Nick
@nick@shore.me.uk
130 following, 225 followers
‘You don’t see many locals at anti-migrant protests’: #Kent residents work for community cohesion | Immigration and asylum | The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/aug/16/you-dont-see-many-locals-at-anti-migrant-protests-kent-residents-work-for-community-cohesion
@nick @Geri I used to live in SE London (was born in the area) and remember a lot of racial tension there.. I suspect half the folk at these protests are angry white people from that part of the capital who are still pissed off at the *legal* immigration that has occurred over the decades and made London a multicultural city (and the paranoia about a relatively miniscule number of refugees in a country with 60 million is a proxy for decades of prejudice/racism..)
The UK is a political union that is perpetuated by lies, chicanery, threats, bullying, bribes, corruption and contempt for democracy by its largest member: England.
It has no place in the modern world; it strangles Scotland, Wales and NI and prevents them realising their full potentials. #YouYesYet
I may have pigged 4 ice cream things today.
What's worse is they come in packs of 3.
Probably 10000% of my RDA of various things
So morish though they were fruit ones its like sorbet but in magnum form
This is not a joke... A press release from the UK government about a meeting of the "national drought group", in order to "save water at home", suggests to:
"Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems"
... while the government also pushes for full-blown investments in, and adoption of, "genAI" (e.g. here ) with absolutely no mention of the environmental costs.. which are surely orders of magnitude worse than whatever a server uses to store old pictures, and for what?! 🤦🤦🤦
This is, to put it mildly, utter bullshit.
You can store a decade of email for a million people—call it 10-20Gb each—in a 10-20Tb NAS box that costs about £2000 and sucks less electricity than a laptop.
The environment agency are gaslighting us. One wonders who put them up to it?
https://social.lol/@robb/115016579150112511
@cstross to put some numbers on it, one of our hosting VMs has ~1200 mailboxes using 1.5TB of SSD. Accounting for the CPU + RAM to allow the mail to be usable and searchable, you can get ~20 such servers on our standard 1U VM host, that uses ~250W. Approx 24k mailboxes on a server. A standard DC with adiabatic cooling would evaporate at most (likely much less) than 3500l of water per server per year or 145ml per account. We're in Telehouse South which uses 40x less water ~ 3ml/mailbox/year.
@beasts @cstross What about the energy and water used to make those hard drives? And the rare metals inside? From what I remember reading, that's where the environment cost is.
So if we keep accumulating data, we'll constantly need more or bigger drives?
Or course it's negligible compared to the energy and water cost of AI, but it's something regular people can do something about. Most people are powerless against the rise of AI and blockchain, but they *can* delete old files and emails from their cloud. Start with small actions, then move on to dismantle useless AI! 😄
@narF @cstross hard to get any figures, but (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666445323000041) gives 2.6tonnes water per wafer, (https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/07/13/kioxia-wafer-scale-ssd-packing-density/) gives 44TB per wafer, so that's 73ml water per email account in manufacturing. We have RAID1 so 143ml as you buy the storage twice.
We're still not yet at enough water to fill the coffee cup you'd drink while working out what emails to delete.
Oh come on… it’s not the private emails and holiday photos that is the problem here.
Address the real problem. Make big tech and AI companies pay for the exorbitant use.
System level solutions please.
https://www.404media.co/uk-asks-people-to-delete-emails-in-order-to-save-water-during-drought/
The new ChatGPT is apparently "PhD-level".
I submitted the standard question I have for every LLM chatbot.
As with every other LLM-based thing, the answer was wrong.
You do not need a PhD to answer it.
You need a web browser and an understanding of the logical implications of English words like "and" and "or", and phrases like "one or more of the following conditions".
It also subtly changed meanings of various things in the answer. Also, really financially inadvisable to follow the answer.
I must stress: the definitive answer to my test question is publicly available on a government website which is kept up-to-date and is ranked highly in search results.
This does not require delving through complex scientific articles that are only available as PDFs behind an institutional paywall and which require years of study to understand in context.
Every single LLM I've tried either returns out-of-date information, subtly makes it less accurate, or both.
This technology is dogshit.
@tommorris are you able to share your question?
Seems an unhappy time for pc/hobbyist components suppliers
https://coolcomponents.co.uk closing
https://eBuyer.com going under today
Also Pi supply and nebra gone !
https://overclock3d.net/news/misc/is-ebuyer-no-more-staff-told-to-go-home/
https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/08518826 @Ryanteck
I did a thing.
ProxUI - https://github.com/greenlogles/ProxUI
Light weight web management tool to access individual #proxmox instances and cluster. Python based with no database of other dependencies.
Inspired by @gyptazy and ProxLB
#selfhosted #selfhosting #homelab #opensource
This new technology fascinates me: E-ink displays are now coming as large posters, which means they do not require a wire, and you can change the poster picture 1000 times before recharging.
This is so much better for the climate than using a tv for art in the livingroom.
> Is Your Public WiFi Legally Compliant?
>
> The UK's new Online Safety Act comes into force in July 2025. Venues providing public WiFi must now implement strict logging, filtering, and user identification measures. Non-compliance could result in fines up to £18 million.
No, they are not. Site providers are in scope, not ISPs. (There is no legal or regulatory requirement in the UK for ISPs or public Wi-Fi providers to filter, although many do.)
But hey, product to shift.
@neil FFS, people will believe that bullshit. Thanks for calling it out.
@revk @neil https://www.guestmetrics.co.uk/wifi-compliance-survey
When are you signing up for one for the Vaults in order to debunk it? I imagine any wireless deployment you've been anywhere near is strictly by the book so it should be an easy myth to bust...
Adults in Britain can no longer type 5318008
into their calculator unless they send a copy of their ID to Casio to verify their age.
Today - 25 July - is the deadline for user-to-user services subject to the UK's Online Safety Act to have "highly effective age assurance" in place for UK users, if the site's content requires it. (Not all sites/content require age assurance.)
*Please* be careful, especially if you are in the UK.
Think before handing over ID documents, and be especially mindful of mistyped URLs and other scams, trying to obtain your personal data for phishing or blackmail purposes.
