Nick
@nick@shore.me.uk
179 following, 253 followers
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 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
The Scottish Parliament has had to suspend business.
Literal democratic process is being affected.
@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 I predict it will selectively list, authoritatively, all members of a disapproved class as "not citizens", who then get deported without due process.
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.
I just discovered how good MikroTik routers (all devices in general) are.
RouterOS 7 looks amazing and the web UI is clean, powerful, and fast. Can’t believe I wasted money on cheap TP-Link and Cudy routers that broke when I tried to install OpenWRT. MikroTik gives you real control, pro-level features, and solid firmware right out of the box.
Wish I knew about them earlier. 🥹
@nick Already using it. They also have a mobile app called Mikrotik Pro. It has the same features as the winbox app!
“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.
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.
@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.)
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!
@bloor This is certainly something I'm seriously considering.
I'm not quite on the geek/hobbyist scale, but it doesn't scare me either
@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.
I've just received this text message. The names are correct and the sender's number matches the name, but the sender isn't somebody who would use this language/tone or even contact anybody this way at all - I don't believe this is anything other than a scam for a moment, but I'm struggling to see what the angle is here. What are the odds on me receiving another "please send money to..." or similar text shortly? Or does this scam work a different way?
@NAB I suspect they're waiting for you to respond in some way
@CatherineFlick @Floppy You're both probably right, but if that's the case, it does mean that the scammers must have stolen my contact's phone - which would also explain how they knew the name of their son and his girlfriend. I've sent a message to their partner to make them aware... we'll see what happens.
@NAB
My guess (no more) is that you're right - a request for cash will quickly follow. And they've got your number.
Curious about the details though.
@NAB I reckon you'll only get the link if you reply... otherwise they'd have sent it straight away. There's probably some people who would fall for this and reply that *would* be alerted by the inclusion of the link.
Confirmed as a scam **SEE BELOW** (as if we didn't already know). Interestingly, it seems that my contact still has their phone, so I wonder if it's a dodgy app or something else...
**EDIT** Not confirmed as a scam. Not confirmed as anything yet.
Oh great. Texted my contact's partner, letting them know what was happening. They told me they'd let them know. Just received another message from my contact saying "It was from me". Clearly their partner has just texted them with my message. 🙄
@NAB Maybe I’m being paranoid, but would their partner not know and be able to confirm what had happened?
Now this is just getting weirder and weirder.
Probably don't need to redact as much info as I did before, so...
Just had a reply from my contact's husband (who is also the father of the son in the original message):
"Hi Nicholas, have just spoken with XXXX and she did send this message to her contacts on her phone, she has also put a post on FB"
So, he's the father of the man in the car crash, his wife has flown out to Portugal and he never thought to mention any of this before.
Plus I sent him the text of the original message and he's not commented on that either.
I'm still thinking scam, but this has become very very weird. Maybe his phone was stolen/compromised too.
@nick None that couldn't be controlled by their phones (WhatsApp, FB etc.)
@NAB If this was me (in the position of the initial message sender) I don't know why I would be messaging my contact list asking them to spread this sort of news far and wide?
Is it actual SMS text messages, or from some kind of messaging app? I don't recognise the UI (but also I haven't had an Android phone in a long time).
@missiongiraffe I agree. Text message. I thought the same, but the number for both her and her husband match what I've contacted them on before.
@NAB I'm really invested in this now. I hope it is a scam because the real situation sounds awful, but I don't understand what they are gaining from this, unless it's going to lead to some kind of 'gofundme' type link at some point?
I wouldn't be worrying about anyone's lost belongings though when someone is on life support in a foreign country!?
@missiongiraffe And guess what.... There's a GoFundMe link.
Tried calling him. Slight pause before it rings and after a few rings, AI "Sorry can't take your call" message. Suspect calls diverted elsewhere.
@NAB It’s a lot of effort to go to this isn’t it, crikey.
A friend of mind had something similar, someone took over her phone number, they think by going into the relevant phone shop and passing off ID, who didn’t follow checks properly.
I wonder how many members of the house of commons would be able to pass an A level in English...
@quixoticgeek just read the article and it says B2. Um.
Yeah no. It's not A Level. If B1 is considered GCSE... I mean yes B2 is a step up but not that big! And there's a chasm of a difference between English subject A level and English as a foreign language A Level (not even sure that exists?).
