I started keeping a spreadsheet of my blocks so I could know why I blocked someone. As of this comment, I have 1,493 accounts blocked. Round that up to 1,500, easily, to account for the blocks I made before I started tracking them.

So to answer your question, very quick.

“It was a textbook landing, and hundreds of lives were saved”.

OpenLDAP. Have been running that as the backend of several of my services since 2015.

I use it for authentication/authorization, either directly or via Authelia, as well as the backend storage for my DNS, DHCP, Kerberos, email servers, and a few internal / self-built applications. I even registered an official IANA PEN so my custom LDAP schema are properly implemented. It’s setup with a 4-way multi-master replication strategy and highly available via two load balancers in different data centers (plus one locally).

Runner up is Nginx as I’ve been running it for just as long or a bit longer, and it also underpins most of my services in some way (at least as the frontend proxy/WAF).

My coffee hasn’t kicked in yet, so this is as diplomatic as I can phrase it under current conditions:

Both are entrenched identity politics instances (“aNaRchISM!”) and a good chunk of the calls for violence around here are from users there. You’ll be over here trying to have a rational discussion, and someone from there comes in like the world’s dumbest parrot who can only say “Bawk! Guillotines! Bawk! Luigi”.

dbzer0 was aight when it was just the piracy instance, but they’ve shifted more to far left politics and re-federated with Hexbear, so they’re basically Hexbear-lite these days. Quokk turns a complete blind eye (or tacitly endorses) several power users who do nothing but call for violence, doxx, and/or do nothing but spread anarchist propaganda.

• Shun the toxic people. Block them and don’t look back.
• Seriously, block them. They’re still gonna toxic whether you’re there to observe it or not.
• Find a well moderated instance that isn’t afraid to show toxic people the door
• Block .ml, grad, hexbear, dbzer0, and quokk.au
• Block any other instance or person that centers itself around identity politics
• Block all the news/politics communities. Just get your news from actual news services. The comment section for most news/politics posts here is worse than an entire garbage dump on fire.

And you’ll end up with like 3 federated users left which is basically my /all feed now 😑

If anyone doesn’t get the reference:

I forgot how old this gag was until realizing it’s in 4:3 aspect ratio.

If you reverse the polarity of lots of things, you get a fire starter.

You mean the one from the obvious troll account that was obvious?

I don’t really consider blahaj as an “identity politics” instance, but I think I know which users you’re referring to (or at least their style). I’ve probably had those blocked for a while now.

Edit: A few of those have older hexbear alts which kind-of explains things.

Don’t want to start any drama by listing specifics, but basically any instance that advertises itself as “a space for {insert flavor of identity politics here}”.

Excellent catch!

“Tell me how old you are without telling me how old you are” 😢

Don’t feel bad. I was able to distinguish by ear between a T.38 fax handshake and a V.34+ modem handshake which definitely reveals my oldness 😆

So many things wrong with that though:

1. That’s a fax machine handshake not a data modem.
2. That’s a LOT of data to be hissing over dial-up in a highly compressed GSM voice channel
3. She didn’t dial anywhere near enough numbers
4. The background noise would have had that handshake repeating over and over

The most nostalgic chiptune generator you’ll ever hear.

I was surprised by that, too. When I went looking for a way to decode them with RTL-SDR, I assumed it wouldn’t be parsing the audio but a narrowband data stream. TIL also.

Edit: It does kind of make sense with it being AFSK encoded in-band, though, or maybe I’m just so used to it being that way. I always thought the screeches were there to demand attention (and also be something that headend equipment can pick up and respond to). So it’s interesting they’re doing double duty as both an unmistakable audio cue to pay attention as well as containing the actual alert data.

Plus there are NOAA stations all over the country rather than centralized like the time signal transmitters. It was probably cheaper to do it in band at that scale.

Yeah, I may have to settle for woodworking. I could set that up in my basement safely enough but definitely can’t be welding or have other fire hazards.

Only limitation with woodworking in insufficient ventilation if I want to paint or varnish or something.

Metalworking. It’s not so much beyond my ability so much as it’s out of my price range to get into it. I just don’t have any of the necessary tools nor an appropriate workspace, and I’d basically have to build a workshop and start from the literal ground up.

Heh, I just watched “The Search” the other day which is actually what inspired this meme. The thought did cross my mind that “Seska” could be T’Rul wearing a Cardassian mask wearing a Bajoran mask.

They kind of do, or at least used to.

If memory serves, they would take higher-end chips that didn’t pass QA for that product line, disable some cores or whatever, and sell it as a lower-end chip.

LOL, yes.

She did, but the Seska episodes were the only Kazon episodes that I enjoyed from the early seasons of Voyager.