Nick
@nick@shore.me.uk
157 following, 242 followers
Just seen the news and am holding my head in my hands. Who'd have known this country had 100,000 people willing to stand up and boast about how pig thick and cretinous they are.
Protesters have attacked police officers, says The Met
Police officers have been attacked by protesters at anti-immigration activist Tommy Robinson’s ‘Unite the Kingdom’ event in central London. Scotland Yard said on X: “Officers were attacked with projectiles and have had to use force to avoid their cordon being breached.”
Is this two-tier policing?
The Metropolitan Police have decided not to use real-time facial recognition technology on today's 'Unite The Kingdom' Rightest march in London....
So, the Q.s here are: will they be using the tech retrospectively on the marchers?
Are they concerned the live-tech will be swamped by the number it would pick up?
Do they regard a march organised by Tommy Robinson (Stephen Yaxley-Lennon_ as less dangerous than other marches?
Am I being thick? #uspol
So Trump deported a few hundred South Koreans that were there to train US workers in a new factory set up.
Surely that means they were not even immigrants - let alone illegal immigrants? I assume they were only there on a contract to train people - not planning to more to US. And surely they would not be in any way illegal in doing so?
Or did the company not have the appropriate paperwork for them working in the US?
Maybe I am missing something.
Being cynical, I assume that (a) they were the wrong colour and/or (b) the company did not pay protection money to Trump.
@revk that, and i think a lot of americans can't even fathom that people might not want to move to the US at all (legally or illegally), which makes every visitor a potential illegal immigrant. I speak from experience.
@jelte I never understood, when in long queues in to US, how it is one process - queuing up at a passport check desk - for someone going on holiday and someone trying to immigrate. There were people with all their immigration papers at the desks taking forever, obviously.
Surely someone going on holiday, with booked accommodation, and booked return flights, etc, should have a fast track!
@revk According to both left and right-leaning media it was mainly the method by which they had entered and/or remained in the US. Some were undocumented, some had visas that had expired or visa waivers that didn't allow them to work.
Trump asked the South Koreans to stay after discussing (i.e. making a deal) with South Korea but South Korea insisted on them returning home. He has since said that he welcomes foreign companies and workers if they use official channels to enter the US.
boosted@revk According to South Korean news media there's a loophole in temporary Visa documents for South Korea citizens in the USA.
There's no Visa allowing people to enter the USA with a temporary work permit.
Skilled professionals training local employees so far have entered with a travel Visa and this practice has been tolerated for years. Until now, apparently.
The shiny new Lenovo Legion laptop arrived, so I set up the essential work apps in Windows (mainly AutoCAD). I wanted to give running primarily in Linux a go, but have wasted 2 hours trying to make my second monitor work and have failed.
Things evidently haven't improved since I bought the Macbook in 2012 because my left mouse button stopped working when I plugged in my headset. 😞
@neil it's already £100
Why on earth does it need to be more! At least they say you can set your own limit. I wish I could now, I'd make it £20
@Tattooed_Mummy @neil for some reason with at least 1 major bank setting the limit lower than the default also sets the limit for mobile payments to that
@Tattooed_Mummy @neil Indeed but with at least one bank if you set a lower contactless limit than the default £100 it also applies that limit to Google wallet. Etc 🙃
If you don't want a limit on mobile wallet payments you have to leave the contactless limit on the default setting
@Tattooed_Mummy @neil I guess maybe you could use a virtual card for mobile as it looks like those have separate limit controls to the main card
We are getting a heat pump later this month, replacing an old dying, leaking gas boiler.
Hivemind! Predict the outcome :
| Literally fine, works amazing: | 26 |
| Minor issues that get resolved: | 52 |
| Catastrophic, end up returning to gas boiler: | 0 |
Closed
@bloor upgrading rads and piping too?
@ret one needed replacement, two were marginal, we will see and replace later if needed. Not replacing pipework.
@bloor I'd take a fair bet on the installers looking at the plan, looking at your floor and doing it differently 8)
And the weather compensation curve will be wrong, because it's 99% magic.
@bloor heat pumps aren't particularly new. They're all over the place industrially. My experience with industrial air handling units and plenums (steam fed) are that if wet air gets in and filters aren't changed then you're asking for a short life.
Bottom line is like lots of things, you get what you pay for.
@nick our most expensive day of gas cost us almost £17 in one day earlier this year. My hope is that it is not /too much/ worse than that.