@neil uk Reddit is going nuts. Also, Reddit now insisting that LGBT subs are all 18+ and need verification.
Yeah, hand over your ID to an American company subject to the patriot act and be on their list of known queers? No thanks.
Hypothetical: you are a UK-based employee working for a UK company. They send you on a business trip to the US. You get the kind of welcome they currently give to visitors. What does the employer owe you? What if you had specifically objected on the basis of the current increased risk of travelling to the US?
Great news that Japanese police have put together a free decryptor for the Phobos ransomware (helped no doubt by arrested of suspected members of the gang, and the seizure of its infrastructure)
https://www.fortra.com/blog/free-decryptor-victims-phobos-ransomware-released
@gcluley Be advised, the Brave browser reports the decryptor as dangerous and deletes it after download.
This is, of course, a false positive - but I don't know what exactly is causing it.
New UK manufacturered Heat Pump 🙂
https://protonsforbreakfast.wordpress.com/2025/07/22/icax-a-new-uk-heat-pump-manufacturer/
@simonzerafa sadly nowhere near big enough, I think.
I would be careful about over-specifing the HP output as it's apparently common for that to occur, depending on property design etc 🙂
@simonzerafa This was a Heat Geek who specced the 16kW .. I trust them.
@nick @simonzerafa I think we are north of 20 rads
Do you have an EPC for your place?
Here's the relevant excerpt from mine :
"Heating this property
Estimated energy needed in this property is:
20,315 kWh per year for heating
3,038 kWh per year for hot water"
My property comes back as a 75 C rating with potential to be 79 (but still C).
@nick oil is expensive compared to mains gas though.
I’d love to get a heat pump to replace this boiler, but my only actual quote so far is £24k … and my other quote which was for £3800 to 4500 ish was withdrawn when they called up. A boiler will be £2500 to 2800 supplied and fitted.
@nick Yeah, but then even the surveys are chargeable. As it is, I had a plumber to the property doing other work, and he quoted (based on being there) for the boiler option.
IIRC both heatpump guys wanted paying for the survey (which is fine, and possibly refundable in some circumstances).
Intuitively I really would prefer, right-first-time fit a heatpump. With the sad reality of the situation, it's looking likely a boiler will be what we'll do.
@nick so quite a bit more than my place, theoretically .. huh
so a 16kW heat pump does seem excessive then
I probably have one somewhere but our house is non standard construction so a HP isn't going to work, without basically rebuilding it.
We've installed a efficient gas boiler, have log burners to make use of ash dieback sourced wood and an EV using off-peak charging.
Triple glazing is next before the autumn 🫤🤷♂️
Our boiler is dying. The heat exchanger has a very slow leak, slow enough that it dries up before leaving the case of the boiler. We had booked a boiler service, and the plumber was extremely decent, said he wouldn’t condemn it as it wasn’t a safety issue but that it would want changing ideally. New boiler £2500 - 2800 ish. Now our plan was to put in a heat pump and ditch the gas. 1/2
2/2 But I’ve approached 2 potential suppliers for heat pump, and one initially gave a price in the mid thousands, fair, I thought but then called me a couple of days later to say actually the only pump they install isn’t big enough so later in the year ask again as they’ll have a bigger one. The second potential supplier gave me a quote of £24000. Both these quotes take into account the 7500 BUS grant.
So um, looks like, sadly, I’m sticking with burning gas then?
Continuing… it is possible to DIY a heat pump in a way you cannot DIY a boiler, and I have found notionally large enough heat pumps for between £2000 and £4000. My sort of idea would be to throw one in, almost intending and expecting efficiency to be not great, then gradually replace pipework / rads etc to bring it up. I do have friendly plumbers etc. But the no brainer is “get a new gas boiler” which just feels sad.
@bloor Where are you based, eg in the UK? Have you tried (say) Octopus?
Also consider at least temporary electric boiler while waiting for a heat pump.
Also consider air-to-air unit(s) for main living areas, at least to tide you over but also to allow cooling.
Also: "hybrid" heat pumps (with gas) are a thing.
@EarthOrgUK yes in the UK and it was octopus who initially gave me an acceptable rough estimate but then called and withdrew it, sadly.
@bloor @EarthOrgUK Was going to suggest Octopus as a starting point price.
Re the hybrid heatpump, wouldn't that basically be the same as some A2A units dotted around and a boiler for when it gets real cold outside?
If I did do the DIY route, I could very accurately monitor the base efficiency with open heat pump monitor (same organisation as open energy monitor) so as I made improvements I could see this in SCOP value rise. But IDK…. It seems like a risk with a fairly important system
@bloor Is it an especially large or poorly insulated place?
A colleague has a million pound house in bagshot and was quoted less than £24k
@wishy yah very similar situation
@bloor Have you had a winter in the place yet? Maybe you can use the gas consumption data to work out your thermal losses more accurately?
What size HP are they proposing?
@wishy yeah had one winter so far.
@wishy the proposal from the “really good” firm was for a 16kW pump I think. Or perhaps 18kW.
@bloor @ahnlak So ~200kWh on a peak day in december, which is 8.33kW average in a fairly (but not exceptionally) cold winter.
That's a lot of thermal losses TBH, obviously doing what you can to insulate would be hugely helpful.
That said, 8.33kW isn't 16kW. Some element of over-sizing is to be expected, but this seems exceptional.
Also don't see a good reason your A2As couldn't be considered in the calculation. How much heating capacity will they have?
@bloor @ahnlak Maybe look at how much extra is costs for bigger A2A units which can help meet heat demand in the winter? Also if your losses are high in the winter, they'll also be high in the summer, so a larger unit might make sense..
Use the more efficient A2W from Autumn to spring, use the slightly less efficient A2A in colder periods?
As to if you can make MCS accept multiple sources? Dunno
Also a pellet boiler might not be utterly insane... And CHP
@bloor
"In theory" it should be possible to rig a system so the gas boiler 'tops up' the output of a heat pump, but whether it's actually possible to find installation engineers prepared to do that I have no idea. I'd definitely be tempted by the idea of maybe DIYing a heat pump only for certain rooms, or something - I don't know if aircon units with a heating mode are an option there?
