My headcanon for The Matrix’s “humans are batteries” is that it’s the machines’ perverse interpretation of this — killing the humans is off the table, and for whatever reason letting them live with no purpose to serve the machines is also disallowed. But giving their lives “meaning” in the form of a shitty (and thermodynamically dubious) “battery” somehow satisfies the rules.

It’s a very big stretch, I’ll admit…

If you have a TV, you likely already have the receiving device. Antenna can cost, or you can play around with wire length and orientation.

It’s mostly so that I can have SSL handled by nginx (and not per-service), and also for ease of hosting multiple services accessible via subdomains. So every service is its own subdomain.

Additionally, my internal network (as in, my physical LAN) does not have any port forwarding enabled — everything is over WireGuard to my VPS.

My method:

VPS with reverse proxy to my public facing services. This holds SSL certs, and communicates with home network through WireGuard link configured on my router.

Local computer with reverse proxy for all services. This also has SSL certs, and handles the same services as the VPS, so I can have local/LAN speeds. Additionally, it serves as a reverse proxy for all my private services, such as my router/switches/access point config pages, Jellyfin, etc.

No complaints, it mostly just works. I also have my router override DNS entries for my FQDN to resolve locally, so I use the same URL for accessing public services on my LAN.

the fact is

Well there’s your problem…

It can be daunting to get into the hobby, there are a ton of niches.

To start: where are you? I’m in the USA, so that’s where my experience is.

License: required to transmit on the ham bands; you can listen without a license.

Range: are you looking to talk to people in your city/region? If so, a cheap “walkie-talkie” style (called “HT” in the biz — best avoid “walkie-talkie”) is a good place to start. These VHF/UHF (very/ultra high frequency) radios are affordable — something from Baofeng(~$30) or similar will work just fine, though they are often looked down on (I have one — for the price, it’s great). You will have the most luck if there is an active ham scene in your area, in large part because they may have a repeater, which can greatly extend your range. Many regions will have scheduled “nets” where you just go around and chat.

If you’re looking for the ability to chat with folks on the other side of the world, you’ll want to look into HF (high frequency). This is much lower frequency, thus longer wavelength, than the handheld VHF/UHF HTs. So…the antennas take up a lot of space. Mine is 52 feet long, in the attic. And the radios are much more expensive (more like $1k new). ICOM 7300, Yaesu FT710 are popular entry level units (but you also need power supply, cables, and antenna).

That said: if you just want to listen to HF, the antenna doesn’t matter as much at all, and you can use an SDR (RTL-SDR probably works?) for listening. You can probably also find a used shortwave radio that covers some of the HF ham bands.

Getting TLS certs will be complicated

I just use Let’s Encrypt with a wildcard domain — same certs for public and private facing domains. I’m sure this isn’t best practice, but it’s mostly just for me so I’m not too worried :)

Yeah I don’t expose Jellyfin over the Internet, so it doesn’t matter for me, and wouldn’t work at all over WAN (unless VPN’d to home network).

Also, it’s all reverse proxied, and there’s nothing preventing having two Jellyfin hostnames, e.g., jf-local.mydomain.com and jf-public.mydomain.com.

Another fun trick you can play is to use a private IP on your public DNS records. This is useful for Jellyfin on Chromecast for instance — it uses 8.8.8.8 for DNS lookup (and ignores your router settings), so it wants a fully qualified domain name. But it has no problem accessing local hosts, so long as it’s from 8.8.8.8’s record.

I have set up local DNS entries (with Pi-Hole) to point to my srrver, but I don’t know if it possible to get certs for that, since it is not a real domain.

So long as your certs are for your fully qualified domain there’s no problem. I do this, as do many people — mydoman.com is fully qualified, but on my own network I override the DNS to the local address. Not a problem at all — DNS is tied to the hostname, not the IP.

Reminds me of that West Wing episode where he “accidentally” makes an offensive gun analogy comment; Harris doesn’t really alienate any supporters here, and she appeals to the undecided gun crowd voters. As a bonus, she’s “telling it like it is” for folks who are self-described as being “fed up with PC culture.”

Right. But I think it’s a mischaracterization to represent the EC as a “technicality,” as it’s very central to the way voting in the USA works. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s stupid and should be abolished, but it’s very much ingrained in the voting system.

I think I’d counter your example — keeping the sports theme — by saying it’s like the World Series: it doesn’t matter if there are three absolute blowouts, all the matters is who wins four games. So you could easily win the World Series, but have fewer total runs across seven games (game = EC votes, runs = popular).

(Again, I think the EC should absolutely be abolished.)

That’s unfortunately not really a contradiction though, given the electoral college — I think Harris will obliterate Trump in the popular, but that’s sadly not what matters.

I’d love to see someone like this go on Fox live, with the understanding that would give Trump a reach around…and then eviscerate him on live TV.

But the goal isn’t just to convince people that you’re better than the other candidate — it’s to convince sympathetic people to get out and vote for you, and if not that, then at least not vote for the other.

I think people are largely decided on who they are not voting for, but who they are voting for is a bit different.

Any chance you have a DMZ set up on your router?

On your router, are there any settings specific to any host (other than the server maybe)? For example, a static IP or a port forwarded rule.

Do you have a VPN on the phones? Can you traceroute from your phone to the server and post that? (I like PingTools for Android.) You should have 1 hop (you -> server, nothing in between).

Can you verify that you are on the same wifi including same wifi channel? Phone on 5GHz but Linux box on 2.4GHz, for example.

Some mobile clients make it easy to accidentally downvote. I sometimes see that I accidentally downvoted a comment from time to time.

PingTools has been useful for me (though I mostly just use it for iperf).

Anybody want a peanut?

if the Democrats truly understood the minimum wage would be $20 or more

In Democrat-controlled California, the minimum wage for fast food workers is $20: https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/minimum_wage.htm