Nick
@nick@shore.me.uk
181 following, 258 followers
Kitchenware question:
In the old days it was Tupperware. I’m talking about “plastic boxes for food storage in the fridge, freezer, maybe a reheat in the microwave”.
We have some by Sistema but frankly they are rubbish. They get brittle in the freezer, then the lid latches break. We have tried other cheaper ones.
Are there any GOOD plastic food storage systems?
@bloor I upgraded to the fancy Sistema ones with the tritan plastic - these ones. https://www.sistemaplastics.com/uk/our-ranges/ultra
They have held up to freezing and dishwashers and all kinds of things so far. I've been really impressed.
@bloor I prefer glass containers over plastic as they can be heated in the oven and are easier to clean. John Lewis have some own brand ones that are decent.
@bloor it is better to avoid plastic in the microwave. The lids are ok, but where the food touches the box it can get too hot and melt the plastic. The fumes et al then permeate your food, not ideal for your daily intake of plastic but obviously we’ve all been doing it for decades. 🙄
@bloor For freezer we use cheap plastic pots with plastic lids; they're thinner and lighter than anything we'd use if we wanted it on a countertop, and don't have the clever seals or anything.
One option is the plastic boxes that takeaway food is delivered in. They aren't very robust but they are basically free. Recycle them when they fail 🙂🤷♂️
@bloor I moved away from plastic to glass with a silicone lid. Home Bargains always seem to have quite a few 'Lock n Lock ones which I really like.
@Wifiwits @ben it looks like zen are now available on my headend exchange. (As in their own network rather than using BTW)
Depending on pricing the 1.8Gbit is semi tempting but it still has the 110 up and I'd need an ONT swap
Keeping an eye on olilo at the moment but might just wait for OR to roll out XGSpon
@NAB No. The way to edit a text file on a Linux server is
* copy it to a Windows box
* edit it using a real editor
* copy it back.
You have to learn about line endings, but that's about the only hassle.
@NAB vi, not vim, is present on any and all *nix variants. The basic commands is enough to save yourself from bad situations. After that choose your daily driver editor.
Another tip is to t-y-p-e every command manually in the beginning, read manpages not google. That is imho the only way to learn the sysadmin skill, and in the end be able to do things effortlessly on any system.
@NAB I’ve never learned anything with vi beyond how to get into insert mode and how to quit (with or without saving).
I think that’s enough unless someone particularly likes vi as an editor (I don’t, I prefer nano or a gui editor)!
@NAB Definitely. If he doesn't get comfortable beyond i a d w q and hjkl, that's enough to feel like the CLI isn't trapped. Whether he wants to do serious editing in vi, emacs, nano, kate, or whatever, is another question
@NAB Exposure to Vim and Emacs is important for people to get used to the idea that powerful software can sometimes have a learning curve.
As someone who unexpectedly acquired a project maintaining an old but important system with no fancy tools installed, and who had to fix something immediately... YES!
[Edited to add] I got into vi ok, but couldn't work out how to exit!
@NAB I've got thirty something years of Emacs under my belt, and I still say Yes to that. I don't particularly get on with the VI Way, but dear god it beats the crap out of nano.
@NAB yes, and the core gnu toolset: grep, awk, sed... *regular expressions rule everything around me*
@NAB yes, and make him write up a cheat sheet for the editing commands to help establish best practices.
@NAB At my current job, we have locked-down Linux servers where vi is the only editor. I hate vi, but knowing the basics is invaluable.
James Watson sounds a *lot* like some other people I could mention…
“His signal achievements, and the way he accomplished them, inflated his belief not only in his genius but also in how to succeed”
What’s the name of this tendency for people to succeed at one thing to then think they’re right about *everything*, and to retreat into ever-more extreme positions when questioned?
Hello! And welcome to the third and final day of Jet Lag: The Game - Hide + Seek: Netherlands edition! It’s 10:30am, @quixoticgeek and, having discounted the War Games option (the only winning move is not to play), we are so back in the delightful town of Lunteren, where it’s time for us to Go! Go! Go!
Today it’s @darkphoenix’s turn to hide, and she is somewhere with the borders of the Netherlands mainland. We’ve got all day to try and find them, and we have to beat the time of 8 hours and 7 minutes it took us to find @quixoticgeek yesterday.
For those of you who missed yesterday’s thread, it’s up at: https://cupoftea.social/@moof/115513147403818486
For Day 1 (Friday), my thread is up at https://cupoftea.social/@moof/115507383775325900
Confused as to what #JetLagTheGame is? First of all, welcome to my little corner of the fediverse, you must be new here. But you can read a little primer I wrote about here: https://moof.space/what-is-jet-lag
So, it’s time to lock in, and get going…
(CW: selfie with eye contact)
…to nowhere in particular. A behind the scenes tip: we all started at Amersfoot Centraal this morning, which is the closest station to our hotel for the night. We agreed to *notionally* start at Lunteren, and @darkphoenix has an actual itinerary that started at Lunteren at 09:30 to wherever they’re heading that will be within the 3 hour time limit.
So don’t believe all the photos you see on fedi.
In our case, we worked out when the first train after 10:30 arrives at Amersfoort and will be at the platform to meet it at 11:00am, where we are then released to be able to move.
That’s another thing, @darkphoenix is not actually at their hiding place. Much like we did with my run on Friday, she started later, and is notionally answering questions as if she were already there. We aren’t allowed to ask photo questions before 12:30 in order to give her time to arrive.
(CW: selfie with eye contact)
Speaking of questions, we can’t move til 11, but we are allowed to ask questions now, and house rules state that they are counted from where we physically are (to avoid us having to simulate the current train location or whatever). So we are definitely going to see how much we can reduce the entire map of the Netherlands without going anywhere.
We’ve asked whether @darkphoenix is within 80km of us, and she is inside the radius.
