I've used a GL.iNet Slate 7 to bring my home network with me when I travel. It can connect to the internet through WiFi, ethernet, or tethered to a cell phone. The Mudi 7 does the same kind of thing, except it comes with a battery and a cell radio, too.
I’ve got an older Slate model and I wouldn’t dream of traveling without it:
* Dumb hotel policy wants you to pay a fee for every WiFi device you connect? Fine. I’m only connecting one.
* VPN back to my house for every device, including a Switch or ereader.
* Last weekend we were in a hotel with no LTE coverage and crummy WiFi. The Slate connected to the hotel WiFi much better than my phone or laptop could. It has better antennas and probably more power because it’s not optimized for battery life. My phone on WiFi: 2800ms pings (!!!). My phone connected to the Slate connected to the WiFi? 15ms.
It’s high on my packing list. I’ll never travel without one again.
I've had a question for a long time: I've been involved with infra most of my life but not strictly networking. Given the vulnerabilities, AI adversaries, etc; understanding I'm a tiny fish in a massive pool; it's still been 15 years since I've felt comfortable allowing external access through VPN into my home network (which has my NAS etc).
I have a friend who does, exposing his Synology NAS and Windows server through Ubiquiti UDR7 on Bell Gigahub, but honestly, I feel he's doing that more out of different risk assessment / "Little knowledge is a dangerous thing" rather than sheer expertise and assurance.
For those who allow VPN access from outside into your home network - how do you have confidence that your configuration is correct, you understand all the config options and their interplay on your modem/router/firewall/OS stack, you're up to date with vulnerabilities and permissions, trust the apps and containers, etc? Are you network admin during daytime, or have fully nerded out about it for years, or have a risk threshold that's met, or something else? :)
My first tech job was working alongside the network admin at a regional ISP. I feel like a n00b on the subject, but objectively, I'm pretty good at it. So basically, I've nerded out about it for years. I do allow VPN access to my LAN, but even that is tightly firewalled with a default-deny policy. Connecting to the VPN just lets you make connections into the LAN's address space, but only for certain IPs and ports. I can connect into Plex running on the LAN, and specific ports on the NAS. I can SSH into a Linux box that doesn't have credentials to connect to anything else. That's about it, really.
I didn't set out to make a hypersecure setup, but approached it with "least access" in mind. I started with the default-deny firewall, and when I needed an exception, I added that one single exception. Honestly, if you follow that principle — don't allow it if you don't require it — you've done 95% of the work a dedicated expert would do.
That's the approach I took when I had VPN to my LAN ~20 -> ~10 years ago; now I worry about the massive "unknown unknowns" - sure, that Linux box doesn't have access to anything else... officially. But what vulnerability is there on that Linux box, or on the plex server, or anything else on your network, that might enable massive expansion of access?
Oh, I get it, trust me! Professional paranoia is a skill that's served me very well over the years! Especially with AI-driven attacks now: we might be little fish, but it's cheaper and easier to catch little fish than it ever has been.
But there's still a calculated risk. To get into this, someone would have to compromise the VPN, then compromise the firewall, then compromise the reasonably-hardened servers running behind it. Sure, those things might be possible. Even with AI, though, is it likely? I don't think it is.
"A ship in port is safe. But that’s not what ships were built for." - Grace Hopper
I thought about it, but then setting my phones and laptop up to use WireGuard automatically turned out to be easy and reliable enough to not need that.
Setting up WiFi once and being done with it is pretty nice. Especially with a large traveling party. Also, some devices are difficult to reconfigure, especially those without screens.
Fair, traveling as a family it makes sense. One thing you have to consider, though, is theft. Once it's stolen you have to invalidate your VPN keys/certs ASAP. Evil maid also becomes totally plausible.
Not that I have any evidence it's happening, but it'd be more likely for TV manufacturers to partner with ISPs that offer public WiFi using the access points they rent to their customers.
It looks like he has not studied any Akkadian. He is apparently reliant on glosses by Assyriologist Jacob Dahl and presumably other translations.
From the introduction:
> Benjamin R. Foster, another esteemed academic author who has made significant contributions to the study and translation of the poem, [...] says, “I have no patience with clueless folk who think they can translate the epic without going to the trouble of mastering Babylonian.” This is a disheartening and discouraging comment. Are we really to accept that satisfactory transmissions of the Gilgamesh story rest entirely in the hands of professionals in the subject of Assyriology, or that the poem is located behind some kind of intellectual force field, or that those of us outside the inner circle must leave such profound work to the fellowship? And what of the counter argument: that the job of translating poetry cannot be fully realized by professors, only by poets?
