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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: February 1st, 2024

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  • I think (?) it’s generally true that the root user should never mess with users’ files.

    Imagine your home directory is shared across many systems on a network (my alma mater did this). It would be really bad if a sysadmin for alpha.university.edu removed a program, and suddenly your personal settings were removed from beta.university.edu — even though that computer still has the program.

    This is one of the “UNIX on the desktop” issues — a lot is designed for a sysadmin/multiuser situation, and it has some gotchas when using it as a desktop machine (I’m used to/really appreciate the directory structure and settings management at this point, but it may take some getting used to).




















  • My carrier is Google Fi — one perk is that they will give you free data-only sims (up to 10 I think?) and you just pay for the data you use like any other data. I have used old Android phones in USB tether mode this way, and it works just fine. So, rpi+old/cheap phone should do the trick.

    One fun bonus is that if you tether over USB it will work as a WiFi dongle, too — the failover from WiFi to cell should happen on the phone, transparently iirc. Not sure if that affects you.

    Caveat is that I did this a while ago, and their pricing structure may have changed. Finished to be a great deal but has slowly become another carrier with not much to differentiate it…