Next, we want to know if she is closer to the coast than us. This is effectively an East-West split from our location. And.. she is. Which basically reduces us to the Randstadt, the area of the Netherlands that basically includes Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Den Haag and Utrecht. Aka “everywhere you’ve ever heard of in the Netherlands”
Long time #JetLagTheGame stans will be disappointed that we have already eliminated apostrophe es hurtigruten.
If you want to follow the other players, @darkphoenix has a thread going at
https://not.an.evilcyberhacker.net/notes/aeuzsu2tg7o300dn
@quixoticgeek has her thread up at https://social.v.st/@quixoticgeek/115519042948605723
It seems that @darkphoenix is also closer to an aquarium than us in Amersfoort. It means she’s not in most of Amsterdam, which gives us a train to get on, towards Utrecht.
And we are now sat in a station bench at Utrecht Centraal, listening to a pianist playing a jazzy version of A Little Night Music, as we wait for a response to our next question. Delightful.
So we decided to ask if her nearest airport is the same as ours… and it wasn’t.
So we have effectively stopped at Utrecht, got off the train, asked the question, gone upstairs, waited, gotten the answer, headed down to the same platform, and gotten back on the same train, which is heading towards Gouda
We did a thermometer from Utrecht to Papekop (we saw the station as the train sped through). This has made more interesting slicing, removing some bits that were worrying us in Alkmaar, and we are now doing another thermometer from Gouda up towards the north.
That was an intense few minutes…
We did a thermometer from Gouda to a little outside Alphen am der Rhein.
This managed to eliminate a significant swathe, including Rotterdam, which means the dreaded rail replacement bus is much less likely. We then boarded a train to Leiden, and got the curse of the hidden hangman, which we successfully identified as PYLON within five minutes. Because we’d boarded the train before the card, we continued on our way to Leiden.
We managed to ask for a photo of the tallest building from the station before declaring lunch at 12:30.
As we expected @darkphoenix took a lunch break after ours finished at 13:00.
We took the opportunity to head to Den Haag Central to start a thermometer, and then headed on Den Haag-Ypenburg on rail replacement tram. There we finished the thermometer, and then asked if her closest theme park was the same as ours.
It’s left a very small area to search…
With the judicious use of a tentacle based on zoos, we managed to track @darkphoenix down to Delft Campus, and are currently on our way there.
We are effectively in the end game, and I’m going to go silent, as this is a very intense game today. See you the other side…
We found @darkphoenix! It was in a random thicket by a
park. It took us 6 hours and 3 minutes, plus 80 minutes in effective time bonuses, making it a total hiding time of 7 hours and 23 minutes, which places them very much in second place. I lost, and @quixoticgeek won fair and square.
Today’s game was very intense, more so than the last couple of games. There was less time to rest, due to the very short train times inherent in the Randstat. We very much struck lucky by sitting down to rest right next to where she was hidden, as we were not quite in determined end game search every bush mode.
That being said, it was a fair game. Different from the last two, but no less enjoyable.
We are now sat at a bar in Delft toasting Kitty’s excellent win, and dissecting this game every which way to make it better. I’ll be writing up our conclusions in another round of Intercity Insights some time soon. Watch this moof.space!
And with that, goedeavond!
Electric vehicle drivers are likely to be hit with a new “pay-per-mile” tax in the forthcoming budget, amounting to an extra £250 a year on average. The scheme, which would charge EV motorists 3p per mile on top of other road taxes, comes amid falling fuel duty revenue as more people switch from petrol to electric.
@kibcol1049 how will they know how many miles are people driving per year?
@Disputatore Good question. Who knows how they propose to do it. 🤔
Apparently its from estimates of individual drivers mileage (presumably obtained from MOT for older vehicles or maybe self-declaration similar to applying for insurance (the govt could get this data from insurance companies/MIB, or even from manufacturers for vehicles still in the dealer servicing network with active telemetry)
But this is only going to fuel the conspiracy theories of the paranoid, and could even stall the wider adoption of EVs (especially as the easy customers with at home charging have already been cherry picked and there seems to be little effort to make it easier for those with on street parking)
@vfrmedia @kibcol1049 @Disputatore Think it's a silly way to do it. Why not just have a vehicle tax rate like they do for other vehicles?
@UkeleleEric @kibcol1049 @Disputatore
Its *on top* of the £195 VED for normal vehicles, hence why its a daft idea which could well put folk off getting an EV - if you can't charge at home you are at the mercy of various public charger operators with higher levels of rent seeking and data harvesting and at present less reliability than just buying petrol/diesel, and at present there seem to be 0 attempts to improve this situation (which won't change if left to the market alone)
@vfrmedia @kibcol1049 @Disputatore
I understand that the idea is to pay for the roads but this idea will surely dissuade people from using an EV and consequently from buying one.
The most polluting stage of having an EV is its construction not its use so discouraging people to drive one after purchase is of negative benefit.
@Sarahw @vfrmedia @kibcol1049 roads do require maintenance
@Disputatore
Yeah, this feels like they’re sticking it to us EV drivers, but they’re not only losing all the money I used to spend on petrol, but they get very little out of me on public chargers too, since I almost exclusively charge at 7p/kwh at home.
And the roads do need to be maintained. Eventually there will be no petrol cars. So they need some way of getting money from the heavy road users rather than taxing the cyclists and pedestrians for the motorways they’ll never use.
A vaguely per-mile charge sounds fair. I don’t know how that compares with the per-litre fuel duty.
But short of actually taxing billionaires and megacorps properly (and… yeah, wouldn’t that be lovely!), this is probably ok?
