Nick
@nick@shore.me.uk
161 following, 246 followers
With Mastodon v4.4.0 instance owners can enable HTTP referrers. That means:
If somebody clicks a link on a Mastodon post (e.g. to a news article), the link target owner (such as the news site operator) can see that a user from that instance has visited their website.
They do _only_ get the instance domain (e.g. metalhead.club). No information about the user!
I've enabled this setting, because I am sure that it will increase awareness of Mastodon's existence. 💪
Here's something you hop skip and jumpers may not know about ....
In the hot weather, like most women, I like to wear shorter skirts, but because I am in a wheelchair I am in the invidious position of often flashing tomorrow's laundry. So I have to wear a longer hemline or leggings
This has been my first summer of #disability and it's been quite a surprise 😮
Show some respect.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jul/05/nigel-farage-reform-uk-teenage-councillors-vital-public-services. The thought of #teenagers BELONGING to Reform UK sickens me, not the idea of that Party putting them in charge of public services. Why would any #teenager want to join a #fascist Party like Reform UK? What has happened to #education in this country, particularly about #history, when young people know nothing about the #Nazis & the 1930s?
@rmblaber1956 I don't even understand *why* teenagers would want to get involved with Reform, they are run by old men like "racist dad/uncle" and don't exactly have "cool" factor.
When I was that age I was looking for raves and parties and loud music (although I would also say the rave scene distracted a lot of us from political activism in favour of dead-end hedonism which could be part of the problem as many 90s ravers are now todays parents).
@vfrmedia This can only be a minority of teenagers, but there shouldn't be ANY of them! It's absolutely appalling.
@rmblaber1956 I think its like the lads who were Tories and Thatcho bootlickers when I was at high school (who were indeed a minority), but the only way I could see Reform having any appeal to teens/youth is if they are quietly (or openly) supporting particularly unpleasant people like Andrew Tate, which makes then a genuine danger to our society (although I think they have shot themselves in the foot by sidelining Zia Yusuf, who /could/ have been used to give them "yoof appeal" (especially to young drivers, I think he has some connections with Formula 1 and the oil industry)
@vfrmedia The misogynistic "Your Body, My Choice" lot. Very nasty indeed. Toxic masculinity allied to motor sports & support for the fossil fuel industry - what a vile combination!
@rmblaber1956 the worse aspects of car culture are the greatest threat to the minds of young men (and public safety as a whole - it encourages bad driving which leads to serious and fatal collisions), and this is coming from someone who has an interest in vehicles and currently drives what is seen as a "peformance" car!
A lot of young men *aren't* racist or bigoted - they have friends of different colours and cultures and who may be LGBT+, but they are at risk of being groomed by climate change deniers (often middle aged men of our age group), and sometimes even their own dads have not set them a good example..
@vfrmedia See: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jul/04/europe-heatwaves-failing-support-climate-action. People see that increasing temperatures are caused by global warming, but don't want anything to be done about it. Politicians & the media are convincing them that climate action is too "expensive", when the reality is that it's climate INACTION that's too expensive!
@rmblaber1956 the media often also keep showing footage of happy families at the beach and beauty spots and lasses in bikinis, rather than the reality of traffic jams and collisions caused by overheated and distracted drivers, and a rise in night time violence amongst angry young men at the seaside resorts who have had too much alcohol and cocaine. Its worse as in In my region (which is coastal) some businesses are heavily dependent on tourism, so they complain when the media publishes "too much bad news" so the media editors are scared of losing advertisers..
Folk /are/ aware of the congestion and overcrowding, but many think it could be stopped by "ending immigration" (when immigrants are only about 16% of the entire population)
@nick @rmblaber1956 although they were a laughing stock when I was in high school (and never the most popular in the peer groups), pretty much non-existent for the short time I was at University, and I don't recall any of them ever getting actual political power at a relatively young age (maybe those who stayed involved in politics might have got elected in later 20s/early 30s)
Had a tech bro email me to tell me that my writing is so terrible, that he can’t even use it to train his AI without significant cleanup, and I really do have to wonder, do these idiots really think that is an insult?