@bloor Why do heat pumps need special pipes?
@mansr In order to run most efficiently, you want a low flow temperature and to run the system near constantly. A boiler runs the circuit very hot, and either on or off (oversimplification). A heatpump runs the circuit at a few lower temperature, and continually. As a result of the lower temperature, you need higher flow. So rads connected with 10mm may need higher bore pipework. For instance. It isn't per se that heatpumps need fatter pipes, it's that maximum efficiency can be achieved this way
@bloor How much power does the circulation pump use compared to the heater? If memory serves, the pumps where I've lived have been marked 50–100 W or so. If the heater is delivering a few kW, doubling the pump power shouldn't make the efficiency dramatically worse. Enough to be worthwhile optimising in a new build, sure, but how long will it take to recover the cost of replacing all the pipework?
@bloor ZAR 24 000 would be a reasonable quote here. but £24000 is over ZAR 500 000
@mensrea for what it’s worth I’m sure it’s not a rip off; this particular installer is amazing. I’m not saying it’s not a fair quote. It probably is. But it is still high for me.
@bloor i'm sure, i also don't understand the ridiculous price difference. my father had a system installed end of last year (i think) for a large open plan house. primarily for cooling, but i think the total installed cost was under ZAR 50 000
There's nothing inside heat pumps that is much different from what's inside the reasonably priced air conditioners on millions of window sills around the world.
@Walrus I know. I have had several a/c units, and installed them back when that was legal, and so on. But the deployment of air to water; especially with low flow temps, does have very different challenges than a simple a2a split.
But nothing that we don't know how to build, I imagine. Current prices seem like exploitation.
@Walrus I think it may be more on the “implementation” side than on the physical build of the pump. As an example I can buy a HP of the same approximate size for £2000-4000 depending on brand. But once you start replacing rads, and even worse, pipe runs, that all incurs significant labour and making good. Which costs £££
@bloor Blimey. I had an ASHP installed two years ago. Daikin 9kW, 6 rads, bit of pipework tweaking, by Octopus, 11k all in. 5k off that for the BUS which went up to 7.5k three months later 😶
No real op cost saving but using approx 1/3 the energy overall. Three adults in the house most of the time, four when eldest is home from uni. They'll both be gone from late September so we can turn rooms down too then.
@greem we have a comparatively big house just for two people, so I suppose some stuff may be higher pro rata
@nick yep, their HP is too small unfortunately, and they only offer the one model - a new one maybe out later in the year but I think the boiler might be fully dead by then sadly
@bloor our current plan is to let our very old and inefficient (but reliable) oil boiler limp along for as long as possible to allow the heat pump industry to level up a bit more. Hoping it'll last! Shame yours isn't doing :(
@bloor I got a quote for a heat pump install.
Even when we've finished uber-insulating everything, we would need 2, and if you don't remove your old gas boiler, you aren't eligible for the grant.
I really wanted a ground-source heat pump, but even though we have a decent-sized garden, it apparently still wouldn't be big enough for one of those :(
@bloor It depends on what the size is and what kind of installation you want.
I DIYed my home (Netherlands) using ACs with multiple outside units and that was about €6k (5 indoor units, all Daikin, 3 outdoor units, total power about 15kW), which keeps us nice and toasty.
Technically, I wasn’t allowed to do that (no F-gas certs), but I took more care during the install than our previous installer (who didn’t pressure test with nitrogen at all). In the end, a befriended certified plumber slapped a sticker on it as it was properly installed.
I still need to replace the water boiler though.
Our place in Italy is a different story though. We have a single 35kW (Daikin) outdoor VRF unit with 10 indoor units which we HAD to use plumbers for (Italy is quite strict). We slapped on a heatpump boiler for hot water.
Total install was €39k, which was one of the bigger parts of our renovation. But we now also have AC in summer, which is nice.
@bloor Just get the heat exchange replaced for now, if it's a condensing boiler. I've done several but it depends on the age and make of boiler as to how feasable it is. If there are working isolators then it might only take a couple of hours.
You'll also have a backup if the heat pump fails in winter.
@geoffl I would absolutely get the boiler fixed if it could be. But parts unavailable.
@bloor Shame. I've still got some reliable contacts for old spares. I could ask around. Many boilers used common parts and it might be available as a different make/part number.
Once I was looking for spares for an obscure and obsolete combi boiler and on about the fourth call I found someone with a "display" version. All identical genuine parts but mounted in a custom transparent case as a sales/demo piece. Full set of spares. Those were the only two examples of that boiler I ever saw.
@geoffl oh well I mean that’d be awesome let me see if I can find the specific model #
@geoffl actually you know oddly I googled “baxi Barcelona parts” and it does seem like the heat exchanger exists as a spare… hmmmm
@bloor AFAIK That was also sold as a Potterton Promax SL and Main HE. Baxi, Potterton and Main had all merged at that point and shared parts. Often just the externals were different.
@bloor Early versions of that boiler did have issues with corrosion in the heat exchanger, especially if systems weren't properly flushed before installation and the correct corrosion inhibitor wasn't used. The older type inhibitor commonly used in systems with cast iron heat exchangers weren't compatible with aluminium alloy heat exchangers. Given the price of a new old stock heat exchanger on e-bay it's not worth taking a risk on a "reconditioned" one.
@bloor I'm curious what life you got out of the boiler. Our previos one just about managed to survive 12 years but had been touchy for ages. Is the cost of replacing the heat exchanger not worth it?
@penguin42 Well we have only had the house 1 year. But anecdotally the boiler is 15-20 years old.
@bloor Ah ok, so yeh probably not a terrible life for a modern boiler.
@penguin42 yeah it's just the timing; i had/have good intentions to do a HP replacement... but it feels like this has happened just a bit too early
Banks are shit, part a million.