@Sarahw @vfrmedia @kibcol1049
@gareth @Disputatore @Sarahw @vfrmedia @kibcol1049 after the mileage charge still just 5 or 6p per mile but look at the cost of home batteries. You can charge them at the 7p rate too. Mine have reduced my electricity bill so the car costing a negative rate per mile
@John_Loader @gareth @Sarahw @vfrmedia @kibcol1049 I was told the UK has a government scheme where if you buy solar panels and batteries together you don't pay VAT, or something. That's a great offer. But there is no incentive scheme in Portugal to buy batteries. I bought solar panels with a government incentive plan. With the savings and the first year of selling excess production, I was able to pay for the panels in less than 18 months. But I can't find a business case for batteries.
@Disputatore @gareth @Sarahw @vfrmedia @kibcol1049 batteries are complicated . I can only use the UK situation. Solar on its own will pay back quickly if you get a good rate for export and, as in your country, loads of sun. Batteries are expensive and add to the years of payback. They are more a reaction to ever increasing electricity price rises rather than quick returns
@John_Loader @Disputatore @gareth @Sarahw @kibcol1049
My relatives have solar + batteries and it seems the batteries are more useful for resillience rather than immediate payback - a couple of months ago they lost the grid supply for a whole hour (at least during daylight in good weather) and the entire house power demand was picked up by the solar + batteries without even making much of a dent in the battery charge level (rather like a giant UPS)
@John_Loader @Disputatore @gareth @Sarahw @vfrmedia @kibcol1049
LiFePO4 batteries have massively dropped in price. You could easily do a 16kWh DIY setup for well under €1,000
@davep @John_Loader @gareth @Sarahw @vfrmedia @kibcol1049 I would also have to change my inverter to a hybrid one. But 16kWh for under €1,000 has an extremely pleasant sound to it.
@Disputatore @John_Loader @gareth @Sarahw @vfrmedia @kibcol1049
Hybrid transformerless inverters aren't generally good for working off-grid by the way.
@Disputatore @John_Loader @gareth @Sarahw @vfrmedia @kibcol1049
If you're interested in DIY batteries, check out the off-grid garage on YouTube.
Here's a thread about a couple I made...
@Disputatore @vfrmedia @kibcol1049
Oh completely. And one could argue that ev drivers should pay more as the cars are heavier and therefore cause more wear and tear.
But then again that is counter productive if we want cleaner air.
I'm an EV owner myself but I might be put off if I had to pay more tax. One of the advantages is cheaper running costs but this is offset against higher purchase price.
@Sarahw @Disputatore @vfrmedia @kibcol1049 increased driving, even in EVs, which is currently incentivised because of low running costs and less user guilt, is still a net negative. Tarmac, car parks, urban sprawl and tyre plastic pollution are still terrible for the environment and still contribute to climate change. I'm not a hardliner - I own a car and drive it! - but cars are still *not good* even when they're EVs, and in an ideal world we would consider driving a luxury, not a right.
@Flisty @Sarahw @Disputatore @kibcol1049
Although anyone looking through my profile/timeline might think I'm a petrolhead, I only started driving in my 40s and managed 30 years without a car because I lived in London/SE England, but all it took was one recession in the late 2000s and having to move to more car-dependent East Anglia to find work to change that.
Another problem, particularly in provincial towns is alternative transport is often just about good enough for traditional 9-5 weekday working hours, but the moment you work outside those hours, or if you want to travel for pleasure on a weekend it becomes non-existent..
@vfrmedia @Sarahw @Disputatore @kibcol1049 tell me about it. I live relatively close to you, I'm guessing! I drove today to visit my parents, who live 20 mins' drive away. We both live in towns with railway stations but a tiny section of rail ripped out by Beeching means our lines don't join. Saturday buses run hourly and take 50 mins not including the 15-30 min walk to/from the bus stop. Ultimately public transport is Cambridge/London commuters or GTFO round here.
@jayfell @vfrmedia @Sarahw @Disputatore @kibcol1049 what, even with all that Northern Powerhouse funding?????!!!!!
@jayfell @vfrmedia @Sarahw @Disputatore @kibcol1049 when I want to wind my Mum up (Cheshire) I tell her she's from the West Midlands...
@Disputatore @Sarahw @vfrmedia @kibcol1049 they do, but they also seerve everybody, whether they use a taxi/rideshare or a bus, or drive a 20 year old corolla, or order groceries from one of those mail order meal prep companies. so the sensible thing is probably just infrastructure grants from taxes
@kibcol1049 Surely a better idea for ICEs and EVs would be to charge road tax through fuel prices for ICEs and charging sessions for EVs and therefore abolish road tax altogether. The more you use the vehicle or the bigger/less efficient the vehicle, the more you pay.
@nick @kibcol1049 VAT on EV chargers as well as VAT on the electricity?
@jayfell @kibcol1049 And that is where my suggestion possibly breaks down. It was an easy idea before EVs came along.
@PaulNickson @kibcol1049 or just apply car tax on a carbon release/mile and multiply it by distance travelled applied retrospectively after milage recorded at MOT. EVs charged at grid carbon component averaged over previous year.
@epistatacadam @kibcol1049 Yep. That could work.
@epistatacadam @kibcol1049 However the point is (and this may be controversial for some) that all road users (besides pushbikes) should pay some sort of premium for the upkeep of the road system. The more you use your vehicle, the more wear n tear you do to the roads. What I was proposing was a ‘Road Use Tax’. Payable by the gallon or kWh.
@PaulNickson @kibcol1049 I agree, I was thinking of a similar scheme but rather than on the energy alone, keeping the link to carbon emissions, and distance travelled, of course you could add a kerb weight component too so heavier vehicles get taxed more as well.
Either would be fine by me, though I use mostly my own generated electric in summer. So would that be taxed?
@epistatacadam @kibcol1049 Bugger. Hadn’t thought of ‘home-generated power’! Hmm, that complicates it.
@PaulNickson @kibcol1049 Sorry! But it would be hard to keep tabs on everyone with rooftop solar, especially as cars become grid support batteries too.