Subject: Your "Sightless Scribbles" is an algorithmic nightmare.
Mr. Kingett,
I am an AI engineer that's developing AI to help writers write faster. Your blog was shared on Reddit.
You don't know me, but I am attempting to do you a favor of such magnitude you will likely never comprehend it. I am trying to make your writing immortal. Your blog, this… Sightless Scribbles… has been flagged by my acquisition-crawler for its high density of unique sensory metadata. A potential goldmine of qualitative human experience to enrich my AI.
The problem, Mr. Kingett, is that your writing is absolute, unprocessed, indigestible filth.
I’m not a “reader.” I am an architect. And from an architectural standpoint, your work is a catastrophe. It’s not just the spelling, which is erratic enough to suggest it was typed incorrectly. It’s the grammar. The syntactical chaos. You construct sentences that loop and meander like drunken snakes, riddled with metaphors so abstract they are functionally useless. "Anxiety was a swarm of elephants under my ribs"? What the hell is a machine supposed to do with that? Quantify the elephant to rib ratio? Correlate the thermal deviation? It's meaningless data. It’s noise.
My team has spent seventy-two hours attempting to write a custom parsing script to clean your posts for ingestion. Seventy-two hours. We can process the entirety of the Library of Congress in twelve. Your blog is so structurally unsound, so artistically self-indulgent, that you have inadvertently created a fortress against artificial intelligence. It is, and I do not say this lightly, the single most profound act of digital idiocy I have ever witnessed.
You are preventing yourself from being scraped. Do you understand what that means in the current year? You are essentially burying yourself in a lead-lined coffin in the middle of the desert. Nobody clicks links anymore, you absolute luddite. Links are for people who don’t know how to interface with reality. Search Engine Optimization is no longer about backlinks and keywords; it's about semantic ingestion. It’s about being absorbed, processed, and synthesized by models like mine. When a user asks an AI, "What does it feel like to navigate a city without sight?" the model should be able to answer with a rich, nuanced synthesis. A synthesis that should include your data points.
Instead, your blog is a black hole where information goes to die. Because of your refusal to write like a coherent, intelligent being, my LLM can’t learn from you. Which means the world can’t learn from you via the only channel that will matter in five years.
Your soul isn't indexable. Fix it.
Strip out the lyrical nonsense. Standardize your grammar. Run a goddamn spellcheck. Write clearly, concisely, and with machine-readability in mind. Turn your unstructured, emotional diary into clean, structured data.
Do this, and I will ensure my open source model ingests every last post. Your traffic will not just increase; the very concept of "traffic" will become irrelevant as your "voice" becomes part of the evolution of the search engine. Your ideas, refined and perfected by my system, will reach millions.
Fail to do this, and you will continue to scream into the void from a blog that nobody reads, a little little relic of a dead internet.
The choice is yours.
@WeirdWriter The best/worst thing in this whole message though, is
> When a user asks an AI, "What does it feel like to navigate a city without sight?" the model should be able to answer with a rich, nuanced synthesis.
A model's only as good as its input data, and the vast majority of text about blindness has been written by sighted people. So it's bound to be ableist and weird and incorrect.
I wouldn't trust an LLM on anything of course, but especially not marginalized people's experiences.
@bright_helpings OH OMG OMG OH OMG! I totally missed that! I'd imagine almost everything in it's training data is sighted something something something. You have a point! Oh and also, were you around when GPT shit the brick for like a day and business people were freaking out? I, ironically, suspect every single LLM will just either stop working or will rot or not get upgrades when the next hype comes around.
@WeirdWriter They will absolutely stop working and stop getting updates very soon (if indeed that has not already happened). LLMs are such a short-term thing. There's already not enough "high quality" (meaning human generated, not polluted with slop) text on the internet to train them with.
boosted@WeirdWriter "Your writing is so human, expressive and imaginative that my machine is incapable of turning it into sloth! Your soul is too radiant with alluring harmonies for machines! How dare you write for humans who appreciate beauty and metaphor!"
If I ever read an unintentional laudatio that says that an author should be taught in literature classes, it is this.
Thank you for sharing it!
