Drones have without a doubt changed warfare a ton, but there’s still no fighter jet equivalent on speed and impact power. Situation in Ukraine is a bit different as Ukraine doesn’t have much hardware to spare and Russians seem to be afraid of modern defences and neither of them have real infrastructure in place for fighter jet maintenance close enough to the front lines.

I’ve been writing a small powershell script at work lately and as vscode now offers their AI bundled in I just tried it out of curiosity. It does a half decent job. Nothing I couldn’t write on my own, but on a simple script it saved some time as I’m a long term linux guy and just getting my toes wet with powershell so I need to dig up proper functions and syntax pretty often.

But it also created a script which would have broken syntax and errors in it, so it still needed manual tweaking, but as long as you know what you’re doing it can be useful. And also potentially dump your company data to some learning database.

Is my current set up secure, assuming strong passwords were used for everything?

Network security is a complicated beast to manage. If general public can access your services over the internet, that’s a threat you need to mitigate. Strong passwords is a good start on that, but it doesn’t take into account if there’s a flaw or bug on the service you’re running. Also if you have external users, they might reuse their passwords and leak for those might cause a threat too, specially if there’s privilege escalation bugs on the software you’re running.

And so on, it’s a too wide field to cover in a short comment here, but when you’re building your stuff, and what is maybe the most disticntive feature on a good professional between a not so good one, is to think ahead and prepare for every imaginable scenario where something goes wrong. Every time you add a way to access your network, no matter how minuscle, think what happens if that way gets compromised and what it might mean on the very worst case.

Maybe you want to add another access point to your network since your terrace isn’t properly covered. That’s nice to have, but now everyone around 100 meters around your house/apartment might have access to your stuff if they can break your wifi security. Maybe you set up a reverse proxy or tailscale on the stack. Now the whole internet can at least probe your stuff and try to find vulnerabilities, try to use stolen credentials and even try to social engineer their way into your stuff. Or maybe you made an mistake and left something open that shouldn’t be.

I’m not trying to scare you off out of anything. Go ahead and play with your stuff, break things, learn how to fix them, have fun while doing it. Just remember to think ahead about worst case scenarios, weigh their risks, think ahead and then go on. Learn about DNAT, reverse proxies, VPN and network layers and whatever you come across on your adventure but keep in mind that shit will hit the fan at some point. And learn to accept that, learn from your mistakes and do better next time.

The option to run one cable to the monitor, or reversely charge your laptop with one docking cable.

USB-C docks can already do this. Obviously with less power and it’s not perfect by any means, but we don’t need another technology for this. And sure, it’s two cables, one from wall outlet to integrated dock/monitor and usb-c from dock to laptop, but no matter the technology you still need something to plug in to wall outlet.

Hetzner provides managed web hosting too. For emails I think you need to look for some other provider.

I totally agree. Setting up an email server is pretty trivial, but setting up a good email server with long lifespan and managing it is another matter. I absolutely recommend doing that, that’s the one front we can take back from the giants if enough people decide to go that route, but it’s not something you should just spin up by following a random youtube tutorial and leave it be.

I do host my own emails, but I’ve been doing that commercially too for a decade or so and make my living as system administrator, so I’ve cut my teeth on this quite a while ago. You need to understand quite a few things, set up backups, clear your IP from various blocklists every now and then, manage the ever growing spam problem, make sure that no malicious actors can access your systems and so on.

It is very much doable and at least I personally enjoy the freedom I have for not relying on anyone else on my communications. Go for it, but be prepared to jump in to the deep end without floats.

Without any expertise, I’m going to say that minuscule amounts of radioactive nickel from your CR2032 replacements compared to wasted lithium on pretty much every battery your all current devices have plus single use LiIon-cells on e-cigs, single use toys and whatever is a pretty good improvement. In 100 years or so all that nickel is converted to copper with small amounts of radiation and heat as byproducts, in today’s technology, is pretty good.

And the radiation is beta-negative. I’m not an nuclear physicist, but if I’m not mistaken your common 3032 cell has enough metal to shield pretty much all of the radiation. Just don’t eat them and maybe stick with li-ion on your wrist watch.