@epistatacadam @kibcol1049 Yeah that makes it tricky. Back to a scaled annual road tax then but by mile, read off the MOT cert I suppose. That would then work for ICE vehicles as well.
@PaulNickson @epistatacadam @kibcol1049 I mean distance travelled is an option. Sure some people might try to finagle it but in a country where you regularly have to have it checked it wouldn't be too hard.
@ariaflame @PaulNickson @kibcol1049 it just requires a chancellor to have the guts to a) think of a sensible system and b) rope their colleagues in to amend other laws if required. E.g. recording milage at MOT becomes compulsory, and on ICE I think carbon emissions are calculated already. And get independent checking of fuel/mile and KwH/mile.
@PaulNickson @epistatacadam @kibcol1049 Some places do this, actually. Many communities in the Chicago area (where I used to live) require drivers to buy 'stickers' for the front windshield, the lack of which can be fined. These are a road tax. (Chicago also has toll roads. And, ironically, some of the worst roads in the US.)
@lmgenealogy @epistatacadam @kibcol1049 Hmm not the perfect solution then but a step in the right direction.
@PaulNickson @epistatacadam @kibcol1049 I think the Chicago area has plenty of money for road maintenance. There are other types of problems there, including a very strong asphalt lobby in the state capital which ensures that roads are built with inferior materials (as per a friend who works in local government), and a city government that contracts with companies based partly on their connection to serving politicians and not fiscal responsibility. But the road tax idea does at least mean that the drivers are the ones paying for the roads - which might even encourage public transportation . . . if it existed outside of the city core. Sigh. (Chicago is an amazing city, but it does have its problems!)
@ninkosan @nick @alexlomas Ah hold on - is this the one that needs either the compatible car or charger? If so, I have neither.
@ninkosan @nick @alexlomas ah yes ok ... "intelligent go" versus just "go".
@nick @ninkosan @alexlomas My problem is I want to use a Victron EV charger, which will be locally smartified. And with other Victron kit; Cerbo GX, Quattro 15K and several MPPTs. So I'm kind of going to be a victron shop. And that means none of the best pricing.
As you know, we got shot of our faulty gas boiler and replaced it with a heat pump. Anecdotally I do think the heatpump is slightly cheaper to run at the moment, than the gas boiler used to be, even on a "any time flat rate" tariff for electricity; in my case 21.89p per kWh and a 62.22p per day standing charge.
I was paying 5.69p per kWh and 27.86p a day for gas.
So this is vaguely impressive.
1/2
2/2
So now I only have electricity and my tariff is up for renewal. And holy wow the price has gone up.
Unit cost for electricity rises from 21.89p to 26.44p = 4.55p per unit. Ouch
Standing charge falls from 62.22 to 43.66p = 18.56p a day
Mysteriously I think had I still had gas, my gas unit price would have actually fallen too!
I'm not entirely blaming Octopus but we are told electricity pricing is based on gas pricing. So how is gas kWh pricing falling, and electricity kWh pricing rising?
Additional thought (3/2)
We have two EVs and a heat pump. And we also run stuff like a hot tub. As a consequence of this our annual usage is like 12,000 kWh of electricity. Rather a lot.
That's a bit of a guess based on former gas usage translated to electrical usage.
But because our usage kind of can be any time, I still don't think we're better to go on differing kWh by time tariffs UNTIL we get a storage battery.
Long term, storage battery + solar, and near zero bills. But just now, oof.
@bloor we don't do any load-shifting, but have a tariff that's cheap(ish) for a few hours early morning and mid afternoon - in the current weather, the biggest draw we have is for hot water, and that's scheduled for the cheap times and saves a fair bit (especially when it's a dull day!)
Depends on provider, but Good Energy make it very painless to shift tariffs on a whim, so it's easy to tinker...
@bloor Try an app like Octopus Watch or OctoAid - they can do tariff comparisons on your actual usage.
@alexlomas I am wondering if in practice it is probably safe to assume we use more energy at night, simply because it is generally colder at night. Same with hot tub heating. And therefore, could a 2 rate tariff help.
My issue is that all my numbers are kind of new-ish and not perhaps maximally representative due to our recent killing of gas.
I'll look into those apps though, thank you.
@bloor Agile tends to be spendy at this time of year at peak hours but there have been a lot of very low prices lately as well.
@alexlomas Once we have battery, I'll go onto the tariff that has a 6 hour window at like 8p a unit and just fully charge always at that price...
@nick @bloor @alexlomas we’re on tracker. No EV, ASHP, et al. Nonetheless, this has saved us more money than anything that we’ve actually spent money on! 🤔
@nick @alexlomas Is that Octopus? If so, they seem to have reduced that to 5 hours not 6 for new customers.
Rate is 8.5p per kWh I think
@alexlomas @bloor agree about Octopus Watch. Our main storage is the hot water and I now use Havenwise to heat the hot water when cheap on Octopus Agile. Been using agile for years when when we had gas and other than a couple of months at the start of the year it's been working out the cheapest tariff with just a little load shifting of washing. Oh it's windy and prices are low, let's use it as an opportunity to make sure we get all the bed sheets washed etc
@bloor Can you time shift stuff like water heating and appliances ?
We did go battery and the works but the best single RoI on my spreadsheet once you factor in the costs and depreciation of equipment was actually simply doing shit between 00:30-05;30. The second was insulation and the battery itself was far behind (although of course it's kind of an enabler)
@bloor I've have thought charging the EVs and washing machine/dishwasher overnight would be a good win with IOG?
@ross We cannot get IOG. But we could get OG. And you are right. I am wondering if this would be a good trade. Even in the short term. Once we have a battery it's an absolute no brainer as we can continue to use "whenever" and just take from the battery.
@bloor My experience of solar plus battery so far is that I’ve managed to about halve our electricity bill.
