I’ll cut right to the point, I was not chosen. Instead, I spent two days on the third floor of the relatively new Multnomah County courthouse with about two-hundred and fifty other random folks.
They started our first day with two videos extolling the virtues of serving jury duty, scratching the bottom to convince us would-be jurors of the good we were injecting into a broken justice system. I might go so far as to call them propaganda. Being summoned, and perhaps even serving jury duty, isn’t that big of a deal. If you are unable to serve due to family or financial obligations, they might excuse you if you ask. Everyone else gets to sit in a sterile room from 8am to 5pm (earlier, perhaps, if the docket is light) and ignore each other. No food is provided, daily pay is $10, $25 if you are chosen to serve. If you take the bus, they’ll pay your fare. Good luck to those who drive and have to pay $18 a day, no reimbursement for you.
Anyhow, complaining is easy. I spent probably too much time thinking about not wanting to ride the bus, about not wanting to be in the rain, about not wanting to participate in this cornerstone activity of our justice department. But, there I was, nonetheless, packed into a room of someone’s peers, compelled by law to judge my fellow Multnomah County denizens.
Early on, I decided that I would bring my laptop. The wifi, despite being completely open, was fast. I was weary of the insecure connection, so on day one I just watched YouTube on my phone with my cell connection. There was barely enough signal there on the third floor, but it was sufficient. It dawned on me that this was a golden opportunity to try out the VPN connection to my router. When I got home after the first day, I established the OpenVPN connection on my laptop and was ready to go for day two.
To my surprise, the VPN worked as expected. I ran a DNS leak test, something I stumbled upon and I really don’t understand it completely. The test clearly showed that all of my DNS traffic was coming from my home internet provider; I took that as a good sign. When I turned off the VPN, the DNS traffic was coming from a different source, I’m assuming the ISP of the courthouse. I had no issues with general web surfing, streaming from my Jellyfin instance, RDP to one of my Windows machines, or connecting to my Ubuntu server via terminal. It was stable, and at least made me feel safer than I otherwise would have.
I wasn’t chosen for jury duty. I’m off the hook for two years, but the last time they selected me was more than ten years ago. The two day servitude did reinvigorate my urge to expand my homelab, and I feel like I was able to prove that it all works at a distance.
As an aside, I discovered another tool after I got home on day two: Moonlight. Moonlight is an opensource desktop streaming tool based on Nvidia tech. It’s meant for game streaming, but it’ll stream pretty much any program or even just your desktop. Microsoft RDP is great and all, but it doesn’t really do high resolution, high framerate, or low latency. Moonlight offers client apps for most devices, including Android TV. If the software works at a distance, it’ll be a replacement for GeForce Now. Moonlight will stream 4k HDR at max, usually around $20 a month on GeForce Now. It’s a shame that I didn’t have a chance to test it out in the wild, but I have offsite testing time coming up (Thanksgiving) so I’ll be able to experiment from an external network.
So anyhow, despite two boring days, jury duty wasn’t a complete waste of time.