swizzlestick
@swizzlestick@lemmy.zip
- Comment on Lemmy.zip Server Update July 2025 4 hours ago:
Shoutout to @gazby@lemmy.zip then, what a trooper :)
- Comment on Lemmy.zip Server Update July 2025 8 hours ago:
You’re early!
I’ll actually read this now :)
- Comment on Corporations are saving the planet! 12 hours ago:
Exactly - some are perfectly fine. The cheap ones are terrible, crossthread too easily, get up in your face, dribble, or all of the above.
Sports style bottles solved the problem long before standard caps got in the game. They get disposed of together here either way, even if the cap gets yanked off for being stupid.
I don’t understand how they end up separate in disposal in the first place. The whole point is that you can reseal the bottle and move/store it without leaking. If you’re not actively using the bottle, it gets resealed to move or store. When you finish the bottle, you probably have the cap still in hand or very close by.
Tangentially, I’d love to see a Pfand type system here.
- Comment on What's a good instance to be on at the moment? 1 week ago:
We’ve opened a piefed instance too - early days yet though: piefed.zip
- Comment on Hosting virtualbox for my students 1 week ago:
Whatever way you go for setting up the systems themselves, I’ve found dwservice.net to be perfect for accessing systems with only a browser.
The host component is Mac, Windows and Linux compatible. The clients need only an account at DW. Hosts tied to your own account can be shared with others.
Depending on host OS, you get screen, terminal and fire transfer access. Sessions are logged if you need to review who’s accessed what.
Free. Donation optional.
- Comment on Lemmy.zip Updated to Lemmy 0.19.12 1 week ago:
I almost worried. Actually used my alt for all of 5 minutes 😂
Nicely done and welcome back all.
- Comment on The hidden cost of self-hosting 1 week ago:
I condensed down from a power hungry tower server to a couple of thinkstations and a nas. Much nicer on the power.
- Comment on Scheduled Maintenance Tuesday 17th June 12:00 UTC 1 week ago:
Good luck 🤞
- Comment on Announcing: Piefed.zip - our new Piefed instance! 1 week ago:
At the very least, backups have been fire-tested. We were back up and running within a day when one of the recent upgrades went all to shit.
I have a non-zip alt that sits idle and hopefully will stay idle :)
- Comment on Announcing: Piefed.zip - our new Piefed instance! 2 weeks ago:
All sounds good. Piefed might not be my style, but pitching into .zip as a collective - whatever form it takes - certainly is.
Though I’m sure you will, please police your community sourced mods effectively.
Onwards and upwards, looking forward to seeing how it all develops :)
- Comment on Announcing: Piefed.zip - our new Piefed instance! 2 weeks ago:
Probably not for me, but can’t deny the popularity. Questions:
How distinct is this instance from piefed.zip? Running alongside on same hardware, different hardware at the same host or completely separate?
How will this affect the donation model? What separation or merging of funds do you have in mind? I’m happy either way, but it should be made clear sooner rather than later.
This instance is run by the same team as Lemmy.zip
this doesn’t affect our Lemmy instance in any way.
These two statements are at odds. If the same staff labour is now divided among two instances, then there is an effect. I worry about running into the lemm.ee problem of too few staff to deal with the load of an expanding ‘zippyverse’. I know we’ve added more staff (love you ♥️), but would not want to burn them out. More on the team soon or are you all currently ok with workload?
Best of luck!
- Comment on Bambu Lab Controversy Deepens: Firmware Update Sparks Backlash 2 weeks ago:
That is also a very good point. Not something I would ever allow.
Keep the target audience in mind though, who probably have Ring cameras and other ‘phoney-homey’ budget Chinese crap littered around. Still doesn’t really register on their radar.
- Comment on Bambu Lab Controversy Deepens: Firmware Update Sparks Backlash 2 weeks ago:
Release your models under a license that requires the printer that prints it to be open source.
That has about as much sway as me telling you what bowl you must eat your breakfast from. Completely unenforceable.
Restricting models in such a way would also in itself against core values.
Bambu make great printing appliances but that’s about it. It’s still a good recommendation for someone who just wants to print as a starting point, and unconcerned with much else. The same kind of people would buy OEM cartridges at 3-5x cost for their paper printers and simply don’t care. File goes in, model comes out. Vendor lock-in doesn’t matter to them.
Other options exist for those of us who want to tinker, learn a thing or two, or simply just be in control of their shit.
Still, there will always be a ‘but…’ when I’m mentioning the company to someone looking to start printing. Then they can decide based on their own values.
- Comment on Lemmy.zip 2nd Birthday Giveaway! 🍰 2 weeks ago:
Always welcome. Best of luck with it & be careful working with our around mains electricity. Get a sparky in if you’re at all unsure.
