And yet, “pro life”.

F**king hypocrites.

I still run a small constellation of programs (some obscure) that are required for my workflows that have neither a Linux version that is perfectly file-compatible, nor can be run reliably under WINE.

Plus, I also provide tech support for others, so being able to “mirror” actions on my own iron as I’m helping them is a massive plus. Differences between installs has helped me catch config issues on many occasions.

So unfortunately, running Windows is still a must-do for the foreseeable future. Now granted, I also have a good half-dozen workstations, which also run MacOS, OpenBSD, OpenSUSE, and various other virtualized fun shit (HaikuOS, etc.).

Build your USB installer using RUFUS.

The SELECT drop-down (the down arrow itself, not the entire button) even downloads a generic multi-version of the latest Win11.

It’s at the last step before creating the installer when RUFUS gives you a bunch of settings that you can leverage, one of which is a Microsoft Account bypass so you can create a local account.

Windows 11 can be wrangled into something decent, but it requires an immense amount of wrangling on initial install to do so.

As an example, XP needed 8-12hrs worth of work before I was happy with the way I had it configured. Win11 needs about 32-48hrs of work and testing. Some bits - like violently bludgeoning File Explorer back into a halfway XP-like folder tree - takes deep, repeated dives into the registry to properly and permanently eviscerate things like the Library and Home (quick access).

A prior company I worked at had a compliance division whose work was about 80% Oracle. As in, their attention over preventing Oracle JRE installs in favour of Azul Java was 4× higher than ensuring anything Microsoft - or anything else under the sun, actually - was properly licensed.

The problem isn’t climate change itself, or rising temps.

The problem is the SPEED of these changes.

We are seeing in just a century what previously took hundreds of thousands of years. This imparts an immense amount of inertia that no other prior warming event has ever come close to. Even if we were to stop human CO2 production immediately, the inertia will continue to warm the planet and trigger feedback loops for the next several centuries… environmental feedback loops that will continue to pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere even if there are no humans left.

Plus, it is not allowing the planetary biosphere to adapt in time. Prior warming events were so slow that ecosystems were able to migrate across entire continents to follow the temperatures and rainfalls that best suited them. This requires tens of thousands of years at minimum to achieve. So the very plants and ecosystems that are meant to “put the brakes” onto any change are being destroyed in real-time. in a century or so there will be no significant biosphere left to pull CO2 out of the air faster than it is going into the atmosphere.

The possibility for a full-blown Venus Scenario before 2200 becomes greater every year. Warming continues to accelerate. More and more CC events start kicking off “well ahead of schedule”. And thanks to the Parasite-Class lust for wealth locking us into the worst-case-scenario “business as usual” path, we are truly fucked.

The foundation of the vast majority of agricultural fertilizer is urea and DAP, and the gulf countries make about 40% of the world’s supply with Iran being the single largest exporter in the world.

Sulphur is also a critical phosphate production, and most sulphur these days comes from petrochemical refinement.

Poly tunnels can help grow small-scale crops well into the spring and fall. An earthen greenhouse can do so year round even in places where it gets to -40℃.

The problems will definitely be showing up next year. In order for there to be enough fertilizer produced by this fall time (for crops produced in the southern hemisphere) as well as next year (for the northern hemisphere), the Strait of Hormuz would have needed to have reached 100% per-war traffic by July 1st.

It has barely reached 33%.

This means that supplies for fertilizer manufacturing is now months behind schedule, and fertilizer supply for farmers is going to be hellishly expensive through next year. Many farmers may have to try to grow their crops without any fertilizer, leading to potentially severe food shortages worldwide-wide.

The time to have learned how to grow your own food - to ramp up experience over many years - was a decade ago. My wife and I started in the mid 2010s, and are only now hitting our stride with about 230m² (≈2,500ft²) of our yard under direct cultivation, and plans to rehabilitate the other 140m² (≈1,500ft²) into equally quality soil via several metric tonnes of horse manure and soil sifting to remove the copious rocks and boulders.

