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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • The laws of physics mean that no matter what we do with carbon capture it is never going to be cheaper and less energy to emit it and then capture it again. This is a foolish endeavour the focus should be on the green transition with Wind, Solar and Storage combined with ensuring infrastructure is there for Electric Vehicle transition. This is the sort of investment the fossil fuel wants governments to make that will have no impact and allow them to continue to emit.


  • Universities have been running Linux since the very early versions. Slackware was pretty common back in the 90s and 2000s and universities had labs full of them not least because there weren’t really laptops so they had to have enough machines for all the students. Universities have been heavily involved in the development of unix from its inception and a lot of the tools were initially written by university professors.


  • I noticed today searching that the date search no longer seems to work right. There are some terms that only appeared since 2020 and up until my recent attempts those terms produced no results on DDG when date constrained but now produce terms in articles clearly after that date. I don’t know if this is some personalisation nonsense or always pulling but results if the constraints don’t match or what but its seriously problematic and means I can’t trust the date constraints anymore.





  • It really depends on the project. Some of them take breaking changes seriously and don’t do them and auto migrate and others will throw them out on “minor” number releases and there might be a lot of breaking changes but you only run into one that impacts you occasionally. I typically don’t want containers that are going to be a lot of work to keep up to date so I jettison projects that have unreliable releases for whatever reason and if they put out a breaking change its a good time to re evaluate whether I want that container at all and look at alternatives.

    So no its not safe, but depending on the project it actually can be.



  • Over the years I have used OSMC for my TV. I have never used it for streaming however always internal across the network streaming of my own content. It worked reasonably well for the most part although I have had issues with Samba in recent versions and have stopped using it. I can’t say much about its streaming, mostly for that you need a supported android or similar device rather than an open source one.


  • I have done this a few times, so long as the drive isn’t mounted it works fine.

    One advantage of this approach compared to clonezilla is you can pipe it through netcat or similar and move it to another machine. You can also first pipe it through gzip as well to save on the transfer bytes a bit as well and then on the other end just store the compressed image or unzip it. Combine a few tools together and you have quite a lot of capability for complete image backups but its usually best done for the boot drives from a live USB.


  • Ideally for your router you want something that runs an open source firmware (OpenWRT, DD-WRT, OPNSense, FreshTomato). Its better because you get a completely unlocked everything you need system with security patches for the hardware’s true lifetime. Every router company stops with the security updates after a few years and then at some point it becomes part of a bot net or one of this mass hack events. Its best not to play in that game and instead run some open source firmware from the outset.

    The best way to start is to look at the website for openwrt.org and use their filtering to find a device that supports your needs (at least 5 LAN ethernet ports I guess and some wifi but AC sounds like it will do). The other option is a more typical 4 LAN port router which will give you a lot more options and then add a switch to that, doesn’t sound like you care too much about it being managed or >1gbps so they are also dirt cheap.



  • I don’t think modern Raspberry pi’s make much sense unless you are using GPIOs or really need the low power consumption. The 3 and the 4 were OK price wise but the pi 5 is quite close to all these N100 mini computers and they are a lot more performance and expansion compared to a raspberry pi 5 and still quite low power.

    Either a Topton or similar N100 based machine or a mini PC second hand is the way to go at the ~$100 mark. The mini PC will be faster and probably more expandable and cheaper but also more power consumption.




  • When they are reading out the results they do say how many spoiled ballots there were, the problem is the BBC et el usually cut off just as that is being read and they don’t count it across the country or keep the results and as the results start coming in faster you don’t hear it. The spoiled ballots doesn’t seem to make it into any of the official stats for an election that I can see. So unfortunately its one of those acts that ought to be better than not voting but in practice turns out to be basically the same.

    I certainly wont be voting for the Conservatives or Labour but as far as protests go I am better off voting for another party that wont win as a protest than spoiling the ballot as it will be more visible and included in all the stats.


  • People don’t realise how common this is in our society unless you are a minority. Its everywhere. The state abuses disabled people via the DWP, the doctors do the same to disabled people by refusing to treat or put secretly DNRs on their records. Access is awful everywhere and people with wheelchairs fail to get on buses because the spot is taken by a pram which its not allowed to be used for, then there is the removal of accessible bridges for the train network replaced with ones that aren’t accessible, the lifts barely work when they are installed. Then there is all the attacks and verbal abuse on the streets from random people and so much more besides. Its everywhere in every place a minority would go.

    Despite whatever self reported level of discrimination the UK gets as one of the best in the world any minority in this country can tell you how many times a day they are abused by someone else. Its every single day. The Police, NHS and other state functions all do it and there are no consequences for any of it. It is so common infact its not news and rarely makes the news, this one is odd for making it into the press because this happens in schools across the country every year and it certainly happened at my school photos.

    It is hard to accept this basic reality as someone who isn’t a constant victim of our society but if you listen to the people who are the victims of this stuff its relentless.


  • This is almost certainly Covid. We already know it damages the brain and attacks the executive as well as behavioural centres of the brain and children are out sick for twice as long from school directly due to sickness. We are also busy trying to force children with Long Covid, of which there are 68,000 in the UK now, into school and unfortunately that will make them very unwell. Most schools are having to use a lot of substitute teachers due to doubling of sickness and teachers are the second hardest hit profession with Long Covid (behind medical staff).

    It will keep getting worse as more and more suffer from Long Covid impacts.