Why no mention of other tuner options?This journal is more than long enough as-is...
all the PCI cards were iffyNot sure where you got that idea from. Cards from Hauppauge, Twinhan, and others work just fine.
Do I screw into my poor old roof to mount a base/mast, or hope my old metal faux chimney can take the stress?I would only try a chimney mount to a heavy object, not a stove pipe vent, if that's what you mean. Even if you don't have a catastrophic failure, the added stress and movement is likely to shorten the life of your roof and cause leaks. If lacking large rooftop candidates, I most often prefer one bracket as high on the eves as possible, and a mast going down into the ground. Two brackets on the wall is even more-secure. Most other methods won't support a large antenna jutting up 10ft above the top of your roof.
Your water use was 748 gallons.1That's an incredibly low figure. I'd guess you eat out all the time, don't wash your own car, have no plants, don't do laundry, take very short showers days apart, and more. Or otherwise are away from home a great deal of the time. While that behavior may reduce your home water bill, you're still using lots of water, and in a way that's far more expensive than just using water at home.
Your neighborhood average water use was 7,998 gallons.
That stops them from getting in, but doesn't stop them from flooding your system (and your logs) with hundreds of tries per second, right?It does, actually. If you disable password authentication entirely (not just for root or specific users), the server will not provide any way for someone to send it a password. So that's the end of brute-forcing attempts.
When I cut out the Internet from their computers in order to get them to do something usefulThat's called micro-managing. I don't believe it has any useful effect. The fact that you're ABLE to do so, doesn't mean you SHOULD. If kids don't turn-in their assignments, they get bad grades. It's true whether they're watching TV instead of doing their homework, or browsing the internet instead of doing their computer course work.
if kids are not interested in doing what they are supposed to do, they will always find something else to do.Indeed. And the kind of controls teachers / administrators put on computers to try and force kids to do their extremely narrowly-defined coursework, is monumentally detrimental to kids actually learning how to use a computer. That only results in rote memorization and following rigidly defined step, and further becomes a tremendously onerous atmosphere where the most basic exploration is brutally punished...
If only someone could package a nice GNU/Linux or BSD that offered the average consumer a better value than Windows...This is so alien to me, what is missing? What magical awesomeness have I missed out on during the last decade thus depriving my life of joy and laughter and all things good?
Are you saying I could get away with linking the HBU22 to the little sat dish? I would have thought it would overwhelm itYes, the wind-loads on a solid dish are huge, and a dish can't move at all without signal break-up, so the brackets are designed to handle lots of forces. The wind loading on your (not-solid) antenna will be very, very low by comparison.
My last sat dish just had some short lag bolts or something. Come to think of it I've got a few old dishes up there now. :( But they always have little custom mounts, not poles, so I'm missing your point I think.These are the standard DBS mini-dish mounts used by DirecTV and Dish Network, and are found littered around North America at least:
