This is pretty typical for universities. They don’t want the airwaves clogged, doubling up NAT can lead to networking wonkiness, and they don’t want you giving university network access to unauthorized folks with an open AP.

When you say VR streaming, you just mean wireless from your PC to the headset, right? There’s a chance you could do that with an offline wireless router if the VR experiences you’re looking to play are single player.

I can’t help much on the power draw side of this question, but one thing to look out for with a UPS is some sort of communication option. (Usually NUT over ethernet, but there are some USB options too.) Most modern UPS brands will have a plugin you can install on your Raspberry Pi and Mini PC that allows your UPS to signal, “Hey, I’ve got 3% of battery life, you actually need to gracefully shut down now.” It’s mostly useful for NAS applications with spinning drives, but it could help save your Pi’s SD card potentially.

It’s a pretty standard feature these days, but the cheapest of the cheap will omit it.

What are you talking about?

NuPhy’s got some interesting options as well. https://nuphy.com/collections/keyboards/products/halo75-v2-qmk-via-wireless-custom-mechanical-keyboard

The low profile space is a little tricky. It leans into column staggered ergonomic boards really quickly. Kailh’s Choc switch is as low as you can go, but those folks get really custom really quick. They’re not big on function rows or arrow clusters, so the next step after Keychron or NuPhy would be something along the lines of the Afternoon Breeze. https://www.afternoonlabs.com/breeze/

Have you taken a look at any of Keychron’s offerings? https://www.keychron.com/products/keychron-k3-max-qmk-via-wireless-custom-mechanical-keyboard Checks most of the boxes other than the knob.

I still cannot believe NASA managed to re-establish a connection with Voyager 1.

That scene from The Martian where JPL had a hardware copy of Pathfinder on Earth? That’s not apocryphal. NASA keeps a lot of engineering models around for a variety of purposes including this sort of hardware troubleshooting.

It’s a practice they started after Voyager. They shot that patch off into space based off of old documentation, blueprints, and internal memos.

Long Switch can’t hurt you. Long Switch isn’t real.

Hell yeah. 🙌

Ah yeah, the Unicode Consortium ran into an issue a while back where they realized their emoji descriptors weren’t specific enough and were leading to confusion in cross-platform conversations. Apple used to have a woman in a red dress for “Dancer”, while most Android distributions showed a man in a disco suit. They started getting more specific in their emoji definitions and in 2016 and introduced a few emoji pairs like “Woman Dancing” and “Man Dancing” to clear up the existing confusion.

By 2019 the emoji concepts which were gendered (dancing, etc.) and non-gendered (skiing, surfing, etc.) had become pretty arbitrary. They decided to standardize offering a male, female, and generic version of every human emoji. It’s, you know, a standard, so they generally don’t make that many exceptions. Even emoji like “Santa Claus” have a female “Mrs. Claus” and a generic “Claus” options.

https://www.serverbuilds.net/ is a popular website online for folks building NASes at home. They’re fans of Unraid as well. They’ve got a Discord if you’re looking for something more interactive. Worth checking out. 👍

There’s an interesting conversation to be had about making the Fediverse more user friendly at the cost of increased centralization and non-standard extensions. It’s really difficult to focus on the message you’re trying to convey when you have five other alarmist topics crammed into the post.

Mozilla’s conflict of interest taking money from one of the largest internet advertisers and browser manufacturers was widely discussed during their recent anti-trust trial. It’s not super constructive to flatten the whole conversation to Mammoth being “Google Funded”.

They acknowledge it briefly. Captain Shaw grumbled, “Forget all that weird shit on the Stargazer, the real Borg are still out there.”

Picard Season 3 was explicitly being pitched as a TNG reunion season. They knew a lot of viewers would be jumping in mid-show, so it intentionally doesn’t rely heavily on the canon of the first two seasons to enjoy.

I liked the first two seasons for what they were, but honestly I get it. Picard’s premise of, “Legacy and new characters getting into adventures away from Starfleet” would have been tricky to balance with a full TNG cast reunion. Leaning into TNG Season 8 vibes made sense.

Get a bug guy to come spray the exterior of your place. They can use stronger stuff then folk’s indoor life hacks. Eventually they’ll stop getting in.