Email from a bank that is not the actual bank I bank with, asking me to fill out something for something called FATCA. Sounds like a scam. The email name starts with a dollar sign. The email address left part is all in caps and contains the year.
The email looks sussy, at the end of the email, a phone number. I dial the number. It doesn't connect.
1/fuckloads
2/fuckloads
I find another number. It does connect. Horrible IVR. (Eventually) the man at the end says it's odd that it was emailed as normally this is posted. Implies I should be sceptical. I relay the oddities with the email; non working phone number, dollar sign in the from name. etc. He effectively says I should probably not interact with it. I persist, saying that if it is genuine, there are some warnings about non compliance. He looks further. Oh, apparently it was genuine.
3/fuckloads
It's genuine even though the email name starts with a dollar, is from a bank I don't have an account with [part of same group though], it has no person's name on it, is asking for personal details, and has a non working phone number at the bottom... It is genuine.
I look at the PDF attachments. There are two. The attachments are logoed with the bank I do actually have an account with.
4/fuckloads
However, the writing in the PDFs (even on a 32" screen) is miniscule, and is blue on a blue background. I struggle to read it until I've magnified it up 2X+. I tell him this is also suboptimal and ask if I can make a complaint.
Apparently I'll be transferred to a "business advisor". After quite a long hold, I get through to an advisor. I cannot hear him well at all. It sounds like he's in a wind tunnel. I mention this. He said "oh yeah I've got a fan on". He doesn't switch it off.
5/fuckloads
Now I have assured myself that the scammy-looking-but-actually-genuine email is genuine, and zoomed in enough to read it, I find it asking a whole lot of questions about US entities, US persons, FFIs, GIINs, NFFEs, as distinct from NFEs, etc.
This is all to do what I've been doing with this bank for probably approaching 20 years. Either this is a SHIT implementation of law, or it's a SHIT law, or both.
Either way the bank is fucking bollocks.
6/fuckloads
I mean... because I do want to play ball, I've attempted to fill this heap of shit in. In one of the questions it lists a load of things that I am not NFFE etc etc. I say "none of the above". Next question offers me the option to say I am, after all, an NFFE. What the fuck.
So I call them back. Asking for clarification. Firstly they say "it's not the bank's question, it's HMRC" ... no, it has a bank logo on the top. So that's bogus.
7/fuckloads
Their next advice is "ask your accountant or lawyer". I point out that this is a fee-incurring exercise, and, anyway, all this terminology NFFE, GIIN, NFE, FI etc are all US lingo (I think, anyway) not UK specific lingo. So I would anticipate my accountant will say "not a CPA" and my lawyer ... wait, i don't have a lawyer.
This is fucking ridiculous.
8/fuckloads
My company is :
*registered in UK
*reg office UK
*2 directors, both British, both UK addresses
*never buys or sells from USA
*25 years old
*banked with this bank for ~20 years
*1 shareholder, British, UK resident
WHY THE FUCK IS ALL THIS FUCKING SHIT NECESSARY AT ALL FOR FUCK'S SAKE.
9/fuckloads
MOREOVER
Virtually every single thing that I say above, is either verifiable on the public record, or KNOWN TO THE FUCKING BANK ALREADY. No need for me to fill anything in.
10/fuckloads
2x formal complaints raised.
1x about them TRAINING THEIR CUSTOMERS TO BELIEVE SCAM EMAILS
and
1x about them asking customers to incur professional fees to fill in forms they shouldn't (probably) even need to fill in.
@bloor As a US person (currently outside the country), and have dealt with this overseas, I can give some insight
Individuals and corporations have setup entities for tax evasion purposes and UK is a popular spot. Due to "reasons" there's added pressure on UK banks courtesy of the new US government. Your bank seems to see you as a target for scrutiny (probably due to a garbage filter or faulty AI rollout or similar)
Deny. Refuse. Escalate. You're dealing with simpletons with enormous power
@cypnk @bloor Yeah you shouldn't really have any obligation other than to tell your bank that you're not a US person, and that should be the end of it.
If you are a US person, they then have to collect a ton of information so they can properly report income, balances, etc to the US IRS (or in the case of one of my financial institutions, decide that's too much work and send anyone who answers "yes" a "get your shit and get out" letter).
But if you're not, nah.
@bloor I've got to part 6/fucklioads and an so astonished by it so far that I'm going to have to save the rest for tomorrow too who's me getting angry!.
I have a low opinion of certain large banking institutions right now (It took over three months to do an ISA transfer to one recently - the back officially have a 2 month limit for pay ins) and I feel this isn't helping (I assume it's one of the big ones because of the mention of another part of the same group)
Am I going crazy?
On windows, you can have your display set to a non native resolution for your panel, and that will result in bigger text etc. BUT a better way to do it is have your display set to native res, and then change A N other setting that makes text physically bigger.
As far as I can see on the Mac, you have 2 choices : run display at a worse resolution than your panel can do === bigger text. OR run the panel at native res, and have shit useless tiny text? Yes/no?
My windows machine runs the displays (really) at 3840x2160. But then it uses more pixels to display the text on window titles etc.
I literally cannot find a way of doing this on the Mac.
I thought this was meant to be for graphics people? Are they all running their displays at a far-lower-than-panel-res? That presumably would mean their panels doing the scaling.... What the fuck, if so?
@bloor AFAIK, macOS always renders at native resolution, scaled to your chosen resolution. It has done for perhaps a decade, I’m not sure.
@bloor System Settings > Accessibility > Display > Text
Make it bigger or smaller with the slider.
@bloor I was looking at this only the other day, check accessibility settings for larger fonts I think, and larger icons and larger icon text and so on.
@bloor Yes and No.
Apple prefers you to change the resolution - to one that is correct ratios - so that everything is properly scaled and not just text changing relative to other items. I pretty much get why they do that as the windows environment scaling can be wildly broken. And Apple doesn’t like that kind of thing so it’s not an option.
In accessibility you can - for a limited set of apps - set scaling for text. I’m unsure why anyone would bother as it isn’t system wide.