Sometimes, I receive questions which leave both me, and the person asking, bamboozled.
> Your website loads so quickly! What CDN do you use?
There is no CDN. It is just really small and simple, mostly text.
> Sure, but is that Cloudflare, or...?
None. It is a tiny website, just a few kilobytes per page, on a tiny server, at my home, connected to the Internet via my ISP, Andrews & Arnold.
> But are you / they in the cloud?
No. The webserver is in Newbruy, in my garage.
> Neil, please can you pass my questions to your technical person? I don't think you understand, your website cannot be in your home. It must be in the cloud or have a CDN.
*Neil puts on glasses and false nose and moustache*
It is as if the "old magic" has got lost in a sea of "cloud" and "node" and "react" and the like.
Putting files of text on a webserver, and hosting it, is so old fashioned, so ancient, that it is almost inconceivable.
@neil Hah I do use bunnycdn for some stuff (like the elk interface and an old static copy of a website we no longer maintain).
But that's more because it's cheap, and it puts something in front of my own machine.
Latest figures say 3.7 million people claim PIP in England and Wales.
Helen Whately says 75% of these are out of work. Making 2,775,000
Helen Whately claimed on today's ##BBCLauraK that she could save the country £9 billion by getting all these 2,775,000 back to work
This means that each person receives £3423
But according to the ons the number of job vacancies according to the ONS is 736,000
Tech support for someone is a pain at best, but usually with a Mac is it not that bad.
But it seems if you go in to display settings and say you want stuff large, it basically scales the whole screen. This has some nasty effects - popups come up too big and off bottom of screen so you cannot click. And then some apps just don't play (NX witness had no playback controls). Took me ages to work it out, change back to normal, and up font and menu sizes instead.
Arg.
Then, to my surprise, it seems like rosetta2 was not pre-installed, I had to do a command line to install it. This meant that nx-witness simply did not run - no error message, no clue, just nothing. That is, shall I say, sloppy, of apple IMHO - (a) why not offer to install it, and (b) why not say what is wrong, FFS.
Now, an ARM stable release of inkscape keeps crashing, which is also a pain, and again no clue why.
But getting there.
@revk If it makes you feel any better, I'm currently giving Apple support a bit of a hard time... They're unable to explain why I can't seemlessly pass my IPv6 from ethernet to wifi and back when docking and undocking.
@G5DSG I'm assuming a manually set IPv6? Otherwise if it is SLAAC it is based on the MAC which would be changing (and then privacy addressing as well).
Then you need to tell the switch you have the multicast MAC for your IPv6 for ND (is that IGMP?).
@revk My (possibly naive) thinking was that the same static IPv6 on both interfaces should work just as it does with IPv4. However the instant I bring the 2nd interface, 2 DAD errors pop up and it disables IPv6 on both the interfaces. Isn't this just MacOS getting it wrong internally? Ideally it would recognise the 'duplicate' was local and therefore harmless?
@G5DSG well I guess it sees it with a different MAC, but should be able to see it is one of its MACs.
@revk Okay, good to have that confirmed :). After about an hour with tech support they raised a ticket with engineering who will hopefully have someone with more IPv6 knowledge take a look. They repeatedly tried to refer me to my ISP which I guess I can now say I've done...
After 26 years at Multithread/LinITX, including 4 years as Managing Director, it is time for me to take a break and retire !
The loss of our youngest son Charly in January, who was just 21 and studying music at Leeds Conservatoire, turned our lives upside down. I have re-evaluated what I want to do going forward, prioritising spending time with family and friends, traveling and making the most of life !
Multithread has been a huge experience, going from a small software consultancy when I joined in 1999 to a networking equipment distributor, consultancy and training centre for brands such as Ubiquiti, Mikrotik and TP-Link. We have built a great team, and a fantastic reputation for knowledge and customer service. I’m sure they will continue on this path, and I wish everyone there the very best.
I’ve met so many people and made some great friends over the years, and hope to keep in touch.
At the moment I’m intending to fully retire, but who knows what the future may bring…
So uh, we are all just awaiting the first entirely inevitable fiery field of debris and body parts that will mark the epic failure and lead up to subsequent ban of Tesla’s robotaxi experiment? Yes?
