I played a lot of Sierra games in the 80s. I grew away from computers for a while and at some point in the 90s, Sierra sold out. They were basically drug through the mud, canned all its devs and became a brand rather than a software company. Sierra was also the first publisher of Half Life.

I was reading the history of Sierra there other night on Wikipedia and was sad because so many great games came out of that company and most were memorable. Hard to see that in any gaming these days

Back to my point, I started thinking that Valve saw what happened to Sierra and Newell decided fairly early on that they would be a software company and publisher and not sell out to a third party or take the company into the market. Pure speculation on my part, but they got their start sort of at the end of life of a bunch of 80s software companies. EA is certainly a shadow of what it was but it’s still around at least as a brand.

There was a game called The Culling. The sequel was crap and it bombed immediately. The first one was excellent though.

Rush 'n Attack. Get it? I was maybe 6 years old when I was dropping quarters into that bad boy.

Conservatives.

All conservatives are idiots. You heard it here first.

Yes, same type of device.

Adding a hardware key, like Nitrokey, would be an additional level of safety there. I would not use the database without some kind of additional key (something you know and something you physically have).

If there’s something nefarious that has user access, you’ve already lost in that regard.

There isn’t really privacy in email unless all recipients are encrypting the email body itself. Email leaks a lot of metadata even with GPG use, and it’s typically stored at rest in plain text.

There are tweaks you can do that will accept the unencrypted email, then immediately encrypt the message with your key so only you can read it. Then it would be safer at rest, but less convenient. It really depends on your threat model.

While we’re on the topic of open source products, may I suggest the SoloKey:

https://solokeys.com

Been using KeePassXC (and before that, KeePassX) since I abandoned LastPass about a decade ago. The apps integrate with Nextcloud perfectly and at least for me, it’s a breeze. I use it for TOTP too, and I second the recommendation of a hardware token for an additional layer of security. There are some USBc options that work on phones (I’m using a pixel 7 pro).

I’m not sure either part is true given how many software and hardware engineers get churned out every year. I think what happened is the same kind of people who would never have touched a computer in 1992 now have even more powerful computers in their pockets, but they are used for only 3 or 4 different apps. For the most part, it’s very consumption driven versus interaction. Designed to be put into the pockets of plebs in order to drive revenue because it can’t be too difficult.

I would posit that most people working in business at this point don’t even need things as powerful as a modern PC.

Bring your own device. Run it on your own wireless Internet connection (cellular). Never attach it to any private (read: school) resources aside from a power plug. Do not use corporate cloud (Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, etc). When you need to transfer assignments from personal computer to school computer, use your own cloud service like Nextcloud, or use GPG to encrypt the payload and send it to your school email address, which you can decrypt and send to your teacher. It will then be public and you should assume the teacher is techdumb and will put it on compromised systems like Apple, Microsoft, etc.

To answer the casting question, the Google cast API used to introduce a lot of breaking changes so many 3rd party apps had a lot of instant over the years.

You could build something yourself using Google SDKs or try to update an older framework that might be abandoned. Raspicast looks fairly recent but I think it’s just the android app and it uses a deprecated RPi OS. RaspberryCast hasn’t been updated since 2018.

It looks ripe for the development of you’ve got the time and dev chops, otherwise it’s going to be super hacky and unreliable at best.

There’s no reason to allow root to login to anything via ssh. Add a specific user to the Wheel group and that user can sudo whatever they need to do. Just make sure to disable password authentication and only allow certificates.