I mean, I don't think the Spanish language A level is equivalent to an English A Level.
I took a B1 German test to get citizenship. I could have done B2, but I really didn't fancy risking not passing.
@quixoticgeek they mean equivalent fluency to an A-level in Spanish or German, not the English A-levels that native speakers take. None of the news articles mention this, though.
You can't even get an A-level in English as a second language, it's just based on CEFR equivalence.
@neil tata consulting will no doubt claim that they already are, and that what they built for jlr coop m&s etc already was and yet…. ????????
@nick @neil it’s usually much more stupid than this
Put things on the internet
Sack (sorry… “rightsize”) any in house expertise
Award ongoing management to cheapest bidder, who either don’t get told to do a full audit or get told it’s too expensive and that the documentation is “definitely up to date”
Don’t update things facing the Internet fast enough (or at all)
Get pwned
Make shocked pikachu face and ask for government help, I guess
Heat Pump Saga update.
Octopus are coming to cap off the gas and remove the gas meter today. This will save us approx £9 per month in standing charges.
Meanwhile recognising that this isn’t a particularly scientific comparison it is nonetheless interesting to note that we have averaged about 12kWh electricity per day for heating and hot water combined this prior week. Meanwhile if we look at gas usage for the same week last year we averaged nearer 100kWh per day.
As rough gross error checks go, I think that’s enough for me to say it’s somewhat working. Now of course financially a kWh of gas is 6p whereas a kWh of electricity is 22p. But still
@bloor 637Kwh per week? We use less than 300Kwh combined per month for our 3 bed/3 storey semi occupied 24/7... What eats up so much power?
@rbairwell I suspect some of these factors probably play into it :
* big house
* detatched house
* windy/hilltop location
* boiler that was condemned and (water) leaking
* 15+ year old (guess) rather inefficient boiler
@bloor I'm quite impressed with the savings compared to the same month the previous year. (My heat pump was installed in June this year).
boostedThis property no longer burns stuff.
@bloor Oh the earth link between your un-gas internal piping and the external gas pipe is interesting.
I realised I didn't put actual numbers around the two weekly values.
So on the new system, heating and hot water are using 12.44kWh electricity per day average.
On the old system, this time last year, we were using 91.08kWh gas per day average.
Saying again weather could be different for sure, that is still 13.7% of the energy used.
Electricity 21.89p/kWh
Gas 5.97p/kWh
12.44*0.2189 = £2.72 a day elec
91.08*0.0579 = £5.44 a day gas
BUT on a cost basis... weirdly, exactly half.
It feels mad and slightly indefensible that you can use 13% of the energy, and still pay 50% of the money. But the good news is that at some date in the not too distant future, I'll be able to either buy overnight, charge batteries and use during the day. Or, ultimately, a good chunk of the year, generate my own entirely.
I see Octopus's electricity rates are going up in the unit cost, but down in the standing charge. I am currently on a "fixed anytime rate" because we have EVs but don't do heaps of miles, and we have a heatpump which potters along all the time. And a hot tub of sorts.
Current kWh = 21.98p
Current standing = 62.22p
New kWh = 25.27p
New standing = 43.66p
Insanely irritatingly, i looked at the new gas pricing... 5.71p/kWh so gas is actually falling whilst electricity is getting more expensive.
HAHA and - I now can't see via the Octopus app what my gas tariff WAS because at midnight Octopus now longer shows gas (because it got disconnected today!).
Ofc I could look at old invoices from them, so there is that.
@bloor this is why I need my own data system. We changed suppliers and lost ALL of our historical usage data. 😳🤬
@bloor same moving house - I lost access to my historical consumption data for the old house. Thankfully Home Assistant remembers.
@bloor Octopus's historical prices for all electricity tariffs are available via their API to anybody, whether a customer or not. Haven't checked but I think gas prices are, too.
@bloor If you can sort your LiFePO4 batteries out you could use their ultra cheap rate (not sure what it is, but a mate of mine has PV and storage plus a heat pump and EV and he's rather chuffed).
@davep Yep!
Planning to do just that with Fogstar 32kWh and a VIctron Quattro 15K.
@davep The current 4 hours nighttime rate is just 8.5p a kWh.
So I could fill up my battery for a maximum of £2.55 a day at that rate. And ofc charge cars at the same time etc.