28Kw battery, 3Kw of south facing solar, 1.5Kw of north facing solar (yeah, but better than nothing). Annual usage in the first full year including about 600Kwh of car charging, 7500Kwh. We don’t have a heat pump for the house though, we have electric radiators and a forced air system with heat reclaim.
To zero it entirely would require more storage (l double to cover max winter use in a day) and a lot more solar (which will be the limiting factor). And there are days in a row where we get low - very low - solar so actually it’ll never be zero for us. Contemplating an extra 14Kwh of battery but not sure it’s really worth the investment at the moment.
@gulfie my outline plan at the moment involves 32 kWh of battery and getting up towards 20 kW of panels. I don’t plan to feed back into the grid, but I think I will get zero usage costs for at least three quarters of the year. Roughly roughly.
@bloor Maybe Octopus Cosy would be worth a punt?
Day rate
29.07p / kWh
Cosy rate (04:00 - 07:00, 13:00 - 16:00 & 22:00 - 00:00)
14.26p / kWh
Peak rate (16:00 - 19:00)
43.61p / kWh
Peak rate is painful, might be an issue for cooking.
@bloor it's extremely hard to tell given the ridiculously warm weather, but we feel to be comfortably breaking even.
Digging through our LPG receipts, it looks like we ate around 21MWh of gas annually so as long as we hit a COP of 4 or more, we're in profit I think?
To be honest though, the monetary value of *not* trying to get gas delivered in the depths of winter is almost incalculable.
Vital piece of investigative reporting from Sky. They've uncovered the X algorithm which feeds users extremist right wing material from the moment they join the site. It is a far-right radicalisation engine, by design. news.sky.com/story/the-x-...
Many have already taken advantage of our early bird pricing for the #MikroTik Professionals Conference but it may be prudent to buy your tickets before the price goes up at the weekend! 😉 We are also very interested in hearing from anyone who wishes to present a MikroTik related topic. https://mtpc.world/ #MTPC #Conference #Prague
MS is having DNS issues. So the Dutch railways are having issues. Critical national infrastructure should not be on cloud systems owned by foreign companies. This is resiliency 101.
@quixoticgeek
actually shouldn't be on Cloud at all.
A National railway can afford its own servers.
@raymaccarthy
Not so sure about that with the Dutch Railways.
@quixoticgeek
@reinouts @raymaccarthy NS should be able to afford it. Whether they choose to, that's a different question.
@quixoticgeek @reinouts @raymaccarthy they can definitely get it at a couple of national hosting companies for a reasonable and predictable price.
@wsslmn
Well I know for a fact that they are heavily invested in Azure. Whether they can afford to switch, if they would want to, is dubious: NS are making structural losses since COVID and have had to make tough choices.
@quixoticgeek @raymaccarthy
@reinouts @wsslmn @raymaccarthy NS shouldn't need to make a profit. The purpose of public transport is to transport the public. It's a choice by the sole shareholder of NS, the Dutch government, to operate this way.
@quixoticgeek
I couldn't agree more. Yet, the reality is that budgets are tight for NS.
@wsslmn @raymaccarthy
@reinouts @wsslmn @raymaccarthy artificially. They don't need to be.
@nick @quixoticgeek @reinouts @raymaccarthy people often underestimate the actual cost of cloud services until something starts to use a bunch of resources, or your setup is so complex that moving away becomes impossible.
@quixoticgeek @reinouts @raymaccarthy
I'm not convinced it's even a case of being able to afford it. It is very likely that the cloud was sold to them as cheaper, but in the end I suspect it may actually end up more expensive due to various auxiliary cost management costs.
However, switching back may now be very difficult (and expensive) as they would have to rehire all the on-prem and Colo capable engineers. As lock-in strategies go, this is not a bad one.
@reinouts @raymaccarthy @quixoticgeek To be clear, running a server is, *relatively speaking* not that expensive. Especially when it's serving a relatively limited area. (It isn't as if they have to have their servers handling traffic across the world.) It can seem a bit prohibitive to us end users, but even for a struggling government a basic server setup isn't *that* big.
That said, anything as fundamental as a railway should be considered fundamental and be required to be self-sufficient.
@quixoticgeek in finance we have DORA legislation for digital resilience (you need to have a backup plan to stay running during such an event), but where are the same requirements for other infrastructure?!
@quixoticgeek so uh. As someone trying to do this for critical infrastructure: it actually probably should otherwise it will be down a lot more. At least in the current environment.
We should probably ask ourselves how to get out and still have the uptime, but it would need a far more honest look at our tech and how we fund it.
I cannot see that happening.
@Di4na as someone who's built a career out of building resilient computer systems. It can be done. But you need to have the knowledgeable staff to make it happen. And quite frankly. Those skills have atrophied across the industry.
@quixoticgeek i think they have not atrophied. We never had them that much. Because at no point in the past did we really handle that scale for so many different systems.
This is all new and we never built it.
And I have seen the results of the people telling me it can be done. Their uptime is not better, etc.
@Di4na the reality is that most organisations are not "that scale". So so so many companies massively over complicate everything.
@quixoticgeek
The Scottish Parliament has had to suspend business.
Literal democratic process is being affected.
@quixoticgeek
Trains were running mostly okay. It was just the App that wasnt working. With NS that's not that big an issue, since most trains run regular schedules. (If that happens to DB and their bizarrely irregular schedules and delays, it would have been a lot more of an issue to still get somewhere...)
@j2 and ticket machines. And ticket purchases. And OV fiets.
At Amsterdam Zuid I saw someone unable to travel cos they were unable to buy a ticket for their bike. Real world tangible effects.
@quixoticgeek Hardly anybody needs ticket machines anymore these days. You can travel with any bankcard. And I'm pretty sure that if you couldnt buy a ticket for your bike they'd still let you on the train.. It's the Netherlands: if the ticketing system doesnt work everybody travels for free.
