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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Yes, $15 CAD/day to “roam like home”. I have an Orange eSIM that I can keep alive if I use it at least once every 6 months - with a local french number that stays mine. It costs me about $40 CAD for a 30 day - 20GB top up. My wife uses Nomad for data only, we both don’t need local numbers, and it generally costs $12 CAD for 5 GB 2 week top-up.

    So I figure about $60-70 CAD for 3 weeks travel virtually anywhere in Europe. Calls and SMS included (for one) without long distance charges. Compared to $630 for “roam like home” for two people from a Canadian carrier - doesn’t matter which one as far as I can tell.

    We both recently got new phones to be able to use eSIMs.

    And the physical SIMs stay active. So my elderly parents can call my Canadian number if there’s an emergency and it will ring through.

    In fact, on our last trip to Rome, when we used a credit card at the hotel, it was refused and then seconds later I got a text from the bank asking for confirmation on my Canadian number. I had no choice but to text “Yes” back, and that single text activated roaming for the day and cost me $15.


  • As a boomer (at the tail end, admittedly), I too have lived through all of these things. Plus the other thirty years of shit that happened before it.

    The world threat that was the USSR and Mutually Assured Destruction. The Vietnam War, two Gulf Wars, and 9/11.

    The “Troubles” in Ireland and IRA bombings in London. The Munich Olympics Massacre. The rise of global terrorism. The FLQ crisis. Kent State. Watergate.

    Acid rain. Leaded gas and smog.

    15%+ mortgage rates. The oil crisis. Wage and price controls. Multiple recessions. The Dot Com bubble.

    Police raids on gay clubs. Racial slurs in everyday language. Massive gender inequality.

    24" black and white TVs. It took a week to find out how your photos came out. Watching f@#$ing “Tiny Talent Time” on a Sunday afternoon because there wasn’t any else better on the other 5 channels (if that doesn’t traumatize you, nothing will).

    You had to go to a library if you wanted to look something up in an encyclopedia.

    Cars without seatbelts, crumple zones, anti-lock brakes, traction control or airbags.

    F*CK me. “No experience”. Maybe just enough to know how much better things generally are today.

    Kids always think that they know more than their parents…until they don’t.


  • That used to be really true when I was a kid in the 79’s, but not so much today. Back then, a quality guitar cost way more than the cheap stuff and the cheap stuff was rubbish.

    Nowadays, with CNC machines everywhere, there are lots of modestly priced guitars that are very playable. The junk that we used to have to settle with back in the day only exists in the realm of “toy” instruments that almost aren’t intended to be played.

    Seriously, $300 can get you a very playable instrument, especially in electric guitars.










  • Canadian providers all charge about $15 a day to “roam like home”. For about $20 I can buy a 30 day 5GB data only plan for Europe. Getting a European phone number doubles the cost as most of those plans have much more data as well. You can buy the plans before you leave, download and install the eSIM so you’re ready to go when you arrive.

    The wife and I both bought Pixel 7’s this year as they support eSIM. We’re in England right now. Our cost roaming would have been $600+. Only one of us needed a local phone number, and the has just data, and the cost was maybe $70.


  • Well, there are specific hardware configurations that are designed to be servers. They probably don’t have graphics cards but do have multiple CPUs, and are often configured to run many active processes at the same time.

    But for the most part, “server” is more related to the OS configuration. No GUI, strip out all the software you don’t need, like browsers, and leave just the software you need to do the job that the server is going to do.

    As to updates, this also becomes much simpler since you don’t have a lot of the crap that has vulnerabilities. I helped manage comuter department with about 30 servers, many of which were running Windows (gag!). One of the jobs was to go through the huge list of Microsoft patches every few months. The vast majority of which, “require a user to browse to a certain website” in order to activate. Since we simply didn’t have anyone using browsers on them, we could ignore those patches until we did a big “catch up” patch once a year or so.

    Our Unix servers, HP-UX or AIX, simply didn’t have the same kind of patches coming out. Some of them ran for years without a reboot.