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If you're not sarcastic then I'm generally sorry to hear you're stuck in that shitty situation.

You're also welcome at my BBQ if you're ever up here in Canada

Yup. I use credit a lot but also pay off my cards every pay period. I get that it sucks for merchants, but you know what sucks worse: getting cheated like this on a debit/cash transaction, or worse having your debit card skimmed.

A relative of mine had the latter and the bank froze her account for weeks while investigating. If it was a credit card they'd just freeze the transaction and maybe send you a replacement card with different #

This does seem like an important step. Like yeah, absolutely report this to the vendor but a theft also occurred so at least get a file going. Providing a police file # might have been enough to get them to refund as well

Or if you're in Canada: London Drugs actually has decent service in their computer dept

Got a chuckle out of my. IMO good comedy is very much about intent. You can say something offensive and legitimately funny, that's comedy. You can also say something extremely offensive/racist and actually mean it though the delivery may be kinda funny. Not comedy.

Sounds like the other side's strategy is to make it easier to arrest, imprison, and deport, plus cheat while throwing accusations. I fully expect them to use this strategy to try and "win" the next election so be on guard.

I realize this is sarcasm but honestly: all of you/us are greater than all of them, if enough of us can actually unite on what we want and how to get it.

Unfortunately it's also why there's been a huge effort on dividing people by race/gender/religion/etc that might otherwise have been united in socio-economic struggles.

It also means that the people who need to give something to push for change are (deliberately) kept in situations where they have the least to do.

• Less time to organise because of working multiple jobs with little to no free time.
• Less money or resources to fight in courts.
• Less knowledge due to underfunded education.
• Less physical ability due to lack of healthcare or nutritional diet
• Less access to childcare or ability to afford such
• Etc

Which is why supporting community/network is important.

Having a politician that isn't an evil fuck is good, but that politician isn't going to watch your kids while you're at a protest or in the hospital. They're not going to help you get to work when your car breaks down, or help you fix it.

They might stand beside you at a protest or union meeting, but one or a handful of politicians says less than community of hundreds or thousands.

We need to rebuild communities and support networks. Yes we need the help of politicians - or at least less actively fighting against us - but we also need to rally with each other. The attacks on this guy reflect much of the same as those on our communities.

If somebody is a "gay Muslim trans-woman Iranian refugee amputee" who is willing to stand by me in times of need, I'm willing to stand by them and they're welcome at my BBQ.

You're not the only one

I run backups to a USB drive which is way to grab in the event of an emergency. Just make sure you test them every more and again, and possibly only connect it when needed if you're at all worried about malware (a cryptolocker will happily take out any attached storage if your machine is infected).

A lot of that stack looks similar to mine, though I'm running bigger hardware for various reasons. You might want to go with something with more cores than an i5 depending on how much you find yourself utilizing.

Have you considered Nextcloud for documents and syncing functionality? I went through a few ways of running it before ended up with the Snap package which has been fairly solid for over a year now (Docker was good for setup, but upgrading was problematic if not kept up with religiously)

Vaultwarden is Excellent.

Calibre-Web is good, especially if paired with the application to "extract" books, and an app like Moon+ on mobiles

Audiobookshelf is pretty solid. Pairs well with Libation.

HASS I initially ran on my server in a container but moved to dedicated hardware so updating and reboots didn't break automatons. Got a HASS Yellow for the PoE and Zigbee.

If you're looking for audio/video library management, JellyFin is pretty easy to get running and has apps for phones plus many TVs. Finamp is a good mobile app for the music part

You can also use a router that can run wireguard/openvpn and have that run the tunnel back to home for you. I've got a portable GL-Inet router with OpenWRT that I use for this when I'm on the road