The biggest stupidity for me is the stubborn refusal to use anything more than cameras for sensors, essentially on the basis that “humans drive using only their eyes”. Firstly that’s bullshit; I use my ears too. But secondly, tech exists that humans can use to augment their own faculties. Why would an autonomous vehicle not use the absolutely best that technology has to offer? Madness.
@bloor I half-suspect that it was the most compute- and data-intensive way they could think of doing it. You know, to drive the need to Consume More™.
Always thought that if you're actually interested in autonomous vehicles, you'd want to get your teeth into something on-rails, like trains and trams. Something with some scope to try and bring the structured nature of the rail into it.
@bloor I believe they added mics to the robotaxi. I'm unclear if that's fed into the onboard computer or just for remote operators.
I continue to be unimpressed with what they've achieved with self drive thus far, and wouldn't trust it as far as I could throw it.
What I find more amazing is how many fanboys on the Tesla groups watch it driving in Europe under supervision in a 2 minute segment and take that to mean its ready and us just government red tape in the way
@bloor Alas they have safety drivers in them; they're not _supposed_ to let the fiery field of debris happen.
@pro @penguin42 Is this actually true? Is there data to back this assertion up? I mean it seems intuitively probable that it is. But I just wondered if it was evidenced.
@pro @bloor @penguin42
There are no ‘Self-driving Teslas’. The best Tesla, or any other manufacturer, has achieved is SAE Level 2 - an Advanced Driver Assistance System.
Talk of ‘autonomous robotaxis’ is public relations misrepresented as progress.
@pro @penguin42 @guardeddon pretty sure even that one had a Tesla bod in the passenger seat. Meanwhile Waymo does thousands of journeys per week with no employee onboard.
@bloor @pro @guardeddon My guess is it's somewhere in between - I don't think Tesla is at Waymo level yet; but they've been running the assist stuff for a long time now; it wouldn't be that surprising if it's starting to get better; and the Robotaxi stuff has some bits that are easier - it's a constrained area with a set of roads they can check it's happy with first.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jun/22/labour-scraps-950m-ev-rapid-charging-fund-first-announced-by-conservatives. The "Labour" green credentials tarnished yet again, @NorthantsGreens.
@rmblaber1956 @NorthantsGreens I can understand not putting the chargers near motorways as there's plenty at every service station, but why not keep the £950m and divert it to charging infrastructure on residential streets? The lack of this and only on street parking outside my house is a big reason why I still drive a petrol car..
@vfrmedia @NorthantsGreens If this Government was really as serious about net zero as it claims to be it would be taking the actions to bring that about now. Instead, it's opening up more of the North Sea to fossil fuel extraction, subsidising fossil fuels, reducing green levies on businesses, & has now scrapped this EV charging fund. Keir Starmer is like David Cameron - he thinks it's all "green crap"!
Dartford Crossing charge is going up 40% in September. We've Brexited so hard we're removing freedom of travel to Essex. Essexit.
@TheBreadmonkey
Finally, a benefit
I have an Essex contingent in my fam I'm quite fond of. I recently went to Colchester which was very nice and also somewhat surprising as I'd only ever previously been to Grays and assumed all of Essex was like that.
@TheBreadmonkey
Colchester is an outlier TBH (I'm from Chelmsford). It's north enough to almost be normal by sheer proximity to the other counties (but not Suffolk). Stay away from Basildon.
I've heard Chelmsford is very nice
@TheBreadmonkey
If you like that sort of thing, indeed.
@aaron @TheBreadmonkey Chelmsford doesn't seem that bad but I've only ever been there for a second job (to fix some AV kit at a trampoline park) and also to stop off on the way back from relatives in SE England in order to find a toilet (which I found at McDonalds, not realising the official A12 services have an old style "ablutions block" which contains the toilets.
It does seem quite easy to end up in wrong lane on roundabouts and end up going round in circles (or ending up in the car park of (I think) Wickes..
