I see a lot of folks carry pepper spray, non-lethal CO2 guns like the Byrna and Pistelle X-68 and there's a big market for this stuff but has anyone here ever had to use one? If so what was your experience? Did the threat stop?
Oh boy
So late last year (around October?) I left Spectrum after 3 years, switched to a local company. Since then I've received multiple phone calls from Spectrum and have had 2 in-person visits from sales people to bring me back. All within 7-8 months.
I got a knock on the door today from a gentleman from Spectrum who was nice at first but later became combative when his sales pitches weren't working on me and I mentioned them losing internet subscribers (they hate to hear this, I think). After I explained why I needed higher uploads speeds than Spectrum's 40mb/s upload speeds he tried to pivot the sales pitch into "well some people have two ISPs, one for back up in case the main services goes down". I didn't challenge this, but in my head I thought "Isn't that what my mobile hotspot is for?".
I bring up Spectrum's service not doing well, I mention how Spectrum has lost over 400,000 internet customers in the past year and he says that he thinks I am thinking about their TV customers, not their internet customers. He then sees me trying to use my phone to fact-check him and says "I'm not here to argue with you about that, I'm not here to challenge you, I'm not here to compete my data with your data".
After this we do a little more back and forth, he tells me how great he is at his job and I say you may be great at your job, but it looks pretty grim, if Spectrum representatives are calling me and have visited me twice this year to convert me. My point was that while he may be a great salesman who can convert 99% of people back to Spectrum, Spectrum's tactics of continuously disturbing past customers looks grim and desperate as if things are not going well. I said all of that because I felt he was blatantly lying to my face about the internet customers dropping like flies and was trying to gaslight me into thinking it was their TV customers.
He then tells me that my perspective looks skewed and for me to have a nice day and has a nice little chuckle as he walks off and I have one myself inside.
Hopefully this is the last time they come out here.
My Blink camera only recorded the conversation in 10 second intervals, with breaks in-between to process the footage before recording again so that's why there's jump-cuts in the footage but I tried to describe the conversation as accurately as I could above.
I live in a small town, mostly very peaceful but we do have a handful of meth addicts that roam around at night. Most of these meth addicts are just thieves and tweakers looking to get their next fix. Rarely are they violent however, last night, I did get approached by one of the violent ones as I was walking and doing cardio outside. Long story short, he approached me rudely and I responded back to him rudely. This caused him to get in my face and start cursing at me which led to me cursing him out to then him pulling a knife on me, and poking me in my chest with it to intimidate me. I had a thick hoodie on and was not cut and after he got done intimidating me he continued walking and I went home and called the police to file a report.
Now with that said I will probably think twice about responding to someone I do not know rudely, even if they were rude to me first, especially at night time. Lesson learned.
But now I am researching my options for non-lethal self-defense. I will likely buy pepper spray (any brand recommendations would be great) and I want a high powered non-lethal projectile gun like the Pistelle X-68 gen 2 or IntruBuster gen 2.
I can get the Pistelle X-68 gen 2 for around $413 using a coupon
I can get the Intrubuster gen 2 for $250 from their website
Besides the price difference all I can really see is that the Pistelle is maybe slightly stronger (maybe not strong enough to justify the price cost, which is around $150 extra). But I hear the Pistelle is made with better parts, proven to be reliable (atleast the modern gen 2 versions) and is still king in the area of high powered non-lethal guns.
I intend to carry either gun with aluminum projectiles but feel free to recommend something different. I just want the strongest ammo I can use as I only intend to ever pull these things out when I am put in a situation like last night.
Are there any things I should be aware of with either gun? I know I need to buy grease and oil to do maintenance on the guns. I already have that in my cart. I know both guns take .68 caliber projectiles but I am not sure if I need to buy a certain weight (like 7g projectiles, 3g projectiles, etc).
I plan to put a lot of rounds through these things to build muscle memory and get good at aiming it but once that is done I will likely stop using it and only bring it with me on walks at night loaded with the preferred projectiles so as far as I know, these guns do NOT need to be used regularly to perform well but if I'm wrong let me know.