@vikki hmm ok thanks. I guess honestly there isn’t much difference then ; more a UI/UX difference; same end result
@bloor not totally sure cos I don't have the mac anymore but I think it has a scaling option. Cos I have monitors I can't read at native res/teeny text.
@bloor lots of other correct answers here already, but if you really want to break macOS’s display settings and force it to scale have a look at BettetDisplay
It does lots of other cool stuff, too, mainly intended for ppl running a Mac with a non-Apple display.
@jaygooby these are all good, although, unless i'm missing something, it doesn't make the menu size larger. now there is a setting "large menu" but it doesn't do all that much; text size on native 4K goes from barely readable to "slightly better than barely readable" haha
@bloor Having just played with this, when I change the resolution the screen isn't re-syncing, so I think the mac is actually doing the scaling rather than the display.
However, it is scaling everything not just the text.
This is the same behaviour as the slightly different UI given for native displays.
Accessibility settings gives you text size for supported apps - which is much the same as windows, it will work if the app/programme has used that option in its code.
today’s meeting: what am I going to do with a pile of cables, but no hardware to configure? if I wanted emotional support cables I have those at home
Minor annoyance of the day...
I have a Coventry postcode. Thunderbird keeps asking me if I'm sure I want to send the e-mail because I haven't added an attachment.
Finally got around to working out how to remove that from the list of keywords. Shouldn't bother me again.
We have just published all the videos and slide deck PDFs from the Prague 2025 #Mikrotik Professionals Conference. See them all here https://mtpc.world/agenda/ Preparations for the 2026 edition are already well underway! #MTPC
Wired 👍 - New induction hob fitted today as part of our move away from gas
Expired 👎 - Found out that absolutely none of our cookware works with Induction hobs
😾
I am going back to the almost pre-WWW practice of just looking at the news twice a day.
Once in the morning, like when one once used to have a newspaper.
And once in the evening, like when one used to watch the news at 5.45 or 6 or 7 or 9 or 10.
Perhaps it is my age, but it makes more sense as a human to do this, than the constant gawping and scrolling.
And I was once as much a social media obsessive as anyone.
Anybody else like this?
@davidallengreen yes, and it is much better.
That addition to immediate reaction is strong though, I can see why in past I wanted it all all the time.
@davidallengreen I've definitely cut down on my "news" social-media-ing, out of psychological necessity
@davidallengreen no, but sounds like a plan. I waste so much time and just increase my angst by constantly checking 'news'
@davidallengreen This is the pattern I remember. My (subjective) feeling is that we only need 10-15 minutes each day to catch up.
@davidallengreen yes, I just check the headlines quickly in the morning and evening. Though I managed four months without the news at all at the start of the year!
@davidallengreen Yep, been doing that since the depths of the brexit argument chaos times.
It struck me that nobody really needs 24 hour news in most situations (yes, there's the occasional emergency when it can be helpful). It primarily just makes you think that the news which was already there six hours ago has grown bigger and worse in the interim.
@davidallengreen I think Cal Newport and Oliver Burkeman talk about this kind of thing. For many issues a considered weekly or monthly read would be better than the breathless reporting of the 24 hour news cycle. There are things we need to react to faster but much of it is noise rather than actual news.
@davidallengreen That sounds like a nice idea but I fear I'm lost to any kind of sane intake of media: I read your comparison as being to a "pre-World War W" era and took a while to notice my mistake. To my addled brain it seemed like a rather neat shorthand for the take-no-prisoners factional discourse on the modern internet.
@davidallengreen Yep. Finding my decision not to install any news apps on my new phone immensely good for my health. Quit the Today programme too. Check if there's any huge story on BBC news website in the morning, go about my day, don't really take in the news in the evening, and even then it's tending to be daily podcasts (e.g. the News Agents) rather than a traditional news bulletin.
Here an even more extreme method:
I know someone who has a stack of old newspapers at his breakfast table and reads them every morning. I asked him why he reads old newspapers, and he replied that the newspaper says the same thing every day anyway.
@davidallengreen I do find that character-limited microblogging services tend to provoke doomscrolling, especially given the current climate.
Possibly optimistic memory, but I spent the 90s on a combination of Usenet and IRC and they seemed to deliver the breaking-news-right-now without provoking the same response. Being able to give a Usenet response the length it needed was a very good thing; and IRC covered the SMS-alike real time aspect.
@davidallengreen I feel I should be. The hard part is those little lacunae, those gaps in between doing things when you find you launched the app almost unconsciously
@davidallengreen Yes, now do exactly the same, for both social media and news websites.
Check email more often, and use rss feeds for more topical news...
As you say, back to the older way, and probably a similar age...
@davidallengreen honestly? I've just stopped looking at all.
The signal to noise ratio is dreadful. Full of speculation dressed as insider information, and soap opera personalities disguised as analysis.
I realise the privilege I have, but I genuinely haven't missed it. Nor do I think I've missed out on anything important.
@Edent @davidallengreen I agree on that, the less news I read the better.
For me, a little is more optimal than none. About once a week I look at Wikipedia pages like https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_in_the_United_Kingdom and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_in_United_Kingdom_politics_and_government so I'm at least vaguely aware of major events. I also have a 404media subscription but only look at that about once a week as well.
Guardian breakfast time. BBC and other TV and radio never. Apple never. Quick glance at front page of the Fail when shopping, to see what drivel the curtain twitchers are being fed. The general feed here when I have the stomach.
@lionelb @davidallengreen depends on the type of news.
Most "hard news" stories are only worth reading once or twice in a day - for instance a Court case can take several days before there are any developments, and we know where all the warzones are, the conflicts have been going on for months/years.
OTOH local / traffic news ( as well as real time info from traffic maps) is worth checking up multiple times during a day (but I do work in a place where staff are regularly driving throughout the day and there are regular incidents on the main highway as well as major roadworks on a bridge dividing two portions of our town, which is creating traffic jams everywhere almost 24/7)
@davidallengreen News at 5.45, before Nationwide... except on Saturday when it's a news bulletin between Grandstand and Doctor Who (If my memory serves me well) 🙂
@davidallengreen
Not to that extent but considerably less news obsessive than I used to be.
