Lettuce eat lettuce

Hell yeah!! Welcome, fellow penguin. 🐧

Bitwarden

It’s a FOSS password manager that you can self host, or use their cloud infrastructure. Their free plan is more than enough for basic users, and their paid personal plan is less than $1 a month and is packed with features.

Runs in your browser, Android, iOS, Chrome and Firefox extensions, and has native desktop apps for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Super easy to set up and use, no BS, works damn near perfectly. I’ve been using it for years and I love it, it’s the only password manager I recommend to folks now days.

Emulators do what Nintendon’t.

It’s better to buy them food or give them homeless care packs. There are good lists online of things you can give to homeless folks that will help them a lot, socks are a main staple.

I give all three depending on the scenario. I almost never have cash on me, so I don’t hand out money very often just because of that.

It’s important to show them compassion and care. Homeless people are often treated like trash by most people. Saying a kind word to them and giving them a small gift might be the only instance of kindness they experience for days, possibly weeks.

Pixel 6a with GrapheneOS here. Been using for about a year and a half, and loving it.

An oldie but a goodie lol.

For sure. I always try to be extra kind to service folks, first, because it’s good to treat people well. But also because you never know what strings they can pull for you in a pinch.

Years ago, my connecting flight got canceled a few minutes before it was supposed to depart, obviously a ton of people were screwed trying to get where they were going.

I was in line for the service desk to get rerouted and saw the main service desk gal getting chewed out over and over by different pissy passengers, as if she had personally canceled their flight just because she was bored.

She kept telling everybody that all the flights were booked and it would be at least 10 hours before anything would be available.

When it was my turn, I could tell she was exhausted dealing with all the angry people ranting in her face. I just apologized to her about how sucky the whole situation was and said very nicely, “I’ll take whatever flight you can get me, but I understand things are crazy right now.” she thanked me and started to give me the same speech, then paused and told me to wait outside of the line while she, “checked something real quick.”

A minute or two later, she came back out and motioned me quietly back over. She leaned in and said she had, “found me a seat on a red-eye leaving in a few hours to my destination if that worked.”

I thanked her a bunch and was home early the next morning while all the other people were still crashed out in the airport waiting for all the other flights.

Two stories:

I work in IT. Most people are nice and reasonable, but every now and then, there are jerks.

For the most part, everybody gets equal treatment from me, but if you are a super polite and friendly person, I’ll bend the rules for you. I’ve given a few people unauthorized hardware upgrades, boosted their ticket priority, helped them bypass company restrictions, etc. Little favors for being so chill and easy to work with.

But in the other side, a handful of folks have gotten my evil side. One guy in particular, a real douchebag. Super angry all the time, a jerk to me and other employees, was always spamming us angrily to fix his stuff. He would constantly lock himself out of his account because he would angrily type the wrong password over and over and then call us all pissed because he was locked out and couldn’t get any work done.

One morning he did it again, called the help desk and I was the lucky one who picked up. He ranted at me about how he had an important meeting in less than an hour and his account was locked out again, (because he kept typing his password wrong like an idiot.) He swore at me and yelled about how the password policy was bullshit, blah blah.

I had enough and told him that, while I could reset his password, unfortunately we recently updated our servers and it would take roughly half an hour for the change to take place. He yelled about how he was going to miss his important meeting and all that, but I just kept gently apologizing and reminding him that I didn’t come up with the password policy and all of it was above my pay grade.

He hung up furious and I smiled, made a mental note to reset his password in half an hour, and marked the ticket as resolved. Still don’t feel bad about that.

Second story: In college, whenever there was paper due that I had procrastinated on, if it could be submitted to an online portal, I would create a fake Word document, fill it with random characters, and save it with the proper name.

Then, I would use a hex editor to corrupt the document, just enough so it would still get recognized as a legit Word doc, but if you tried to open it, Word would throw an error and not be able to open it.