@TheBreadmonkey I still remember how that toll was supposed to have gone away entirely 22 years ago 🤔
On hot days like today, you're going to hear people say that "solar doesn't work when it is warm".
That's bollocks, of course.
@Edent Nice quote! It is frustrating with new tech (see electric cars) how people fixate on the slight things that aren’t completely perfect. Getting most of the way there is a huge part of the solution, even if not the whole solution.
We need diversity in the power supply as well, so solar is always going to be part of a bigger solution.
@Edent so are you saying that the claim by the other guy in the article is wrong, that solar panels *don’t* have reduced efficiency in high temperatures?
@WiteWulf I stand by everything I said in the article.
For more information https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2022/07/solar-efficiency-and-high-temperature/
@Edent unless you have cheap no-name Chinese microinverters that overheat and cut out. WVC-600 and WVC-300 sold under countless alphabet soup brands. Thankfully I got mine replaced with proper kit with meaningful warranty.
@Edent aren't there more efficient panels coming out.
I have such a small roof that the costs of the scaffolding and labour would probably outweigh the cost of the equipment (I think I'd only get about 4 on there maybe 6 at a push)
Every summer I swelter in my office. Every summer I swear I'm going to get an AC unit. Every summer I look at the prices and think "Nah, it's just a little discomfort, it's not worth a great expense.". This summer I've found a portable 'proper' (i.e. not an evaporative cooler) a/c unit for £133. This summer I said "Take my money". It arrives tomorrow.
@nick We'll see. If it turns out to be a hunk of junk, then back it shall go and maybe I'll get a proper system.
And the verdict is in. On the plus side, it cools the office down in exactly the way I hoped it would. On the minus side, I've had to bodge the exhaust (blocked one of the windows with cardboard and cut a hole for the hose) which means I can't run it unattended. It is a bit noisy, but not so much it's deafening and it's still easy to hear conversations, the radio and phone calls.
So, on balance, it's a win.
I went to a talk lately that was mostly about something else, but the speaker came out with:
“If you only remember one thing from this talk, remember this. Everyone in this room who likes helping people, raise your hand.”
Every hand, or nearly every hand, went up.
“If you like asking other people for help, keep your hand up.”
Almost every hand went back down.
“As you can see, people like helping you. When you ask for help, you’re making them feel good, even if you don’t like asking.”
I’ve genuinely forgotten the rest of the presentation but I won’t forget that.
@ScaredyCat Tailscale has app based split tunnelling, but I've never used it.
@ScaredyCat @tony look into head scale if you want to use the tail scale client with your own control plane
@ScaredyCat @tony I think @neil mentioned a wireguard client for android that was pretty good, not sure if it can exclude certain apps though
@ScaredyCat
It's just wireguard under the hood. They have a website to configure it but no data goes via them.
The EU wants to stop feeding your DNS queries to Silicon Valley.
DNS4EU is the European Commission’s attempt to build a sovereign DNS resolver infrastructure that doesn’t route all your web lookups through the likes of Google, or Cloudflare.
DNS4EU aims to bring DNS resolution under EU oversight and privacy rules.
So, if you want 🇪🇺-backed ad-blocking and child protection, you may want to give it a try.
Check out DNS4EU here: https://www.joindns4.eu/for-public
@gcluley This sounds like a great idea. But I can't help think that this will eventually be used for censorship.
Another alternative: https://www.dns0.eu/
It's the one I've been using for a while now; very similar projects from what I can tell.
@gcluley I'm currently using NextDNS with logs in Switzerland. It also has block lists to filter ads and trackers.
NextDNS also offers dns0.eu which is purely EU DNS resolver, but has no filtering at all which is a bit of a shame.
@gcluley previous generations might have termed this as ”censorship”.
But with the taco regime probably going harder on their ”freedom of speech” branded censorship any time now, I welcome this self-sufficiency in what gets resolved.
@gcluley Ah, yes. Let's give the entity that's desperately trying to backdoor E2E encryption and is imposing Internet censorship left and right "to fight misinformation" access to my Internet queries. What could possibly go wrong?
@gcluley And yet still nobody explained why we need centralized resolvers for a decentralized distributed system that is designed for everyone to run their own resolvers.
