Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like dick cheney, zohran mamdani and cellebrite. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was perplexed.

But one of my favourite tags happens to be offbeat! Taking its original inspiration from Sir Nils Olav III, this thread is looking for any far-fetched offbeat stories lurking in the newspapers. It may not deserve its own post, but it deserves a wider audience!

A friend of mine in Britain recently had to replace a headlight on her Honda. It was hit by a rock and there was no choice but to replace it. Her description of the headlight was "an LED Matrix" unit, and since I don't keep up with terminology in modern cars, this was something new to me. The cost of the light was £729.99 and to make matters worse, it had to be aligned and linked to the computer in the car, which could only be done at the Honda dealership. Their labor charge was £350. That comes to over $1400 US dollars to replace a damn headlight.

I want nothing to do with modern vehicles. I own an old Toyota Tacoma, and I can replace any part on it by myself. Shoot, if you've got 10 and 12mm wrenches, you can virtually disassemble the truck.

For those who like to tinker with their cars, I suspect there is a cut-off point in time, where it is no longer easily done, and it may be ten years past by now.

Anyone have any stories about absurd costs with their vehicles these days?

What have you been doing lately for your own fitness? Try out any new programs or exercises? Have any questions for others about your training? Want to vent about poor behavior in the gym? Started a new diet or have a new recipe you want to share? Anything else health and wellness related?

Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

Add awesome game deals to this topic as they come up over the course of the week!

Alternately, ask about a given game deal if you want the community’s opinions: e.g. “What games from this bundle are most worth my attention?”

Rules:

• No grey market sales
• No affiliate links

If posting a sale, it is strongly encouraged that you share why you think the available game/games are worthwhile.

All previous Save Point topics

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TL;DR: NASA's public Planetary Data System is at risk of being shut down. Anyone have any ideas for backing it up?

Hi everyone,

Bit of a long-shot here, but I wanted to try on high-quality tildes before jumping back into the cesspool of reddit. I'm posting it in ~science rather than ~space as I figure interest in backing up public data is broader than just the space community.

I work regularly with NASA's Planetary Data System, or PDS. It's a massive (~3.5petabytes!!) archive of off-world scientific data (largely but not all imaging data). PDS is integral for scientific research - public and private - around the world, and is maintained, for free, by NASA (with support of a number of Academic institutions).

The current state of affairs for NASA is grim:

• NASA Lays Off ISS Workers at Marshall Space Flight Center
• More layoffs at JPL
• NASA is sinking its flagship science center during the government shutdown — and may be breaking the law in the process, critics say

And as a result, I (and many of my industry friends) have become increasingly concerned that PDS will be taken down as NASA is increasingly torn down for spare parts and irreparably damaged. This administration seems bent on destroying all forms of recording-keeping and public science, so who knows how long PDS will be kept up. Once it's down, it'll be a nightmare to try and collect it all again from various sources. I suspect we'll permanently lose decades worth of data - PDS includes information going all the way back to the Apollo missions!

As such, we've been pushing to back-up as much of PDS as we can, but have absolutely no hope of downloading it all within the next year or two, nevermind in a few months if the current cuts impact us soon.

If you or someone you know would be interested in helping figure out how we can back-up PDS before it's too late, please let me know here or in a DM. I've already tried reaching out to the Internet Archive, but did not hear anything back from them.

Edit: to clarify, the larger problem is download speeds - we've topped out at 20mb/s with 8 connections.

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

The other day I realised I should have used a disclaimer on a comment.

It is a comment that is supposed to be light hearted and fun so I started to amuse myself in a way that I haven't done in quite some time.

I've "always" enjoyed breaking down words (preferably in the "wrong" place), finding synonyms or sound-a-likes or second meanings and their synonyms or sound-a-likes or second meanings, etc, etc...

So I would like to invite you to build on my example below, bring your own examples or tell us about ways that you play with words.

Example:

I decided to spin off this topic based on the discussion in the Leaker reveals which Pixels are vulnerable to Cellebrite phone hacking.

Since I kinda by chance got rid of my dependency on Google Photos (as I installed Immich on my server which does the same but on my own hardware) I decided I want to try and de-Google my life more.

I was thinking about using my own domain to send e-mail from, but since I don't run e-mail server myself and I don't even want to - because of security reasons from multiple directions - I would like to use some paid e-mail service provider that would host the e-mail for me and I would append my domain to it.

I probably know technicalities on how to do that - through setting DNS MX record on my domain provider and pointing it to my e-mail provider. But I don't know which provider to choose.

I would like to sync my contacts (not through import/export feature via .vcf file, rather automatic synchronization like Google/Microsoft/Apple accounts do), I would like to sync calendar and have the ability to share it with other people (can be another account on the service if not outsiders) and of course e-mail, preferably one that doesn't rely on their own app so I can use ie. Thunderbird.

I would like to kindly ask anyone here in audience to share their experience with their providers, if you use some. It would be great if you used the service as I would do or if you could try my proposed usage on your account.

Thank you all who respond to me. I may have questions if you do :-)

I know about Fastmail which is appealing for not being US (things are kinda unsettling there right now), for having contacts, calendar and plenty space, but isn't exactly cheap - not expensive though. I know about Tuta, which is cheaper for 1-3 accounts but not for 4 and above, it has less space (still enough) but I don't know about contacts there at the moment. I found this Wikipedia comparison page and had a look there, but I would like to hear personal experiences and thoughts.