@j2 I literally watched someone turned away because they couldn't buy a bike ticket.
@quixoticgeek Like on the actual train!? Wow. I think you'd stand a pretty good chance of filing a complaint about that.
@j2 @quixoticgeek a complaint? To get what? With what proof?
The fact stands: critical infrastructure shouldn’t rely on foreign providers. I’d argue that they shouldn’t rely on any kind of Internet connection at all, but the Dutch system as a whole would have big issues implementing that — I’ve seen the temporary OV chipkaart validators for NS buses with their big batteries and 4G cells, it’s a complete nonsense.
@j2 @quixoticgeek (also the part about « everyone travelling for free when it’s not working in the NL » is wrong, I’ve already been prevented from entering the station at Almere Centrum when some local incident made the validators out-of-service for like one hour. Everyone was invited to go away or wait until the issue was resolved.)
@j2 @quixoticgeek Do you know how many tourists we have around here lol
@SIT
Yes. And pretty much any bank card or creditcard will work.
@quixoticgeek
@j2 @quixoticgeek Global adoption of contactless payment is not as high as (Western) Europe, I wouldn't assume it for foreigners
@SIT
Even most Americans have that nowadays. And I assume 99% of tourists are on Google or Apple and could use that if they wanted to. I don't go to Amsterdam that much anymore, but even in The Hague or Utrecht I rarely see tourists at the ticket vending machines anymore...
@quixoticgeek
@quixoticgeek FWIW after working with some energy net providers (both in Germany and Netherlands), I’m fairly certain that their systems are autonomous.
So I suppose there are levels to criticality.
@quixoticgeek my train is also delayed, wondered if it was the same issue for a second but it turned out to be a much more Devon reason of livestock on the line
@quixoticgeek The Microsoft sales person probably promised it would be but it was more profitable not to keep that promise because they'd never check.
@quixoticgeek I predict it will selectively list, authoritatively, all members of a disapproved class as "not citizens", who then get deported without due process.
@quixoticgeek @cstross it has been proven over and over and over again that relying on the big cloud companies for critical infrastructure is a bad idea because it's putting all your eggs in one basket meaning it ends up not just being trains its trains, banking, taxis, supermarkets, hotel check in/front desk and your apartments shiny new smart lock that the landlord insisted on for some reason. Any one of these things going down would be a pain in the ass but all of them at once is a disaster
@quixoticgeek @stux You'd be surprised (or not) at all of the hospital systems impacted by this, too.
@quixoticgeek back in the day, the web hosting company I worked at had DNS servers set up with 3 different providers in 3 different places. In the 20 years the company existed, they never had a dns outage.
To be fair, AWS's DNS servers were up throughout the outage, they were reliably serving what they'd been told to.
It's just that automated systems had decided to remove a bunch of records from the zone...
New version! #MikroTik RouterOS 7.20.2 is available in the Stable channel https://mikrotik.com/download
Implemented more scopes to match other ActivityPub implementations (public, unlisted, followers-only and direct message) (contributed by byte).
New icons showing instance and actor failures.
Mastodon API: Added remote accounts follow metrics and statuses when viewing profiles (contributed by Stefano Marinelli), fixed post deletion.
Fixed outbox collection (contributed by byte).
New file FEDERATION.md (contributed by andypiper).
Updated Czech, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese translations (contributed by pmjv and daltux).
Fixed manpage typos (contributed by r-ricci).
If you find #snac useful, please consider buying grunfink a coffee or contributing via LiberaPay.
And thanks to byte, @stefano@bsd.cafe, andypiper, pmjv, daltux, r-ricci and any others I may have missed for their contributions to this release as well!
I submitted a Pull Request to update MacPorts' snac to 2.84 here:
https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/29810
1 out of 3 of GitHub's Continuous Integration checks passed, which is a good sign the other two will pass as well.
It's up to someone else with commit access to merge it.
#snac #MacPorts #OpenSource #ActivityPub #Mastodon #NoDatabaseNeeded
#NoJavaScript #NoCookiesEither #NotMuchBullShit
“People are the most annoying people.”
-Kemi @shitkemisays
The grid is bursting with green power this weekend, and you know what that means…Free Electricity Session Move any heavy power activity into that hour; be it laundry, tumbledryer, extra electric-heat. The power you'd typically use costs the same. If you’re an Read the
Friday 24th October, 9pm - 10pm UK
AND
Saturday 25th October, 12 (noon) - 3pm UK
The hastily crafted (without checking with the product team first 😇) GreyNoise IP checker tool — https://check.labs.greynoise.io/ — was received pretty well at work today, so I spiffied the CSS up a bit and gave it proper opengraph tags and dark mode support.
Shld be a friendly way for anyone, including non-cyber folks, to see if their home IP or work NAT IP was found in GreyNoise.
Might be a good idea to visit it when you're doing on-site family/friend IT support during the upcoming holiday season.
It's that time of the year again, the National Trust AGM where council members are selected, and yet again, the right leaning Restore Trust have a selection of plausible candidates entered. Be warned, they do not have the best interests of the Trust in mind, more of a culture war. So again, I appeal to all Trust members in England and Wales to make sure you vote. Just go to the site and search for AGM. Enter your membership details. Safest bet is to use the block vote. Please boost.
Thinking about it, I do quite like the terminal.
Not quite ready to abandon the gui entirely, but for git, using ssh to access remote systems or plain distraction free writing in base Vim there's nothing like it.
I prefer simplicity because I want the spare brain cycles for other stuff.
My computer should be under my control, not another source of anxiety or pain.
@onepict I've got a great little setup going to do fiction/picture book authoring in neovim (with pandoc templates for the manuscripts)
I figured that if I use this tool all day for work - why not use it? I've got my custom word count scripts, can use version control properly, can comment, can hide formatting away from my brain that loves to play with it - what's not to love?