@nick so that represented 270 ish kWh of gas. Factoring in a pessimistic cop of 3, and factoring in the higher unit cost of electricity, I’m slightly worse off but only slightly.
@penguin42 @bloor @nick move some of the green/social tariffs from elec to gas, tax gas a bit and use it to subsidise elec. With prices as they are, a heat pump does not feel like a clear financial win, given the upfront cost.
@steve @penguin42 @nick I am under no illusions that it won’t save me very much money right now ongoing, if any at all. However: once I get solar and batteries, then it really@really makes sense.
@bloor @penguin42 @nick yes, that makes sense. But from a policy point of getting the country off gas, I think the financials need to be much clearer.
@nick @bloor
And balance all rads/towel rails to hit suitable return water temperature. The biggest waste of energy on wet systems is returning hot water back to the boiler/heat pump because ofvexcessive flow rates. Decorators, diy and builders always mess it up. Plumbers sometimes aren't much better.
@bloor Voted option 1 as I will be getting one too and hope your good luck will rub off on me. Not sure what kind of mysticism this is 😂
@bloor Awesome! Would love to have done that when we moved. Annoyingly 10yo boiler completely died weeks after moving in, so had to replace the boiler in anger in mid December rather than researching ASHP. Got another 4 years or so before justifying boiler retirement.
Would like to get rid of gas piping buried in floor/walls as there were 2 gas fires (decommissioned) and the massive meter unit which takes out almost a full kitchen cupboard.
Looking forward to your updates (and metrics) 😁
Today's trip was to Hurst Castle - a 19th Century fort built around a 16th Century fort.
Well worth visiting and if Mother Nature has her way (having been given a helping hand by us), it won't be around for much longer.
I saw something disturbing this morning.
One of my clients showed me an email. They use Gmail for their emails (on their own domain) and download them locally.
The email officially came from their company president, giving the purchasing department orders to immediately pay an invoice of around €20,000 to a new supplier in the UK. It included all the details and had the invoice attached as a PDF.
The worrying part is that the style and tone of the writing were exactly like their president's. However, the sender's address, while using the correct name, was a generic Gmail account. This immediately raised a red flag for the purchasing department, and they didn't fall for it. It was also easy for them to check because the president was in their office at that very moment.
Looking at the sender's address, it would have been simple for anyone to figure out what was happening, but many people don't.
The accuracy with which they (likely using an LLM) recreated the president's writing style is truly concerning.
I wonder how the scammers get samples of the president's emails to use?
@nlarson830 The president is active as he's talking at conferences, etc. I've tested and the LLMs are aware of this person and his style.
@nick no, they have strict procedures for this. But another company I know fell in the trap (anyway, I'm not surprised)
LLM adds a whole new dimension to this sort of thing. I'll watch out for this in my own little world.
@stefano I’ve heard that they also do this through phone call, using AI mimicking voices.
@stefano This is true. Quite popular fraud scheme in my country (and actually post-Soviet space). So they collect enough samples of your voice to train AI, and then call your relatives asking to transfer money somewhere ASAP. That's one of the schemes.
@stefano As embarrassing as it may be, I once was scammed by someone pretending to be the owner of the company where I worked. I lost approximately $1,000
However, I did learn my lesson and checking the email address of any suspicious email is the first thing I do now
@gabe_saltar don't be embarrassed. In 2004 or 2005, I was scammed on ebay, too. I lost 1700 euros
@stefano Damn! That sucks!
@gabe_saltar it does. I felt stupid. Then I was angry, because it wasn't easy to spot. They stole the login credentials of a legit shop and changed the IBAN. PayPal or other similar tools weren't available. It came out that more than 15 people were scammed, all around Europe. We got in touch with one another and we all went to the police but they couldn't find the money. There's been some money transfer from the original country (Germany) to another, non European country and then...everything lost.
@stefano WOW! In my case the person pretended to be my boss, and asked me to send him money in for apple gift cards... It sounded suspicious as hell, but I felt for it because I was new in the company. It was second week at the job and I didn't know anyone in the company well enough to make the correct judgement call.
I found the whole thing to be embarrassing because my major is in Cyber Security. To say I felt stupid, would be understatement of the year
😬
@gabe_saltar bad things can happen to all of us. But life goes on, and we lean the lesson 😉
Replacing Sky / Virgin media with a Freeview recorder. Looking good so far, it integrates well with all the catch-up setvices, and a software update just added YouTube. #manhattant4r #cordcutting #freeview
Hmmm, I wonder, I wonder, why my Wireguard tunnel suddenly stopped working (on UDP/51820) after I redirected all packets coming in via UDP between 10000 and 65535 to my VoIP server at the firewall. A true mystery I totally haven't spent 15 minutes figuring out... 
