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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Mint, lemongrass, lavender… nothing works as far as I’m concerned (Ontario, Canada). Same with ultrasonic repellants, burning coils, torches, TiO2 bulbs, taking vitamin B or garlic.

    What does work for me are devices like the mosquito magnet: they burn propane to produce humidity and CO2 and use a fan to blow that through an optional chemical attractant like octanol while using the use the suction of the other side of the fan to draw the little bastards into a mesh basket where they are trapped until they desiccate.

    These machines serve two purposes: they take care of the mosquitoes today and over time they break the reproductive cycle of the mosquitoes in the area which after ~6 weeks DRAMATICALLY reduces the problem for the rest of the season. A 20lb tank of propane lasts about a month. The downside is that these machines tend to be VERY finicky and you have to futz around with them after the first season to get them working again. Not great for a $500+ device.

    Additionally, building bat houses and encouraging swallows to nest in the area also do wonders: both of these creatures are voracious mosquito hunters (and barn swallows are my favourite bird).






  • ssh -D8080 myserver and then use any of the proxy extensions (i like proxyswitchy omega I think it’s called). Also works with tsocks or anything that can use a SOCKS5 proxy, and as an added bonus, it’ll resolve DNS through the proxy as well.

    I’ve been using the -L2500:localhost:25 -L14300:localhost:143 trick to access my personal email without leaking anything outside of the ssh tunnel for years, and things like sslh and corkscrew allow me to get around/through draconian corporate IT policies with almost 100% success.

    The last trick I have is iodine which can tunnel traffic through DNS. If you can’t get a direct connection to the iodine endpoint it can be damn slow, but if you gotta get through it can be a godsend.









  • This.

    Almost all of my gear is bought used: switches, server, even memory. My main server is an old Dell C6100 blade server I got for $250. My disk array is a 12-bay SAN that I found for $50 and took a chance on being able to get it working. It’s power hungry but it’s got redundant everything and I have spare parts on the shelf next to it.

    I’ve been branching into ARM servers a little and right now I’ve got an RK3588 board with 32G of RAM. That’s new (and expensive for me) but I got a fibre channel array for $20 that I’m going to try to make work with it. $8 FC HBA and a $12 cable along with a $30 m2-to-PCIe adapter intended for eGPUs. I’m not going for speed here, but used data centre equipment is nice and some of it is dirt cheap because it’s too slow for “real” work.