It takes a shitton of work to build up a good garden that requires minimal work to start up every spring. But with that original section, we just have to drop seeds directly into the soil and add straw (Ruth Stout method) once the seedlings are up to suppress weeds and hold in moisture. The spring prep work for just that section has dropped by almost 80% over the last five years.

jackyl and hide

Jekyll and Hyde?

at a temperature that won’t roast puny AC adapted people alive

That’s not the only problem. I lived without AC for the first quarter of my life, so living in Canada’s only semi-arid desert I have had to tolerate a lot of hot summers. But where everyone else had the lightest artistic sheen of sweat across their brow while complaining about the heat, I looked like a drowned rat.

Turns out my core temp runs nearly a full ℃ lower than most everyone else, and my body struggles like hell to keep me appropriately cool. Learned that gem in my late 40s.

When the doc tested my heat tolerance - and being of German parents I have used wet saunas all my life - turns out that my wet bulb threshold is a good 3℃ lower than the average person.

Climate change can and will be literally more lethal to me than most other people.

The full lyrics are bittersweet once you understand their meaning.

If you aren’t conservative or wealthy, or better yet both, it most certainly is. Especially with home insurance.

The Canadian PNW seems to be different than further out east. I have noticed that the jet stream undulates such that the extreme winter cold stays east of the Rockies (generally speaking). This means that the PNW is getting warmer winters overall with far less snow in the mountains, leading to droughts in the summer.

Hell, my own area essentially never had a winter this last winter. We had only two “snowfalls” in the valley bottom, and neither lingered more than 12-18hrs before melting away. The average tends to be a good 30cm of accumulation that lingers for a month or more.

So hotter and drier years overall, and the end of real winters. I fully expect to be able to plant cold-tolerant palm trees (the kind you see in Vancouver) within the next decade, and have them survive year round without special protections. We’re USDA Zone 6a or 7a depending on who you reference, but the valley bottom just got officially reclassified as 7b.

In the Canadian PNW, 2025 was frequently called a “1990’s summer” due to how mild and reasonable it was. Sure, we still had heat waves. But like the early 1990s, they only lasted for a day or three and not a week or three. They also kept to the 30s and didn’t toad-squat in the 40s like some demented sauna.

It was a beautiful summer. My family’s orchard had a record harvest thanks to it.

You have a network for employee’s personal phones and devices, correct? That still leads to the Internet, correct?

I mean, the entire point of such a network is to keep outside devices off of internal networks that have sensitive data. And because the insides of large buildings can be absolutely sucky at receiving LTE/5G data connections, employees can and will do anything needed to ensure they still have connectivity on personal devices. So just connect the router/bridge to that network, and Teams will be appropriately sanitized and think you are still at home.

I have seen very tiny router/bridges, clear down to an Ethernet dongle with a +5v USB power feed. Quite unobtrusive.

If possible: grab a router and install OpenWRT onto it, and turn it into a wireless bridge. Use the router to connect to the office WiFi, and have a wired connection to your laptop. Turn off the laptop’s wifi for good measure.

Alternatively, if work provides hard lines, bring your own router and turn off WiFi to provide a protected hardline.

There are many ways to prevent the computer from realizing what network you are on.

Who wants to bet that the county commissioner is raking in massive paycheques from flock?

I’ve been running my own eMail server for almost a quarter century, and I have no clue what all the fuss is about.

Sure, providers are getting very picky about what domains that they will receive eMails from. But that’s why I have gMail, Yahoo, and Microsoft webmail accounts - so I can train their systems by exchanging emails once a quarter.

And yes, you do have to be running whitelists and blacklists and tarpits and have a good Fail2Ban in place. And good geoIP system if you want to cut out regions that you are unlikely to ever have legitimate mail originate from. But that’s just common sense security.