@onepict totally get you but terminal still such an alien environment for my brain. Maybe a computer solely running some music software would be the way to go.
@inpc I think it does depend on what you're using it for.
Like I started on the command line, then windows 3.1 and personally I think after excel 5 the computing revolution went downhill.
But then I used to use WordPerfect as a secretarial temp. So even word was a huge annoyance.
But then I am a grumpy old crone yelling at the cloud. 🤣
@onepict I always think the terminal gets the power relationship between person and computer right: you tell it what to do, it does it or tells you why it can't. You may need to formulate what you want, but there isn't that game of hide-and-seek, where did they put that setting, does it still exist, can you change it that you get with GUI.
I dunno, I feel like "Computer says no" is more of a GUI thing.
@toxy @djm62 yeah I remember in secondary school we learned to type on Amstrad processeurs with orange on black screens and those weird disks that weren't five and a quarter or three point five inch floppies.
I always preferred the green on black.
I remember being really annoyed at uni with the Unix systems terminals being configured in light mode.
@djm62 @onepict I think that has more to do with GUIs being the common mode of interaction for mass-market products, rather than being some innate property of them (or conversely, of terminals). Terminal users are just less likely to tolerate such patterns, and less likely to be catered to by those putting in dark patterns etc.
@joepie91 @djm62 yeah like computers for a long time were accessible to very few folks.
Access to computers when I started with terminals, you needed to have cash or easy access to one.
Whereas with the mass market the interface is what you're given.
Having a device you can control and replace parts with is still an expensive thing.
@onepict for git, definitely - when I'm training junior people, I always advise them to learn git on the command line.
Even though git has a fairly poor CLI experience due to inconsistency between verbs, all of the UIs for it have to abstract away *something*, and if you don't understand where that abstraction is, you can run into trouble easily
@cait I got taught the joy of git send email the other day and patching.
So much less hassle. Especially if you're on the same LAN.
myrmepropagandist [she/her/lady/ma'am/That One/Mrs.] » 🌐
@futurebird@sauropods.win
Struggling with vibe coding? You just need to get better at prompting. Here is a six video series "course" to teach you how to write the most effective AI prompts and get the most out of vibe coding!
(Do you ever wonder what it would be like if there were some special language for giving commands to computers... a kind of prompting language so they would do *exactly* what you wanted? Maybe someone should invent that.)
@futurebird After reading this post, I've decided to flesh out the ideas a little. And I think I may have conceptualised the future of vibe coding!
First, the problem of inconsistencies in how AIs respond to prompts.
We need better predictability!
So let's create a standard syntax for prompts, so when you enter a given prompt in a particular way, the machine will always respond in a standard way.
We'll call these next-gen prompts "commands".
As long as you know this simple "language" of commands, the machine will always do what you want!
Now, on to the problem of needing complex prompts for complex vibe coding jobs.
Let's take away the guesswork.
Instead of trying to precisely enter one complicated long prompt, let's instead have a series of simpler commands that get executed one after the other.
A "program" of commands, if you will.
So you don't have to re-enter your program on prompts, let's invent a physical media for storing and loading these programs.
Now, the next big elephant in the AI room is resource use.
Let's solve this issue so that the command interpreter "AI" software runs with very few resources. I know this is a stretch goal, but perhaps even an 8-bit microcomputer with just 64K of RAM?
And to really make this catch on, let's make this AI vibe command programming language so simple, even an 8-year-old can understand it.
A "basic" programming language, if you will.
Now I know this "Basic" programming language AI vibe coding system sounds extraordinary.
But I promise you that for just $10 billion in VC funding and total indemnity against copyright infringement, I will happily deliver a 64K 8-bit microcomputer with the BASIC programming language preinstalled!
This is the future of AI folks! Feel the singularity approaching!
boostedHow big of a fuck-up is going to need to take place for people to realise that putting lots of things all in one place and nebulously labelling it as "the cloud" isn't the best way to architect an "inherently reliable" Internet, from an end-user's perspective.
I don't even begin to see the tide turning.
It didn't turn at any of the fuckups that happened at fastly, cloudflare, etc had.
It hasn't turned with any of the amazon ones.
There have been others.
1/3
boosted2/3
At no point do I see any movement towards "is this such a good idea? Should we, I don't know, mad idea, host our own shit?"
Because every time, the forgetfulness happens rapidly thereafter.
"Oh it's working again!"
"Well, let's not forget the outage!"
"What outage? It's working again!"
3/3
What I have seen is a possibly increasing number of home users no longer wishing to rely on the cloud; people bringing back in house their NAS, or their home automation. But this is niche/hobbyist folks mainly. I really don't feel the same is true of businesses, generally.
@bloor Leaving quite a few people around the world unable to do any work so far today. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c5y8k7k6v1rt
@TimWardCam @bloor my opinion cloud is good for bursting or short lived workloads.
It still doesn't make sense for stuff running 24/7 at least not at hyper scaler pricing
@TimWardCam @bloor I can see the appeal of stuff like managed databases through if you don't have th expertise in house.
You will pay for the privilege of db as a service though
@bloor Then there are the "local systems" which won't allow you to do anything until after they have successfully checked for updates..Oh, the update server is AWOL? Good luck turning your lights on!
You're not wrong, but the calculus for most companies comes down to:
- hosting our own shit is kinda expensive
- requires expertise we don't have (and which would be hella expensive).
Therefore:
- the occasional AWS outage is low risk (they're not actually that frequent).
- and (as far as we can tell) doesn't have that big an impact on our bottom line.
- round of golf, and then drinks after...?
@rogerlipscombe @bloor I'm not at all convinced that the cloud is less expensive. I think there is the /feeling/ that on it's face it seems less expensive, like all outsourcing, but I don't know how many people actually honestly look at the cost and value after the fact ("it's too late now").