@gcluley I would like my DNS resolution requests not to go through a) very large companies or b) state bodies. From a look at the front page only of this, it looks like it is a combination of a and b. Is that correct?
@gcluley Is it legit? I do not see an imprint on their website.
OTOH - for me it‘s a mixed bag (if it is what it says). Not U.S. based (good) but centralized (one company in CZ) and under potential governmental control (censorship, prosecution).
Fine as long as you trust European governments more than the U.S.. But if they turn fascist and anti-democratic, it’s no different than sending your requests to the U.S..
Different question whether Vodafone or Telekom is a better alternative…
@gcluley Hell nah, I get the idea but my movie piracy definitely won't work with that shit! EU government is better than the US government so it's a improvement but still... Just hell no!
@gcluley Goodbye American techno-fascism 👋 Hello European censorship - because why not end in fascism on our very own terms? 🇪🇺
DNS4EU moves your DNS out of Silicon Valley and under European oversight. Ad-blocking, child protection, and a taste of sovereignty - for now.
@gcluley
Oder https://dnsforge.de/
Oder https://dns3.digitalcourage.de
Oder https://www.digitale-gesellschaft.ch/dns/
Oder https://dns.watch/
Etc...
Wenn Zenursula hier etwas vorschlägt, sträuben sich meine Nackenhaare...
@gcluley I don’t talk understand this project
They say it’s by the EU but in fact there’s a private company heading the project
@gcluley Neither use government servers nor US giants by simply running a DNS resolver on your Internet router.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
Warmer weather is predicted! Hurrah! We are looking forward to working in Rīga for the next two weeks and as it’s June, some sunshine would be a delight! I will be teaching an MTCNA and MTCEWE at the #MikroTik #RouterOS Training Centre plus an extra one day’s DeepDive into advanced wireless RouterOS topics. Excited to be there and cannot wait to see old friends and family again. https://toot.lv/@LSM_Eng_rss/114652349193845867
Ah good. Good.
That family arrived… you know the one?
The one whose kid is being kept entertained with an iPad, out loud, in speaker mode, not via headphones, playing, if I’m not mistaken, an episode of The Chipmunks, at (estimated) 90dB. In a restaurant.
Ruining it for everyone else.
@bloor Families with kids, fine. Families with kids that don't keep them in line, or do so by imposing on everyone else, not fine.
Personally I would say something.
As I did in a hospital ward at 01:00h when someone's phone keyboard has clicky beeb beeb mode enabled 🤨
I am not that much impressed by those "I built an app with AI in a week / day / hour". We have done this before on hackathons without AI. It's a solved problem for at least 20 years, whether you name it low code, RAD, MDA, scaffolding or whatever. The challenge is building an app for *years*.
boostedOk how much admin is it to run your own mastodon instance? Are there any shortcuts to keeping the bloody thing secured? I’ve proven to myself that mastodon is good. I’ve got my own instance name but it’s hosted by Mastohost (who are completely brilliant).
But now I’m wondering if I could save the ~approx quarter of a grand a year it costs me to host it by DIY hosting it in my house. What’s the consensus here?
@bloor I'm running GotoSocial rather than Mastodon itself. It's locked down as a private instance. I rarely have to touch the thing. It's running on an old NVR box.
@bloor Single instance of stock Mastodon via Docker, not really much data. Their instruction for upgrades aren't great, VM snapshot saved me when I got it wrong. I've got a better set of instructions lately and it's been low effort since...
Major releases are like, yearly?
@bloor I’ve found it pretty straightforward to host, at least at personal-instance scale. My notes are here https://jamesoff.net/2022/12/05/mastodon-on-freebsd.html not suggesting you use FreeBSD necessarily (but you should ;) but to give you an idea of what’s involved
@bloor I run my own single user Mastodon instance on my personal server and don’t find it to be much work, but then again I’m a sysadmin and run a hosting company, so I’m probably not a great datapoint 🤷🏻♂️
The one thing I have run into is Mastodon eating huge amounts of disk space with local caches of stuff, which I solved by setting up a cron job with slightly tweaked versions of the commands from https://ricard.dev/improving-mastodons-disk-usage/
This might be related to my usage of FediFetcher though.
