schizo

So, after like 8 months of dumbphone only, I've given up.

It wasn't one majorly annoying thing, but just a non-stop death by a thousand cuts. Modern life really requires at least possession of one of these stupid little rectangles, and if you don't have one, you get slowly nibbled to death by the ducks of modernity.

So, rather than redouble my efforts to bend the world to dealing with me wanting to be a bit of a luddite weirdo, I've given up and just..... bought an iPhone SE and paired it with an Apple Watch 8 I already had.

See, the thing I really didn't consider is that I pretty much already had the ideal dumbphone: this AW8 is a cellular version.

It does phone calls, text messages, and has sufficient ties to modern services (music, podcasts, audiobooks, maps, etc.) that it is, by itself, a 60% solution. And just for perfect clarity: there's a lot of things wrong with the watch that make it not an ideal device, with the biggest one being really not fantastic battery life.

For everything the watch doesn't do, I also have the phone, but the phone isn't strictly required, and I can simply leave it at home when I don't want to deal with all the modern smartness and just rely on the watch.

For sure, it's not a cheap solution since an iPhone and a cellular watch is a giant investment even if you go for the "cheapest" versions, and I'm paying for two cellular plans (though, with US Mobile it's $96/year for each so, relatively speaking, still pretty cheap).

So I'm looking for a laptop, but before you downvote and move on, I've got a twist: I'm looking for a laptop with Linux support that's going to intentionally be console-only and rely on TUIs to make a lower-distraction device.

I was looking at older Thinkpads with 4:3 screens and the good keyboard before Lenovo went all chicklet with them, but I'm kinda concluding they're both way too expensive AND way too old to be a reasonable choice at this point.

A X220 or T40-whatever would be great and be the perfect aesthetic, but they're expensive, hard to find parts for, and using enough crusty old shit that this becomes yet another delve into retro computing and not one into practical, useful computing which is the goal here.

So, anyone have any recommendations of any devices in the last decade that have a reasonable keyboard, screen, use modern enough components that you can source new drives and RAM and batteries and such, and preferably aren't coated in a coating that's going to turn to sticky goo?

Thin(ner) and light(er) would be nice, but probably not a dealbreaker if the rest of the pieces align. This will be almost entirely used at a table for writing and such.

So not entirely music related, but my don't-use-reddit policy and this looking like the closest not entirely dead community has led me to post sooo...

I have an audio question about recording levels. I'm doing voice-over stuff for some really bad Youtube videos I'd like to make and it never sounds remotely good.

I get that the recording volume should be just the green side of clipping, but how do you take a track, and then add it to other tracks and balance the whole thing to not sound like ass?

It always seems that it's either too loud or too quiet and I'm baffled as to how to tweak the mix correctly so that things sound right.

I have a question for the hive mind: what is the point of this, exactly?

I mean, I understand the attempt to gain access, and I understand why 2fa codes can be valuable to attempt to phish but that's like, not the thing here.

They just spam dozens to hundreds of these (I'm showing over 400 in my inbox right now) but like, even if I WANTED to give these codes to the attacker, I have no damn clue who the dude in China that's doing this is.

I'm confused as to what they hope to gain by trying over and over and over every couple of hours because it feels like there's no upside to whomever is running this bot, but I probably have missed a memo on some TTP around this, heh.

So I've got a home server that's having issues with services flapping and I'm trying to figure out what toolchain would be actually useful for telling me why it's happening, and not just when it happened.

Using UptimeKuma, and it's happy enough to tell me that it couldn't connect or a 503 happened or whatever, but that's kinda useless because the service is essentially immediately working by the time I get the notice.

What tooling would be a little more detailed in to the why, so I can determine the fault and fix it?

I'm not sure if it's the ISP, something in my networking configuration, something on the home server, a bad cable, or whatever because I see nothing in logs related to the application or the underlying host that would indicate anything even happened.

It's also not EVERY service on the server at once, but rather just one or two while the other pile doesn't alert.

In sort: it's annoying and I'm not really making headway for something that can do a better job at root-cause-ing what's going on.

Just got an email thanking me for being a 5-node/free user, but Portainer isn't free and I need to stop being a cheap-ass and pay them because blah blah economic times enshittification blah blah blah.

I've moved off them a while ago, but figured I'd see if they emailed EVERYONE about this?

A good time to ditch them if you haven't, I suppose.

I'm wanting to add a bunch of energy monitoring stuff so I can both track costs, and maybe implement automation to turn stuff on and off based on power costs and timing.

I'm using some TPlink based plugs right now which are like, fine, but I'm wanting to add something like 6 to 10 more monitoring devices/relays.

Anyone have experience with a bunch of shelly devices and if there's any weird behavior I should be aware of?

Assume I have good enough wifi to handle adding another 10 devices to it, but beyond that any gotchas?

Saw an older post asking about ArcaOS and BBS stuff, and since I actually just did a rebuild of mine doing exactly that on newer hardware, figured I'd write about all the stupid shit I had to deal with and how to configure the OS in a blog and post it here if anyone is interested.