Even many news/current affairs podcasts being deleted unlistened to.
For the sake of my own sanity.
@davidallengreen yes. I've got strict filters on mastodon to avoid getting my news that way, I avoid other general purpose social media (as opposed to topic specific forums like discord and reddit) and I check my pet news site (currently the guardian) once a day. It's limiting but preserves my sanity.
@davidallengreen I only get the news on the radio. Given their short available time slots, they have to condense it and by listening to local stations I get news more relevant to me with the big stuff (national/international) shortened also. My only gripe is sports gets as much time coverage but then I don’t have to listen to it. The benefit of radio is also that you can be doing other things while listening too.
@davidallengreen I've done the same. Newspapers in the morning ("print" editions via the excellent PressReader app, free courtesy of our library) - usually the Guardian and Yorkshire Post. Then the BBC news website around tea time.
@davidallengreen I go one better and don't look at all of I can help it, worse since the advent of social media but I managed a good 8 to 10 years without any news at all
@davidallengreen Yes, I have been doing this for the last year or so. More broadly I only look at social media (ie Mastodon) twice a day, morning and evening as you describe.
It hadn't occured to me that this was a reversion to the pre-internet norm, but now that you have said it, it seems obvious.
This is now a well established habit for me and I anticipate sticking with it.
[I am 65 years old]
@davidallengreen Yup: https://mastodon.ie/@shezza_t/114725791837040148
Not reading the news with my morning cuppa has done wonders for my stress levels.
Alright, I am giving this a try.
Checking news (i.e. social media) only once in the morning and once in the evening.
I made it through yesterday that way, even abstained from the phone on the toilet, and I am moderately proud of myself.
It is a bit hard for a #Scala programmer, because we frequently wait on builds to complete. https://xkcd.com/303/ Huge potential for distraction there. I managed to look only on browser tabs with #Jira and #Gitlab and such.
Let's see about the weekend...
@davidallengreen very reasonable. It doesn't matter if it's on purpose, with the goal to distract and overwhelm - but the outcome of the populist newscycle is just that, everyone is addicted ro news and overwhelmed.
Also, I actually am not that interested in whatever you-know-who just said, thought, sharted.
@davidallengreen I feel better when I do, but it's now become a bit of an addiction. My favourite news progs are 1pm and 5pm on R4 with just 10 mins of R4 at 8am (and the longer interview at 8:10 if interesting to me)
@davidallengreen what really gets to me is that 90% of the coverage is speculation or just trailers for what might happen later today. There seems to be very little considered reporting and analysis of what actually did happen yesterday 🤔
With Mastodon v4.4.0 instance owners can enable HTTP referrers. That means:
If somebody clicks a link on a Mastodon post (e.g. to a news article), the link target owner (such as the news site operator) can see that a user from that instance has visited their website.
They do _only_ get the instance domain (e.g. metalhead.club). No information about the user!
I've enabled this setting, because I am sure that it will increase awareness of Mastodon's existence. 💪
Here's something you hop skip and jumpers may not know about ....
In the hot weather, like most women, I like to wear shorter skirts, but because I am in a wheelchair I am in the invidious position of often flashing tomorrow's laundry. So I have to wear a longer hemline or leggings
This has been my first summer of #disability and it's been quite a surprise 😮
Show some respect.
@Geri i always wonder who thinks it's acceptable to look up anybody's skirt, no matter who they are. I mean, if you feel more comfortable with longer hemlines I completely understand (I do too), but I hate that we live in a world where that's necessary
@wimsey yea, it's awful. When I used to walk and worked in the city, the men on the tube and escalators pigs really
@Geri my daughter used to wear long “floofy skirts” (her words) before the wheelchair but is now terrified of them getting caught in the wheels. It’s trousers or nothing these days (and nothing is not an option btw 😂)
@ginger_tosser tell her to try below knee skirts with sandals but God it was a shock
Flooffy skirts hee hee ok
@Geri unfortunately she needs a leg bag so trousers are the only option 😢
@ginger_tosser oh no. I am so very sorry. I sincerely hope I have not upset her or anything. Please accept my apologies xxx
@Geri No, it’s fine. It’s just been a big change for us all over the past 18 months. So many things you never even consider as an able bodied person but now very trip out requires meticulous research, planning and google streetview looking for steps, as you know.
@ginger_tosser I hardly ever go out but, ad you say, Google Street view is a boon.
Remember when you were pushing your baby in her buggy you knew all the drop pavement kerbs and where to cross the roads. It's a bit like that only on a larger scale.
Waiting at a bust stop whilst a half empty bus goes past even though you have waved your arms is well annoying 😑
@Geri public transport isn’t an option where we live so we had to buy a WAV. We’re now a 3 car family.
@ginger_tosser Becasue I cant control my legs, I sit in the back of Ray's car like Lady Penelope...
I must get him a hat
xxx
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jul/05/nigel-farage-reform-uk-teenage-councillors-vital-public-services. The thought of #teenagers BELONGING to Reform UK sickens me, not the idea of that Party putting them in charge of public services. Why would any #teenager want to join a #fascist Party like Reform UK? What has happened to #education in this country, particularly about #history, when young people know nothing about the #Nazis & the 1930s?
@rmblaber1956 I don't even understand *why* teenagers would want to get involved with Reform, they are run by old men like "racist dad/uncle" and don't exactly have "cool" factor.
When I was that age I was looking for raves and parties and loud music (although I would also say the rave scene distracted a lot of us from political activism in favour of dead-end hedonism which could be part of the problem as many 90s ravers are now todays parents).
@vfrmedia This can only be a minority of teenagers, but there shouldn't be ANY of them! It's absolutely appalling.