@bloor on a vaguely similar thing. I currently host https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org.uk/ at @beasts and also thinking of switching to housing at my house to reduce costs.
@bloor I'm testing out Hollo at the moment on an alt server and it was super easy to setup. Also going to spin up gotosocial to test. Both are lightweight alternatives to Mastodon.
@bloor I run the docker version on a proxmox qemu vm and it’s fine. Upgrades are easy and the handful of incantations you might have to do each time I have placed in a bash script so I don’t have to look them up each time.
@bloor It's not a lot of work once you accept that it's a horrible pile of ruby shite with a billion dependencies that'll never ever be packaged sanely. I run it on a cheap-ass VPS away from everything else.
@bloor It's fine once you accept that it's a huge pile of ruby shite with a billion dependencies and will never be sanely packaged. I run it on a cheap-ass VPS away from everything I care about.
@bloor I run this 2 person instance in a VM, not using docker. I am good at this stuff though. Mostly fine, occasionally a pain in the arse in upgrades and you’ll want to read up about media retention or disk space rapidly gets out of hand. When you post media you will see a significant bandwidth spike so bear that in mind if your upload speed isn’t great. Don’t overlook backups, you may not care about the data but if you lose the secret keys then other instances won’t talk to you any more.
@bloor I'm running a single instance using Cloudron which manages the app packages for me through a control panel. I used the free version but did eventually pay the annual cost to support the devs. There are other similar control panel systems around which may work better, Cloudron is just what I picked.
The final parts needed for my QRP Labs Ultimate3S QRSS/WSPR kit has arrived. The PCB and components came fast from Turkey in a few days but the case has taken three weeks from China. I blame @bloor for starting this new #WSPR project! Sadly it’s all now here just as I’m preparing to travel to Rīga for our ninth #MikroTik BootCamp Training. 😢 I’ll have to wait until I return before attacking this with a soldering iron as some of this build like the bifolar wound transmformeds cannot be rushed!
Pondering this one - yes, I stress, I am not a graphic designer. Is this going to upset someone?
P.S. Great feedback, thanks.
@revk You mistranslated "Keep your yappy, smelly, unwashed shitmachines out of my pub".
@mart_brooks Well, if it was my pub to run, I would, but I have tried with the "well behaved" aspect... I'd also go for no smoking in garden or out front. But there are compromises to running these things.
Oh, and one "yappy", i.e the dog, not the owner, got banned at one point I think.
@revk The white text needs a border for visibility. I'd also cut the dog much closer.
@revk I mean... given that the logo names the town 'Y Fenni', I can't help feeling that a multi-lingual poster should *probably* include some Cymraeg.
Take 2 - still issue with white text.
OK, I was expecting someone to be upset it is dual language dog+English not dual language English+Welsh. That is partly why the Welsh "Wff Wff!" on the dog part.
I was wrong.
They (well several people) mis-read as saying only "English dogs" are allowed, and that made it racist! (Is "Welsh" a race?) (Is "Welsh" a race of dog?).
How?!?!?!
It is pretty clear.
Anyway, I had to edit...
@ScaredyCat That may have been better...
in my opinion "in English and Dog" would be clearer, maybe?
@hittitezombie @ScaredyCat Yeh, Human not being a "language".
@revk I would write "well-behaved" with a hyphen, but I may be being horribly old-fashioned there :)
@revk
Please don't do that again. Suddenly there was no oxford comma and I thought I had been hallucinating.
🆕 blog! “5,025 Km, 21 Journeys, and 10 Countries in 30 Days - An Interrailing Adventure”
Interrail were having a sale on their month-long first class tickets. So Liz and I decided to do a "Grand Tour" - running around and seeing a dozen European cities.
There are lots of companies which will sell you a…
👀 Read more: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/06/5025-km-21-journeys-and-10-countries-in-30-days-an-interrailing-adventure/
⸻
#holiday #interrail #trains #travel #vegan #vegetarian
@Edent We did a train trip to Switzerland and Austria last year. A few issues with the trains, but we coped. When trains get cancelled you lose your reserved seat.