Used "wrongly" - which many do - the cloud will be more expensive and less reliable than a decent managed virtual machine or even dedicated server on a network that is not designed to be disposable.
@nick @rogerlipscombe @bloor we love Proxmox and supply and manage VMs for a number of customers on it, at least one of whom spends much more - by an order of magnitude at least - with Azure for markedly worse results.
Cloud trades heavily on turn-key-convenience but boy do they charge for that luxury.
@bloor I think a lot of the businesses are happy to deploy the someone else's problem field to the issue. Blaming Amazon for the outage and accepting this. I've seen this type of outage be a vehicle to get discounts on hosting costs going forward as well through sales channels.
@bloor my experience is if you tell modern software developers things like that they look at you strangely and shoo you into the corner... "OK, grandad, go play with your vintage computing or something whist we Run Fast And Break Things like proper software engineers".
Also: "But then we would have to pay someone to do that! That's so dumb."
looks at cloud computing bill that is higher than an OK salary for infrastructure I could manage with probably under 20% of my time (Not that I actually want to do that with my time TBF, but you could hire a whole competent full time person for less!)
Of course the killer argument is then: "but what if we need to scale to Facebook size overnight!?" 🤷
Cannot win.
@bloor 1/x
There's an element of 'no one gets fired for buying IBM' in this - AWS is a 'safe' default that most customers don't need you to justify using.
The managed services (the CDN, DNS, database, queues etc) are honestly quite solid and need a lot less in-house expertise than running your own.
Cost *is* more than some racks in a DC + hardware, but to do that you need someone to spec it, someone to install it, someone to look after it if drives die in the middle of the night, etc...
@bloor 2/2
It also means you don't need to plan capacity in advance or be trapped trying to run a service on limited resources until you can get hardware - and getting hardware isn't as predictable as we'd like these days either.
There *are* advantages to cloud, but I do agree that companies running their own hosting is overlooked these days.
@bloor I think more of a focus lately is how the Americans have proven conclusively - at great speed, no less - that they can no longer be relied upon, and so there is more interest - particularly among government bodies - to repatriate data away from US interests.
Part of that will hopefully include a reckoning about whether or not 'cheapest' is a wise purchasing decision, but I doubt it.
@bloor for a lot of companies their uptime on managed clouds is vastly higher than they could achieve locally. It also appeals to managers because if it breaks it's someone else's fault
@etchedpixels @bloor > for a lot of companies their uptime on managed clouds is vastly higher than they could achieve locally
That's a good point that I think is often missed in the criticism that follows incidents like this. Everything goes down for an hour or two at some point. If all the services affected today had gone down for twice as long but one at a time on different days, nobody would be talking about it.
A lot of skills for IT management/system administration in small to medium size companies in the UK have been lost, and very few of these companies are prepared to hire staff just to "look after computers" (many even baulk at getting maintenance contracts for the equipment they do have, just using commodity PCs and cloud services such as MS365 or similar)
@vfrmedia @mansr @bloor lost ? In many cases they never had them. Cobbled together IT held together by random people in the company who did computery stuff at home, and now and then bodged up by a consultant or two.
For a lot of businesses customer facing IT was always a non critical afterthought and always remotely hosted. It just moved from small co website/email hosting to big cloud aggregation.
And on a cost and returns basis totally rational not an underinvestment IMHO
For many its only recently become more critical due to the use of online banking and/or various types of cloud-based EPOS terminals as well as accounting software and staff scheduling services (which previously more often used to be run on local machines) - and its often not even that the business /couldn't/ go back to older methods, but they required more "slack" time away from the core business which smaller businesses no longer want to spare (especially as entry level jobs like office juniors have increasingly disappeared)
@penguin42 @beasts I would hazard a guess that the customers of @beasts are sufficiently clueful to not make them a single point of failure. The implicit rejection of big cloud and use of @beasts I think is a barometer of this.
@penguin42 @bloor most modern stuff seems to be engineered for MPOF (multiple points of failure). We once came across a static webpage that depended on five different CDNs for dynamically loaded resources.
@bloor I've never been in favor of having someone else manage my data. Call me possessive, but I put all of my important data on thumb drives.
@bloor I mean, solarwinds and crowdstrike are still commercially successful concerns, so clearly the threshold of business damage required to stop using a bad vendor is really, really, really high
okay i have to ask this. it has been driving me mad for so long now.
why is pizza in the UK so ridiculously expensive?
"pepperoni feast" at pizza hut UK (pickup): £20.99 (~A$42.50)
"pepperoni" at dominos australia (pickup): A$8 (~£4)
what could possibly cause this?? if you bought a pizza from dominos AU and shipped it internationally it'd probably cost about the same!
somebody will, of course, reply to tell me "ah, but there's coupons, you can get it for half price if you blah blah". sure. i accept that. however. that also exists in australia!! "you could get it for only £12" but you could get the aus one for only $4! (not factorial)
what is happening??? are the italians imposing a 300% pizza tariff on the UK as punishment for putting corn on pizza? is it thatcher's fault? is this why detective halligan has a pitzer tab? help
Some time ago I posted my rules of DIY.
Rule 1 of DIY: if you're struggling, you're likely doing something wrong. Wrong tool, wrong method, wrong idea.
Not to be confused with the other Rule 1 of DIY: however long you think something will take you, bank on it taking at least twice as long.
And of course there's Rule 1 of DIY: some jobs are best left to professionals.
Now, I am not big on DIY, but I will engage in it when necessary. Also, my hobby has enough DIY aspects anyway, and I quite enjoy those. But I am fundamentally lazy, and that means when I do a job, I want to be able to do it with the least amount of friction and hassle.
So today, for no particular reason, I am going to add Rule 1 of DIY: look after your tools. Keep them clean and maintained. Otherwise they'll fail you when you most need them.
History