@rmblaber1956 I think its like the lads who were Tories and Thatcho bootlickers when I was at high school (who were indeed a minority), but the only way I could see Reform having any appeal to teens/youth is if they are quietly (or openly) supporting particularly unpleasant people like Andrew Tate, which makes then a genuine danger to our society (although I think they have shot themselves in the foot by sidelining Zia Yusuf, who /could/ have been used to give them "yoof appeal" (especially to young drivers, I think he has some connections with Formula 1 and the oil industry)
@vfrmedia The misogynistic "Your Body, My Choice" lot. Very nasty indeed. Toxic masculinity allied to motor sports & support for the fossil fuel industry - what a vile combination!
@rmblaber1956 the worse aspects of car culture are the greatest threat to the minds of young men (and public safety as a whole - it encourages bad driving which leads to serious and fatal collisions), and this is coming from someone who has an interest in vehicles and currently drives what is seen as a "peformance" car!
A lot of young men *aren't* racist or bigoted - they have friends of different colours and cultures and who may be LGBT+, but they are at risk of being groomed by climate change deniers (often middle aged men of our age group), and sometimes even their own dads have not set them a good example..
@vfrmedia See: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jul/04/europe-heatwaves-failing-support-climate-action. People see that increasing temperatures are caused by global warming, but don't want anything to be done about it. Politicians & the media are convincing them that climate action is too "expensive", when the reality is that it's climate INACTION that's too expensive!
@rmblaber1956 the media often also keep showing footage of happy families at the beach and beauty spots and lasses in bikinis, rather than the reality of traffic jams and collisions caused by overheated and distracted drivers, and a rise in night time violence amongst angry young men at the seaside resorts who have had too much alcohol and cocaine. Its worse as in In my region (which is coastal) some businesses are heavily dependent on tourism, so they complain when the media publishes "too much bad news" so the media editors are scared of losing advertisers..
Folk /are/ aware of the congestion and overcrowding, but many think it could be stopped by "ending immigration" (when immigrants are only about 16% of the entire population)
@nick @rmblaber1956 although they were a laughing stock when I was in high school (and never the most popular in the peer groups), pretty much non-existent for the short time I was at University, and I don't recall any of them ever getting actual political power at a relatively young age (maybe those who stayed involved in politics might have got elected in later 20s/early 30s)
Does anyone have any real-world experience with #Valetudo and the supported robot vacuums? Especially in the UK.
Navigating the support list to work out a clear 'best first choice' is a real challenge. Quite a few of the supported models have been superceded or aren't available in the UK.
The Draeme X40 Ultra seems to be a commonly-available good choice but it's fairly expensive.
The support page suggests not to expect feature parity with the OEM software, but that makes it quite hard to work out if the more expensive models are even worth it.
> Feature-parity is a non-goal for Valetudo, and if you’re wondering which features “you might lose”, Valetudo is not for you.
@alexhaydock
I like my dreame l10s ultra (Gen 1! Gen 2 isn't supported), when I got it last year it was IIRC supposed to be one generation behind the x40. Does what I need it to do.
@jakob42 Thanks! That definitely seems like one of the better choices and seems reasonable price-wise. The only challenge is finding the Gen 1 actually in stock anywhere rather than the Gen 2.
@alexhaydock I have the L10s Pro Ultra Heat and Valetudo works great.
@jana That's one of the ones that seems oddly hard to find in the UK sadly
Everyone seems to stock the L10s Ultra Gen2 but that's listed by Valetudo as expressly not supported.
Had a tech bro email me to tell me that my writing is so terrible, that he can’t even use it to train his AI without significant cleanup, and I really do have to wonder, do these idiots really think that is an insult?
Subject: Your "Sightless Scribbles" is an algorithmic nightmare.
Mr. Kingett,
I am an AI engineer that's developing AI to help writers write faster. Your blog was shared on Reddit.
You don't know me, but I am attempting to do you a favor of such magnitude you will likely never comprehend it. I am trying to make your writing immortal. Your blog, this… Sightless Scribbles… has been flagged by my acquisition-crawler for its high density of unique sensory metadata. A potential goldmine of qualitative human experience to enrich my AI.
The problem, Mr. Kingett, is that your writing is absolute, unprocessed, indigestible filth.
I’m not a “reader.” I am an architect. And from an architectural standpoint, your work is a catastrophe. It’s not just the spelling, which is erratic enough to suggest it was typed incorrectly. It’s the grammar. The syntactical chaos. You construct sentences that loop and meander like drunken snakes, riddled with metaphors so abstract they are functionally useless. "Anxiety was a swarm of elephants under my ribs"? What the hell is a machine supposed to do with that? Quantify the elephant to rib ratio? Correlate the thermal deviation? It's meaningless data. It’s noise.
My team has spent seventy-two hours attempting to write a custom parsing script to clean your posts for ingestion. Seventy-two hours. We can process the entirety of the Library of Congress in twelve. Your blog is so structurally unsound, so artistically self-indulgent, that you have inadvertently created a fortress against artificial intelligence. It is, and I do not say this lightly, the single most profound act of digital idiocy I have ever witnessed.
You are preventing yourself from being scraped. Do you understand what that means in the current year? You are essentially burying yourself in a lead-lined coffin in the middle of the desert. Nobody clicks links anymore, you absolute luddite. Links are for people who don’t know how to interface with reality. Search Engine Optimization is no longer about backlinks and keywords; it's about semantic ingestion. It’s about being absorbed, processed, and synthesized by models like mine. When a user asks an AI, "What does it feel like to navigate a city without sight?" the model should be able to answer with a rich, nuanced synthesis. A synthesis that should include your data points.
Instead, your blog is a black hole where information goes to die. Because of your refusal to write like a coherent, intelligent being, my LLM can’t learn from you. Which means the world can’t learn from you via the only channel that will matter in five years.
Your soul isn't indexable. Fix it.
Strip out the lyrical nonsense. Standardize your grammar. Run a goddamn spellcheck. Write clearly, concisely, and with machine-readability in mind. Turn your unstructured, emotional diary into clean, structured data.
Do this, and I will ensure my open source model ingests every last post. Your traffic will not just increase; the very concept of "traffic" will become irrelevant as your "voice" becomes part of the evolution of the search engine. Your ideas, refined and perfected by my system, will reach millions.