> Echoing George and Foster to some extent, Michael Schmidt comments, “Interlopers achieve mixed results among the dead languages of the world.” Am I one such interloper, trespassing on hallowed ground? My approach to Gilgamesh has been the same as for my medieval translations, with the hope of producing critically informed work that speaks to the widest readership, attempting to balance linguistic and historical frameworks against literary expectations of the present day. The difference this time is that like almost everyone else on the planet I have no comprehension of Akkadian or other languages of the period, and for his thorough and no-nonsense translations of the cuneiform scripts I am indebted to Jacob L. Dahl, professor of Assyriology and fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, who provided me with the literals to work from. Jacob also answered hundreds, perhaps thousands, of my questions, some of them well below his pay grade, and stuck to the task for three or four more years beyond my wildly optimistic timeframe. I am enormously grateful to Jacob, for being a medium between this world and the world of the long dead, and for help in bringing them back to life. Any errors of judgment or rogue deviations between the files he submitted to me and the publication of this book are entirely of my making.
Thank you for pointing this out. Dahl is not really an Akkadian-focused scholar, though he teaches it; he's more well-known for his work on proto-Elamite. Still, probably more than capable to assist. I wonder if any Akkadian experts have weighed in on this translation?
Martha Roth talks about one of the great benefits of working on the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary being that scholars were, by necessity, exposed to a broad assortment of texts. The people who worked on the dictionary had a wide view of the entire culture that is virtually impossible to get today, especially as scholars are pressured to specialize more and more. (Roth, herself, specialized in ancient Mesopotamian law.)
Miguel Civil was probably the most famous example of this.
> no mention of this bieng an actual translation from the original sumerian
There are Sumerian Gilgamesh stories, but The Epic everyone reads is a redaction by the scribe Sîn-lēqi-unninni of earlier works written in Standard Babylonian (Akkadian), not Sumerian.
I have a Withings sleep sensor. They recently sent me a marketing mail, based on my previous night’s sleep, with a pitch to improve my sleep through a paid program. I had already opted out of marketing emails so their unsubscribe link had nothing to unsubscribe from.
Is anyone doing scales, sleep sensors, and BP cuffs that don’t use the cloud at all?
If you have an Android phone you can use Gadgetbridge which is an alternative app to sync your smart devices. It keeps all data on your phone. They support lots of devices, I use it with my Garmin smartwatch and I'm a happy user.
A quotation from a letter sent by Ankhesenamun, Tutankhamun's widow, to Hittite king Šuppiluliuma I was found in Ḫattuša. Ankhesenamun asked Šuppiluliuma to send her one of her sons to marry her and become king of Egypt. Šuppiluliuma initially thinks this is a ruse, but the story eventually checks out and Šuppiluliuma sends a son. That son is killed on his journey and a war between Egypt and Ḫattuša ensues.
I don't think that's the consensus. Even if it were the consensus, the I doubt the people making the argument would disagree that the Anatolian languages are closely related to the Indo-European languages. The grammar is classic Indo-European, with 7-9 cases depending on the period. The vocabulary has a lot of cognates with Indo-European languages. The only things that really distinguish Hittite from Indo-European languages are the system of enclitics and grammatical gender based on animacy rather than the usual masculine/feminine/neuter.
We've already seen this happen in the land of cuneiform. In the first millennium BCE, Akkadian cuneiform on tablets was replaced by Aramaic written on papyrus and vellum. The cuneiform survives in large quantity, the Aramaic barely at all. The Story of Aḥiqar, for example, comes from Mesopotamia and the only copy that survives in the original language somehow found its way to Elephantine in Egypt where the climate allowed it to (barely) survive. It puts Assyriologists in a weird position where there's plenty of textual documentation of earlier eras but far, far less in later eras. We're left with odd situations like the best documentation we have of Nebuchadnezzar II's reign coming from the Bible because the Bible got copied and the Babylonian texts that might provide a different emic perspective did not.
That’s not really an “odd” situation, though. That’s kind of just how it goes. The culturally important texts like the Bible get copied and spread, but who cares about the government’s documentation? Literally no one, unfortunately. Preservation within the historical record is in large part a mix of media used and popularity; a popular text can afford to be written on less durable materials, but using those less durable materials for unpopular documents? And they’ll be lost over time.
It is odd here because the surviving records are so much better when you go even a little bit further in the past. Compare Sennacherib's siege of Jerusalem under King Hezekiah a century or so earlier. We have Judah's side of things recorded in Isaiah, II Kings, and Chronicles. We have Sennacherib's side of things recorded in his royal annals. When Nebuchadnezzar II actually succeeded in conquering Jerusalem a century later, we just have the Bible.
My Hittite language class went online during COVID and switched from studying royal annals to the Plague Prayers of Muršili II. One of the most enlightening parts of studying the ancient world is seeing that even in very alien cultures separated by millennia, we're all just people.
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