"Ivan replied that code is either correct or incorrect; there’s no subjective determination of whether it’s high or low… if a coder writes code poorly, the program simply won’t run"
If an engineer ever says that to you, run the fuck away.
The fact it runs doesn't mean it's:
- right
- secure
- maintainable
- efficient
or can handle anything except the single case you've tried.
Every time you scratch the surface of a vibe coder, you'll find delusionally low standards.
Our nice IT admins have fixed the Mastodon instance, thanks guys!
Mic check one two, is this thing on now?
Cool cool. A load of 50 because Facebook/Meta thinks it needs to hammer the server like crazy.
2a03:2880::/29 blocked.
so far so good...
Running a single user (or small) instance in the Fediverse? Relay instances acting as a spreading proxy can help you to find your content and also to make your posts visible to others - and you can easily join with #Mastodon, #snac and many other ones!
The https://fedi-relay.gyptazy.com relay is mostly for tech related content and just got updates to the manpageblog design.
#mastodon #snac #relay #activitypub #fediverse #federated #bsd #devops #proxmox #ipv6 #opensource #community #debian #python
See also https://delightful.coding.social/delightful-fediverse-experience/#activitypub-relay-servers
If you are not on the list, there is a repo to PR to, linked from the top.
@gyptazy is this running on custom software?
@fox yes and no… it’s a personal customized fork of Aode
@gyptazy I'd count that as custom
@fox It got some further adjustment and also the template stuff got customized to match my #manpageblog layout (my own blog solution) of gyptazy.com
Thanks for this!
Some unsollicited UX feedback:
- "contribution" link leads to a broken page
- List of connected instances: linked text being either the domain name or the instance title is somehow hard to process, is that sorted by chronological order? That list could be tabulated and sortable (a common practice for any list bigger than the screen)
@tobozo thanks, I’m currently still in transition where I’m moving back to my self-written manpageblog. Things may take some time ;)
@gyptazy is it generating a lot of traffic?
@bogo it highly depends on the users, their posting frequencies and type of content. Mostly, it’s between 0,2 - 0,5Mbit, but of course it can also peak.
Wow. Not sure what this is from, but QR codes are “fun”.
1. QR is URL that is an IP not a domain. Wow!
2. QR is not as compact as could be.
3, QR may not have required white space.
4. This is the biggie… How the fuck does anyone pick which QR they are scanning?! Most devices make that really hard.
Well done stating the crazy URLs in text though, even if text too small to read!
Have one (sane) URL and a select language option on that page.
This is special!
@revk reminds me of barcode scanner programming books that were just page after page of barcodes you had to scan in order to configure the scanner lol.
@revk I have seen a lot of QR codes (and other 2d bar codes expected to be scanned with a phone) that are unnecessarily small, and have left wondering if anyone actually tested them with a variety of devices. To pair my phone with my car, I ended up using an SLR and macro lens to scan the code and then zoomed in so I could scan it with my phone!
@revk And for some reason, they have a Belgian version that looks identical to the Dutch one. What are the French-speaking Belgians supposed to do?
“We will always work to facilitate peaceful protest and protect the democratic right to assembly, however the actions of this group were unlawful.
“Our officers’ role is to prevent disorder, damage and disruption in the local community and they will use their powers to do this. Any breaches of the law will be dealt with.”
What damage, disorder and disruption? All I witnessed was a peaceful protest
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/16/police-arrest-protesters-palestine-action-norwich
‘Police arrested 13 people at a protest in #Norfolk on Saturday on suspicion of showing support for the proscribed group Palestine Action.
A group assembled outside City Hall in St Peters Street, #Norwich, holding placards referencing the organisation, Norfolk police said. The force said they were arrested on suspicion of displaying an item in support of a proscribed organisation, contrary to section 13 of the Terrorism Act 2000.’
Where will this end?
I was curious to see what #BBC Look East had reported on the protest…as their studios are literally within spitting distance of City Hall and the last arrest which I must have witnessed was outside the Forum where they are based.
They have literally just cobbled together press releases from Norfolk police the Met.
They felt no need to view this peaceful protest happening on their own doorstep with their own eyes…
‘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.
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.