe the confusion is because both DNSCurve and pqconnect encode pubkeys in DNS, but they do different things.

Here is DNSCurve:

  $ dig +short ns yp.to
  uz5jmyqz3gz2bhnuzg0rr0cml9u8pntyhn2jhtqn04yt3sm5h235c1.yp.to.
Here is pqconnect:

  $ dig +short cdb.cr.yp.to
  pq1htvv9k4wkfcmpx6rufjlt1qrr4mnv0dzygx5mlrjdfsxczbnzun055g15fg1.yp.to.
  131.193.32.108
Like CurveCP, pqconnect puts the pubkey into a CNAME.


In some cases yes, replacing an old machine with a new one can be an evironmentally responsible choice. But in general that's not the case and one should thoughtfully consider the variables including but not limited to software choice, grid carbon cost (see Electricity Maps below), embodied carbon cost of materials, environmental issues of mining and production not strictly related to climate emissions, and more.

Low Tech Magazine wrote an article about this here:

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/12/how-and-why-i-stop...

https://app.electricitymaps.com


Apple News is loaded with ads, so this wouldn't surprise me. iOS already has ads.

I just installed Open Street Map (the iOS app is called OsmAnd) and it looks nice! Zoom in/out is much better than on Apple Maps. A quick check of a route I know produced a good map, so I'll start using OSM from now on.


OsmAnd is a commercial product ( by OsmAnd BV of the Netherlands ) that uses Openstreetmap data but it isn't related to that organisation.

There are other apps that use Openstreetmap data, such as Organic Maps.


Yeah I had to look myself, Apple currently sells ads on App Store, News, and TV (MLS).

The App Store ones are a nuisance and are never the app I'm searching for.

I'm expecting the same degraded experience with Map.


Note that GP used "whilst" which is British English, and previous posts seem Euro-centric and talk about renaming "American football." So it sounds like this person is Europe's problem.

The post had a number of grammatical errors too, so if "whilst" we're at it, should we criticize all of European education? Please don't post low-effort negative nationalism. It's cheap and the subject (the richest person alive is apparently a nazi) is a serious matter.


> I was surprised how little it costs to stop climate change.

If you read Drawdown, you'll see that it doesn't cost money to stop climate change, it saves money.

https://drawdown.org/the-book


Of course stopping climate change will save in the long run. The critical question is who should spend the money now to save money later. That is the crux of the free rider problem.


I don’t like that we’re even talking about money in this context. Money is almost fake, it’s right there in the ‘fiat’ name, yet that’s all most people care about.


Money isn't fake, it's a useful abstraction for describing the allocation of goods and services. We could describe the cost of transitioning from fossil fuels in terms of labor hours spent, miles not traveled in an ICE vehicle, tons of lithium mined, etc. But money lets us collapse all of that down into one number that we can get our heads around and which is useful for figuring out things like how much we need to raise taxes


Just because it is not solid, does not mean it is not real.

As long as it has value to people - it is real.

Meaning, as long as you can use it to buy things. And that is what people care about.

That stops the moment, people don't believe in the currency anymore. Then they will either use a different currency they do trust - or go back to trade little pieces of gold.


In this context money is just a unit of measurement. If we say that we need more of a particular kind of infrastructure and reduce a particular kind of activity, etc, then the discussion requires being able to say how much of those (many!) things and we can quantify all of those in terms of dollars.


It's a strawman to say that money is fake because no serious economist argues that money is "real". Of course it is fake. We use money because it's a useful way to organize society


My point is you need a society to use it and climate change will cause events which will make people question whether we still have one - which is enough for money to stop being useful. People in the west take a lot for granted.


Even in disaster scenarios like hurricanes, where everyone is going to do nearly everything they can regardless of cost to survive, money is still used in practice and in discussions, evaluations, planning. In a practical sense money is real not fake, because what money is used for, limited resources, is real not fake.


Standard of living and human development index is a better metric to measure how well a society is doing than money.


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