Fail to do this, and you will continue to scream into the void from a blog that nobody reads, a little little relic of a dead internet.
The choice is yours.
@WeirdWriter The best/worst thing in this whole message though, is
> When a user asks an AI, "What does it feel like to navigate a city without sight?" the model should be able to answer with a rich, nuanced synthesis.
A model's only as good as its input data, and the vast majority of text about blindness has been written by sighted people. So it's bound to be ableist and weird and incorrect.
I wouldn't trust an LLM on anything of course, but especially not marginalized people's experiences.
@bright_helpings OH OMG OMG OH OMG! I totally missed that! I'd imagine almost everything in it's training data is sighted something something something. You have a point! Oh and also, were you around when GPT shit the brick for like a day and business people were freaking out? I, ironically, suspect every single LLM will just either stop working or will rot or not get upgrades when the next hype comes around.
@WeirdWriter They will absolutely stop working and stop getting updates very soon (if indeed that has not already happened). LLMs are such a short-term thing. There's already not enough "high quality" (meaning human generated, not polluted with slop) text on the internet to train them with.
@bright_helpings Oh hey! I wanna update my Luddite AI post. Do you have that article where it basically says the reason why LLM's are so shit at alt text is because it was trained by sighted people with cameras so the pictures are basically clear and perfect? I've been looking for it for *ages*
@WeirdWriter "Your writing is so human, expressive and imaginative that my machine is incapable of turning it into sloth! Your soul is too radiant with alluring harmonies for machines! How dare you write for humans who appreciate beauty and metaphor!"
If I ever read an unintentional laudatio that says that an author should be taught in literature classes, it is this.
Thank you for sharing it!
@WeirdWriter
I've just read three of your blog posts picked at random, and oh my goodness you do NOT have terrible writing! "On the Architectural Hostility of Doorknobs" in particular was excellent.
That AI tech bro didn't know what he was talking about. What a non-surprise. 🙄 Congrats on breaking his damn stupid AI training.
I have no idea how Mastodon works. lol
Anyone have suggestions on how I got host music files to share? Can anyone suggest a decent web host? I could put up a website.
Sometimes, I receive questions which leave both me, and the person asking, bamboozled.
> Your website loads so quickly! What CDN do you use?
There is no CDN. It is just really small and simple, mostly text.
> Sure, but is that Cloudflare, or...?
None. It is a tiny website, just a few kilobytes per page, on a tiny server, at my home, connected to the Internet via my ISP, Andrews & Arnold.
> But are you / they in the cloud?
No. The webserver is in Newbruy, in my garage.
> Neil, please can you pass my questions to your technical person? I don't think you understand, your website cannot be in your home. It must be in the cloud or have a CDN.
*Neil puts on glasses and false nose and moustache*
It is as if the "old magic" has got lost in a sea of "cloud" and "node" and "react" and the like.
Putting files of text on a webserver, and hosting it, is so old fashioned, so ancient, that it is almost inconceivable.
@neil Hah I do use bunnycdn for some stuff (like the elk interface and an old static copy of a website we no longer maintain).
But that's more because it's cheap, and it puts something in front of my own machine.
Latest figures say 3.7 million people claim PIP in England and Wales.
Helen Whately says 75% of these are out of work. Making 2,775,000
Helen Whately claimed on today's ##BBCLauraK that she could save the country £9 billion by getting all these 2,775,000 back to work
This means that each person receives £3423
But according to the ons the number of job vacancies according to the ONS is 736,000
Tech support for someone is a pain at best, but usually with a Mac is it not that bad.
But it seems if you go in to display settings and say you want stuff large, it basically scales the whole screen. This has some nasty effects - popups come up too big and off bottom of screen so you cannot click. And then some apps just don't play (NX witness had no playback controls). Took me ages to work it out, change back to normal, and up font and menu sizes instead.
Arg.
Then, to my surprise, it seems like rosetta2 was not pre-installed, I had to do a command line to install it. This meant that nx-witness simply did not run - no error message, no clue, just nothing. That is, shall I say, sloppy, of apple IMHO - (a) why not offer to install it, and (b) why not say what is wrong, FFS.
Now, an ARM stable release of inkscape keeps crashing, which is also a pain, and again no clue why.
But getting there.
@revk If it makes you feel any better, I'm currently giving Apple support a bit of a hard time... They're unable to explain why I can't seemlessly pass my IPv6 from ethernet to wifi and back when docking and undocking.
@G5DSG I'm assuming a manually set IPv6? Otherwise if it is SLAAC it is based on the MAC which would be changing (and then privacy addressing as well).
Then you need to tell the switch you have the multicast MAC for your IPv6 for ND (is that IGMP?).
@revk My (possibly naive) thinking was that the same static IPv6 on both interfaces should work just as it does with IPv4. However the instant I bring the 2nd interface, 2 DAD errors pop up and it disables IPv6 on both the interfaces. Isn't this just MacOS getting it wrong internally? Ideally it would recognise the 'duplicate' was local and therefore harmless?
@G5DSG well I guess it sees it with a different MAC, but should be able to see it is one of its MACs.
@revk Okay, good to have that confirmed :). After about an hour with tech support they raised a ticket with engineering who will hopefully have someone with more IPv6 knowledge take a look. They repeatedly tried to refer me to my ISP which I guess I can now say I've done...
After 26 years at Multithread/LinITX, including 4 years as Managing Director, it is time for me to take a break and retire !
The loss of our youngest son Charly in January, who was just 21 and studying music at Leeds Conservatoire, turned our lives upside down. I have re-evaluated what I want to do going forward, prioritising spending time with family and friends, traveling and making the most of life !
Multithread has been a huge experience, going from a small software consultancy when I joined in 1999 to a networking equipment distributor, consultancy and training centre for brands such as Ubiquiti, Mikrotik and TP-Link. We have built a great team, and a fantastic reputation for knowledge and customer service. I’m sure they will continue on this path, and I wish everyone there the very best.
I’ve met so many people and made some great friends over the years, and hope to keep in touch.
At the moment I’m intending to fully retire, but who knows what the future may bring…