I mean, a show like Star Trek couldn’t possibly do well pushing a progressive worldview, right? Definitely it would have to appeal to bigots conservatives, or it would tank. No progressiveness on Star Trek, no sir.

/s

Nintendoland. Specifically, the mini games Animal Crossing: Sweet Day and Mario Chase.

The asymmetric gameplay was really fun. I ended up playing the Animal Crossing one with a couple of buddies until 3am one night, we were enjoying it so much. And Mario Chase was a staple for our group for years.

• Low coupling, high cohesion
• Sometimes it’s better to use a less optimized solution for clarity or simplicity
• A simple solution is usually better than a “clever” one
• Allot time for refactoring during development, don’t assume it will be done later (spoiler: it won’t)

If only I could remove OneDrive… IT expects us to use it for everything.

When I was getting a PC upgrade, I explicitly told them that I had already handled backing everything up (as they repeatedly said I needed to do). Most of my projects are synced with our version control, so I have a projects folder with a few hundred GB in it that I didn’t need to explicitly transfer to my new PC (I would check out projects as I needed them). I wrote in the ticket that they didn’t need to transfer any files, I had already handled it. And I told the IT person who took my old PC. They said my new PC would be ready the next morning.

Lo and behold, it wasn’t. I called and asked, they said they were still working on it. The following day, I went to pick it up and the IT person explained that it took so long because they had to transfer over hundreds of GB of files. And they reminded me that if I had been using OneDrive, I could have had it a day sooner.

You know, because they had to copy over my files. That were already in version control. A system they admin. And that I told them about like 5 times. After they said they wouldn’t be responsible for file transfers.

Ah well, guess I got paid for their ineptitude. I wish this was the worst they’ve done, though.

• waiting 20 minutes for your PC to boot all the corporate bloatware before it’s usable
• quarterly 4-hour-long all-department meeting that could have been an email
• “incorporating” the latest tech buzzword into your process because that one manager has nothing better to do
• “celebrating” things like Company Culture Week™ and other BS stuff imagined up by people with nothing better to do

Many DNS providers offer privacy options. They’ll put their own information in the WHOIS database and forward relevant stuff to you.

Well shit, that’s weirdly viable.

Yep, meant it as a joke.

Out of scope for the project, we’ll flush it from the backlog and include it in another epic.

They have their own databases, no additional info required.

Fine, we’ll add altitude as well.

GPS coordinates. Much more efficient than storing country, province, city, address, and postal code. Let the front end handle the rest.

Truly autonomous driving (on general purpose roads) is a lot further off than the hordes of venture capitalists want you to believe. Not sure which state is letting them loose, but I can’t imagine it’ll end well.

“You must be the worst web scraper I’ve ever heard of.”

“Ahh, but you have heard of me.”

I believe this is called a “stand up”. That is, you’re standing up your real work for an hour so a useless middle manager scrum master can feel like they’re contributing.

Yeah, the water levels in DKC1 are pretty slick as well (Charles Cornell talks about that one too).

The DKC series also had some amazing music (especially DKC2). Overall some of my favorite games from my childhood.

Even DK64 was okay for me, though it came out at probably the best time for me to enjoy it (I think I was 11 or 12 and had lots of time to burn).

Here’s a great musical analysis on Stickerbush Symphony, for anyone interested.

The brain does what it must to survive. We normalize things that are insane to keep us from going insane. It’s… weird.

The answer also depends on your level of experience and how much you want to learn doing this. You mentioned you haven’t done this before, but are you otherwise comfortable using computers and figuring things out? Are you familiar with Linux and/or the command line? In addition, are you hoping to tinker around and learn a lot from this, or are you more concerned with just setting it up so you can use it?

There are options for all levels of expertise and technical interest, but I recommend starting with any hardware you already have or can aquire for cheap/free (especially if you’re hoping to tinker and learn more). As another commenter suggested, finding an old desktop or laptop and putting a NAS operating system on it would be a great starting project. Then once you play around with it, you’ll know if/where you want to spend some cash on something better. If you don’t have old PCs laying around, check on whatever you use for local buy & sell listings, you can probably pick up something for pretty cheap.

If you’re mostly looking to play around and you don’t have any extra hardware, you can also try things out in a virtual machine (download VirtualBox), which will let you learn without any monetary investment.

I’m using my old desktop from 2010. There’s no such thing as a server that can “do it all”, but any computer from the last 10 years would probably be a fine place to start. The more you do, the more likely you’ll be to hit some sort of performance limit, and by that time you’ll know more about what you actually want.

In short, find old cheap/free hardware and start playing around.