Then I would submit that the night it was due, so it would look like I had submitted my paper on time. Even with small classes, it would usually be at least 2-3 days before the professor or TA would get to my paper, sometimes up to a week, and that whole time, I would be working on my real paper.

I would get a message or email from the professor a few days later letting me know that for some reason, my paper wouldn’t open, and requesting that I resend it.

I would then respond with something like, “oh hmmm, that’s weird, not sure what happened. Sure thing, I just uploaded it again, please let me know if that worked.”

Of course, the second time I actually uploaded my real paper. Did that trick a half dozen times or so, never got caught lol.

How did you set up the kiosk? I’ve been looking for an alternative to Windows Kiosk mode on Linux for a while now.

Tell me you don’t work in IT, without telling me you don’t work in IT.

Ple*se stop.

Lol I am so happy about this.

At a place I worked at previously, there was a guy who got fired because the company found out that he had been hiding cans of beer in the water tank part of the toilet.

Yes…you read that right, he would “take a bathroom break” so he could pound a beer a few times throughout the day lol.

I wouldn’t critique it that much honestly, except for the fact that he operated heavy equipment for his job, so yeah, not safe at all.

A health company where they have that poor of security practices? Get the hell out ASAP! When they get ransomware, (and they will,) you do NOT want to be on the hook for trying to recover their systems.

Trust me, I had to help recover from a ransomware attack at a small company a while back, it hit early in the morning, I got there a little before 8am once I got the call.

22 hours later, we had only just finished wiping and re-imaging every computer, let alone getting all the software reinstalled, configured, tested, backups re-synced, etc. It took weeks to get everything fully recovered, and that was with a team of half a dozen people.

In the meantime, CYA hardcore. Document all security issues you can find in email and make sure whoever is in charge is aware and is on the email chain. There literally could be legal charges brought up if it’s involving private health information.

NCIS, or its variants. I think where I lived, it came on at 9pm, and because my parents didn’t want me to watch it, (violence and all that) it was a convenient bedtime marker.

I worked for a classic MSP a while back, barely lasted 3 months. Such a toxic environment, tons of pressure to spread yourself thinner and thinner.

It was one of those places where you were expected to be there an hour early, stay an hour late, and work through your lunch.

Even though that’s illegal, it was never explicit, just one of those, wink wink type things. But the workload was always so heavy, you couldn’t stay on top of everything unless you were working 50+ hours a week.

And of course, all salary, no overtime or double time for weekend work.

I do internal IT now, much better. Trying to get my own one-person shop going to eventually be fully self-employed. Actually, it would be really cool to become a worker-owned co-op, but that’s still a faint dream.

Lol

10 seconds? That’s generous.

Your fear is understandable and valid, this is a dark timeline and a really bad outcome.

But being afraid and panicking cannot possibly help anybody, least of all yourself.

Take a few days if you can to reset mentally as much as possible.

Then, get to work building resistance, it’s more critical now than ever. Find a leftist org near you and get involved. DSA, a local anarchist group, a worker co-op that needs volunteers, a democratic socialist org, anything leftist that is doing real work locally.

If you can’t donate your time, donate your money. If you can’t donate either of those, then help them spread the word on your social media. Post all their links and use your social media to advertise their events and meetups, help make people aware.

On the personal side, protect your health. The conservatives largely want to demolish healthcare, especially for underprivileged folks. Your health is so critical, especially now.

Quit your vices or at least, reduce them:

• Quit smoking/vaping.
• Stop drinking, at least heavily if you do.
• Stop eating junk food/candy.
• Get in shape, hike, calisthenics, walk, bike, etc.

It will not only help protect you from an administration that wants you to have less coverage if you’re sick/injured, it will help your mental health and save you money, sometimes tons of money.

Final advice for money, save it as much as you can. Practice frugality, get together with friends to cook and share meals. Get involved socially with people, learn about your community, build solidarity.

We will get through this, I believe in you, and I believe in the human drive for true freedom, equality, and community. Don’t let that flame burn out, we’re in this together, and only together can we come out victorious. ✊