From what I heard, a few minds were blown yesterday as the Facebook Hive was put to sleep. Oh no, societal disruption because a website was down! Goodness, if that happened every time I pulled down this space...

Again, it's just a website. Reduce it down to its simplest fraction and Facebook is no different than this computer atop my lap. It runs Linux, too! It just seems that collectively, we ascribe power to these websites far more than they can ever warrant.

Last night, I pulled my own NAS out off the bench so as to host FLAC files. Unfortunately, running Plex is just too demanding for its processor—PLUS, Plex is too bloated with commercialism! I HATE its push to connect my box. There are other solutions out there as I'm still considering a conversion to OGG—run Icecast or something...geez, all I have to do is open a samba share with my laptop and listen to music—why make things difficult just for funzies...or better yet, why invest the time into it? Do I really need to access it with my phone, ESPECIALLY in the context where I'm going to migrate to a feature phone a year from now? Unless a smart phone can blow up a hologram display, I'm losing buy-in for these things. I remember back in 2004 how nuts it were for folks to be so tethered to their phones; this was WAY before the iPhone's launch in 2008. That said, how awesome if they could project to the size of an arcade cabinet?

While I've had my NAS for six years, I haven't really used it since 2017. I think it coincided with the time I switched from a satellite to this YAGI antenna setup for a LTE connection that I then shared out to the rest of the house via a Raspberry Pi. As coverage improved, I could just create a hotspot on the fly and my NAS was shelved.

And now that I'm back in the city, I have an ISP router. I have absolutely no trust in its security. That said, I have no trust in my own equipment, either, as I understand that scorpion-on-a-turtle China routinely builds a backdoor into its networking equipment. As EVERYTHING comes from China, you better queue up some Hall and Oates on your IoT device....

YouTube Link

(Quick aside: Of course, while we're forever in a cyberwar with China, I would guess that these backdoors are meant for a MASSIVE DoS in the event of an actual war to gum up our society since we have no way to flip off the Internet like other countries possess.)

...and yes, I appreciate how embedding that YouTube clip for this post now has Google's private eyes watching you...well, unless you run DuckDuckGo on a phone or Brave.

I will say one thing I miss from Spotify—it has nothing to do with Spotify as a service—is the research people create in finding music for a playlist and how I once found the song above.