So yeah I started this year investing $20 daily in $VOO, then for a period of time I started investing $40 daily in $VOO. That became too aggressive and I noticed between my spending habits + daily investment I was going broke before my next paycheck came in. $20 seems to be the perfect sweet spot to invest daily for me until I reel in my lifestyle and habits which I'm working on now.
With that said I have 4.18 shares of $VOO with the average price of share being $612.71
My current total return on $VOO is $259.55 right now. That's over $250 in profit!
My fear is that if the market crashes I will lose all my profit or most of it. Is it common for investors to occasionally sell all their shares to lock in their profit and then continue to re-invest in the market? To me this sounds like common sense but it might not actually be common sense at all and a bad idea. I do not know what the cons of doing this is, I guess if I sell all my shares I lose out on the next time dividends hits because I won't have has many shares as I'll be rebuilding from 0 shares again.
Hey folks,
I'm a single developer at a company that is wanting to shift the workflow from where I am given a design in Figma and I code that design by myself to now designers hooking up Claude Code to their Figma and generating React components from Claude and passing the code that Claude gives them to me to implement into the website.
The problem is, I firstly have almost no React experience outside of a couple of small projects years ago. I would need a total refresh in React.
BUT I can handle that. My question now becomes, is Astro the infrastructure that would work for us? We are doing a complete website refresh this year and moving to using React to build it.
We are a basic marketing site with a blog. I understand Astro plays nice with frontend frameworks, but is Astro still a good choice for this type of site? The site at this moment will be static and I do not foresee us needing the site to be anything other than a static site BUT we will also want to hook up a CMS to the site so that marketers can make changes to page copy, images and blog posts. Would an Astro site build exclusively in React components (and not Astro components) be using Astro for all the wrong reasons? Would a CMS then also complicate this?
I'm not sure what my options are. Google tells me NextJS or Astro and I really don't want to have to learn NextJS or have a website infrastructure that is very complicated for what our simple needs are (landing pages and blog posts)
Hey folks,
I'm a single developer at a company that is wanting to shift the workflow from where I am given a design in Figma and I code that design by myself to now designers hooking up Claude Code to their Figma and generating React components from Claude and passing the code that Claude gives them to me to implement into the website.
The problem is, I firstly have almost no React experience outside of a couple of small projects years ago. I would need a total refresh in React.
BUT I can handle that. My question now becomes, is Astro the infrastructure that would work for us? We are doing a complete website refresh this year and moving to using React to build it.
We are a basic marketing site with a blog. I understand Astro plays nice with frontend frameworks, but is Astro still a good choice for this type of site? The site at this moment will be static and I do not foresee us needing the site to be anything other than a static site BUT we will also want to hook up a CMS to the site so that marketers can make changes to page copy, images and blog posts. Would an Astro site build exclusively in React components (and not Astro components) be using Astro for all the wrong reasons? Would a CMS then also complicate this?
I'm not sure what my options are. Google tells me NextJS or Astro and I really don't want to have to learn NextJS or have a website infrastructure that is very complicated for what our simple needs are (landing pages and blog posts)
Hey folks. I recently installed Unraid on my HP EliteDesk 800 G8. The computer contains a 256gb SSD, 512gb NVME, and two 12tb 3.5" hard drives in it. It's pretty much maxed out in terms of the storage I can put into it.
I recently bought a Terramaster D4-320 w/ 2x 12tb hard drives and 2x 14tb hard drives. I have this connected to my HP EliteDesk 800 G8.
Unraid has detected ALL the drives, which is great. But I am worried about how to configure my set up because I do not want my DAS to potentially ruin my set up if it disconnects or something.
Would the smartest thing to do be:
Put all the drives that are installed in my homeserver into their own pool and then make a separate pool just or my DAS?
My thinking is, if I do this, then if my DAS disconnects for whatever reason, only that pool will be offline.
The thing is I plan to store media across all the pools, so is it kinda confusing to have movie, tv shows and music stored on two different pools? Or is that normal? I don't know if this will affect how Jellyfin works or anything. I just do not want my server hard drives and my DAS hard drives to share the same pool in case something goes wrong with my DAS.
But maybe I'm overcomplicating or overthinking this. I am a complete beginner.
How would you guys go about doing this?