@davep I think the Quattro 15K and pull 41A peak off the 240v mains and shove it into the 48v battery side, meaning around 200A on the DC side. So in theory it should easily be able to fully charge a 32kWh battery pack from dead in under 4 hours.
@bloor Should be pretty easy, but you'd only want that in winter really if you risk losing extra daytime insolation (unless you can sell it for more).
@davep My notional plan is to do without solar, initially. So just have a battery storage type system, with grid and V2L inputs, and an output into my house/garage.
Then once that is working nicely and reliably, then find a solar installer who'll just do the roofwork/rails/panels to isolators in my loft, and let me hook it all up myself.
My theory is, if they see a well installed and reliable setup already, they may be more willing to add solar to it, piecemeal.
@bloor @davep Octopus Go is 5 hours. Eon Next drive is I think 6 or 7. When I did our maths both cosy and next drive beat the standard tariff without batteries for our use. Back then Eon was 7 at 7p or so, which with heating tending to be night biased and water tank and some load shifting was an easy win, though we went battery anyway.
@nick need a compatible car or charger though, which I won’t have
@etchedpixels @davep my strategy is going to be to call roofers who can do solar rather than solar companies
@bloor I am on Tracker for gas, and the rates are usually pretty low - I think it would be hard to make a heat pump work for me financially. Which is a big problem - IMHO the charges that aren't directly related to electricity production/distribution should be moved onto just the gas supply to make electric heating a more clear cut choice. Some of this might improve as gas is removed from the generation mix I suppose, but that feels like an unnecessary delay.
@bloor I think it's fair; you're paying for a lot more infrastructure with the electric; for the gas it's just being pumped to you; for elec if it's gas burning it's being burnt somewhere and running through the turbine (loses a big chunk, so more gas goes in to get you that elec energy out), then also their is payment for the wind/solar infrastructure, and cablling and pylons and the supply of blue smoke.
@penguin42 hmmmmmm I guess so … intuitively though it just feels like gas infra is so much more of an ongoing infra liability. But you are right, it probably isn’t.
@bloor @penguin42 they’re putting new gas mains in on the street next to ours, right now.
Very defensible for people to stay on gas for the foreseeable future. More houses going onto gas than coming off, still in 2025 in the UK. Meanwhile, our gas heating was double the carbon of our beef consumption last year, which itself was 2.5x the carbon of our total ICEV miles. Our leccy was 1/10th the carbon of our gas heating, or zero with our Ripple.
@bloor Our only remaining gas usage is for cooking. At £9 a month it'll take 15 years or so for the cumulative standing charge to exceed the cost of a new cooker (it's an 1100mm double oven range).
Or is it the other way round, that it'll take 15 years or so for the cost of a new cooker to be amortised against the removed standing charge?
There's probably a sunk cost fallacy and some false economy in there somewhere.
Anyway, I'll probably be dead before then either way!
Ticket prices for next year’s #MikroTik Professionals Conference are reduced until October 31st. Early birds really do catch the worm as space is also limited for the VIP Dinner so please make sure you book your tickets early rather than at the last minute and find we’re sold out. See https://mtpc.world for more info. Also we’re now calling for presenters for MikroTik related tech talks. Got a great solution using their gear? Tell us about it and you could be presenting it in March! 😀 #MTPC
Was served a YouTube ad for some kind of small plug-in room heater – i.e. the heater is kind of built right onto the plug, like a wifi booster – that will apparently be in every home in the UK by next year and thought, hm, that seems unlikely, and a ten second research revealed that yes, they’re illegal and will probably burn your house down! If you don’t have a suspicious nature online, how the fuck do you survive?
This is a tad special of @jlcpcb - they altered placement for one of my parts.
What did they change? Well, they do not say, but there is a clue here - if you look closely this is not "straight", it is a few degrees off. I can assure you my placement was at 0 degrees rotation, dead straight. Looking the other side you can see the alignment pegs are not centre of holes - what I uploaded was, exactly.
So WTF did they change it to be "off" like this? I'm assuming it will end up straight.
@jlcpcb Ooh, and another clue.
They moved the component bottom right in first picture slightly (they don't say how much or why and it is tiny). They normally do that if too close to another component. Well it was not.
But having turned the SD card holder slightly, it may now be too close. That is mental!