What I get out of self hosting services: Full control of my data and something to tinker with when the fancy strikes.

Graphs? Monitors? Failover? I get enough of that shit at work. If it’s down then whatever: I’ll fix it when the inconvenience is too great to ignore. External users? I only invite people who understand that this is my hobby, not my job.

The Dirty Dozen has a very cathartic finale, nearly on the level of the cinema fire from Inglorious Basterds.

TempleOS signed by Terry Davis.

I burned it to a DVD and mailed it to him for an autograph, back when he still had stable housing. I think maybe 2015.

Plenty of people just want an appliance to play games.

I build my own, but that’s because I want to save money. Actually picking the parts and figuring out compatibility, specs, etc is my least favorite exercise. Luckily I have a friend who cares way more about that, so I tell them what I want to achieve and they give me a shopping list.

The difference is small and pedantic:

“Once” means “A single time”

“Nonce” means “Used a single time”

Nonce carries extra information that something is being used.

Wikipedia claims this term dates to middle English:

Nonce is a word dating back to Middle English for something only used once or temporarily (often with the construction “for the nonce”). It descends from the construction “then anes” (“the one [purpose]”).

Nonce is used extensively in the context of cryptography to mean “used exactly one time”. Usually this refers to a random number that a server shares with a client to establish secure communications.

Red Sonja (1985)

I like that it’s a definitely-not-Conan movie with a bit more humor. Maybe people don’t like the kid actor, but I thought that Prince Tarn and Falcon added a lot without being overbearing. It could rate even higher for me if they’d gotten Basil Poledouris to do the soundtrack.

Cool World (1992)

Things really start to fall apart in the third act once Holli transports to the real world and from a technical side, Who Framed Roger Rabbit beats it by miles. However, the idea of Cool World, a mix of childish and sleazy animated characters all living in the same universe, is compelling. Bakshi’s animation style really brings it alive.

To be pedantic, the MW in OpenMW doesn’t stand for anything. It’s supposed to make players think of “Open MorroWind”, but only Bethesda has the right to use the name Morrowind.

Skywind: Playing the plot of Morrowind in the Skyrim engine. Game mechanics, spells, skills, models, textures, and bugs are all going to be similar to what you have in Skyrim, give or take some modding.

OpenMW: Playing Morrowind in an open source, crossplatform game engine. You are playing the exact same game as TES III (gameplay mechanics, spells, models, textures, etc are 1:1 identical in a vanilla install) but the code behind it is less buggy, more moddable, and it provides many modern quality-of-life improvements that the original engine couldn’t do.

I agree with the person who suggested linking to Wikipedia articles.

For example, it’s not much help to learn that PCIe stands for Peripheral Component Interconnect Express, because nobody calls it that. As an outsider, now I’m wondering what a component interconnect is. It’s much more useful to link to a page that gives context about how PCIe is actually used.

Very true. I believe FPGAs are also popular for aerospace applications, since it’s cheaper to design and patch programmable hardware than to design and physically install ASICs.

Vivado is software for designing hardware on an FPGA. AMD bought out Xilinx, one of the big FPGA manufacturers, a few years back. FPGAs are basically programmable digital circuits: you configure a series of internal logic gates to represent the function of a circuit with memory, data busses, registers, gates, etc. In this fashion, an FPGA could be programmed to function like a CPU, a radio, a video encoder, or nearly any other piece of digital hardware. Very useful for hobbyists and prototyping.

The thing with FPGA software is that there are no open source alternatives. FPGAs have so many complicated blobs and signing keys and proprietary IP blocks that your only choice is to use the manufacturer’s offering.