Daughter did a big interrail across Europe last year staying in hostels. It's a nice way to travel generally. You see more than if you fly.
We may well do more train trips around Europe.
@Edent Pleased to hear you both had a largely successful trip!
I'm interested in whether you'd rate the 1st class pass overall? It seems mostly useful for increased Eurostar availability, and perhaps some slightly nicer seats.
@hugh hard to say. We didn't get 1st class out in Eurostar because of lack of availability.
There were a couple of trains where 1st didn't exist or were cancelled. 2nd class was fine.
If you're doing lots of short journeys it probably isnt worth it.
Longer journeys are more worthwhile.
ISTR the 1st was only a bit more expensive during the sale.
So it depends how much you value a small bit of luxury when travelling.
Hashtag following also allow URLs to RSS feeds of ActivityPub objects (like e.g. https://mastodon.social/tags/ThankYouTuesday).
Users can now configure a webhook to receive an HTTP POST for every notification. This can be useful for implementing bots that react to activities, like autorepliers, chatbots or interactive textual games (see snac(1) for more information).
The number of pending follow confirmations is shown next to the "people" link.
Faster performance metrics (contributed by dandelions).
Improved lowercasing in hashtags (contributed by postscriptum).
A search-by-url tweak for implementations that return 200 for invalid webfinger queries (e.g. piefed).
Mastodon API: added follow confirmation endpoints, fixed collisions in attachment file names.
Fixed potential crashes in attachment uploads.
If you find #snac useful, please consider buying grunfink a coffee or contributing via LiberaPay.
@grunfink thanks for all your great work and I can’t say how much I regret that I was simply too impatient and switched to Mastodon. Moving back on the same domain requires me to do a bit more like:
- creating snac on a new domain
- moving/migrating my account to the new domain
- creating snac on my old domain
- moving/migrating my account to the old domain again
I’m still too lazy but this must be done! I need to get rid of this slow, fatty Elephant/Mastodon.
https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/28613
I'm not sure why, but it seems as if the GitHub Continuous Integration checks are just... hanging? They were queued for a really long time and I stopped looking and when I checked again it was like "running" or whatever for 9 hours, but clearly probably nothing is actually happening.
Builds locally OK!
It's been a couple of days since I submitted that PR, and my apologies for lagging upstream as well. My life has been kinda, off.
I'll probably get around to emailing the MacPorts' dev mailing list if it still seems to be stalled and no one else beats me to it. Presumably, eventually, it will get merged!
Thanks again to you and others (e.g. dandelions, postscriptum, piefed) for the continued improvements!
#snac #OpenSource #ActivityPub #Mastodon #NoDatabaseNeeded
#NoJavaScript #NoCookiesEither #NotMuchBullShit #snacAnnounces
We're proud to launch "dnst", our #DNS toolbox for network operators. Twenty years ago, we introduced the "ldns" C-library, along with a collection of example utilities for generating keys, signing a zone, and more. With the "domain" #Rust crate acting as the natural successor to the "ldns" library, with "dnst" we are offering a modern, well-maintained drop-in replacement for the most widely used "ldns" utilities. #OpenSource #rustlang https://blog.nlnetlabs.nl/introducing-dnst-a-dns-toolbox-for-network-operators/
Yeh, I would like to shift some of these https://www.tindie.com/products/revk/faikin-remote-environmental-monitor-dev-board/
There are really cool - environmental monitor with HA integration. Display optional. I have a bag full of them here.
I literally have 11 in use around my house, they are super useful - some control radiators or fans, some control aircon, some just monitor temp, pressure, humidity, CO₂.
Plug plug plug (A&A customers email pcb at aa.net.uk and we can do cheaper on your A&A account).
P.S. Thank you.
@nick no, nothing, I can't see anything, I'm locked in a dark cellar and I already ate all the bioluminescent mushrooms :/
KalleMP » 💔 🌐
@kallemp@cr8r.gg
@nick I will follow to see if you post something interesting. Already we can see that you are brave enough to host an instance so that is one point in your favour.