If you’re looking at making a start on smarting up a home, or just bringing a load of existing smart devices under a single point of control - I can’t recommend Homeassistant enough.
The hardware requirements are any old lump of junk (bust laptop, etc) recent enough to have UEFI. Or just run on your existing PC as a virtual machine - that’s how I started.
- Comment on Lemmy.zip 2nd Birthday Giveaway! 🍰 2 weeks ago:
You can usually pick them up from the usual suspects (jungle shop, fleabay etc) too.
Failing that Sonoff do a fairly decent one - MINIR2/3/4, they have updated the model a few times. I use one of their ZBMINI switches as ZigBee is preferred here over WiFi where possible.
This one also worked well in our setup. It’s switching a small dehumidifier here.
- Comment on Lemmy.zip 2nd Birthday Giveaway! 🍰 2 weeks ago:
No worries.
No garage for us so no personal experience setting up, but I know it from a few years of soaking up related info.
We use Homeassistant here & ratgdo is mentioned a lot when the subject comes up. There’s a whole thing about the manufacturers going to shit and locking down their remote options, hence that hack.
If yours is just a simple switch, something like a Shelly1 could do the job too. I’ve got one of those wired in parallel with our heating thermostat to control the boiler - either by user input or automatically based on other connected sensors :)
- Comment on Lemmy.zip 2nd Birthday Giveaway! 🍰 2 weeks ago:
ratgdo?
- Comment on Lemmy.zip 2nd Birthday Giveaway! 🍰 2 weeks ago:
Instance upkeep.
Prizes are coming direct from @Demigodrick@lemmy.zip for this one. A good egg.
- Comment on Lemmy.zip 2nd Birthday Giveaway! 🍰 2 weeks ago:
Congrats on another year of keeping us all shuffling along :)
Best of luck to all!
- Comment on Welcome to Lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago:
Really went all in on the application then, haha.
Welcome 🙂
- Comment on Welcome to Lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago:
Welcome! 👋
- Comment on Welcome to Lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago:
Welcome, welcome. Excellent snag of a 3char username.
Mosey around, make yourself at home. Donations can be made on Open Collective and Ko-Fi.
- Comment on Welcome to Lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago:
I can happily verify this (Mullvad). Without a VPN, I can’t even be here - so it is all good :D
- Comment on Welcome to Lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago:
Throw enough people at something, and one of them will fail. The more people, the higher the chance.
Perfect people in a perfect world would not need fire extinguishers, seatbelts, helmets, endpoint protection software, or TLD level blocks. You can try to train the problem out of people, but the threat still exists, mistakes can be made, and the next 0day might be just around the corner.
I’m not a fan of sorting people problems out with tech based solutions either - I see your point. The pragmatist in me will take that over dealing with the fallout of user error though.
- Comment on Welcome to Lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago:
And a TLD shouldn’t be so easy to mistake for one of the most recognisable filetypes ever, yet here we are. Well made apps discern between a zip file and a zip web address without issue. The problem, as usual, is in the human element:
- Register a zip domain called
holidayphotos2025.zip,2025ProductData.zipor whatever hook you’re going for. - Serve up whatever malicious garbage you like on it. Spoofed login pages, browser exploits, anything goes.
- Email it out from an already compromised account to all account contacts, removing the https component of the link text. Bonus points for imitating how an attachment would look in the target email client.
- Watch the clicks roll in as people try to open the ‘attachment’.
Having .zip in the string and in the link visible on hover could be all that is needed to ‘sell’ it to a user that makes a cursory glance before clicking - nevermind the ones that just click anyway. Plenty of folk have fallen for more obvious traps than that, so it’s a winner for a bad actor. Any trick that lends legitimacy to a scam increases the chance of success. Users savvy enough to check but not enough to spot the discrepancy may also have more data interesting to an attacker.
Blocking .zip TLDs wholesale at DNS level kills this even if the first and hardest hurdle (getting the user to click) is cleared. I’ll concede that it is an edge case in the grand scheme of things, but why leave the hole open when it is so easily plugged?
- Register a zip domain called
- Comment on Welcome to Lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago:
If I associated with skooma users, I’d probably order something like that too…
- Comment on Welcome to Lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago:
Welcome - bumping into a lot of ee folk and it’s great to see you all making new homes. Just a shame about the circumstances.
Sure they were a bit blunt, but some people just are. Bit cheeky of them to drop in from outside and chat shit in our home community though, agreed there 😅
- Comment on Google confirms more ads on your paid YouTube Premium Lite soon 3 weeks ago:
It’s better to name known safe options rather than leave it up to user search. The entities that work against extensions like uBO are already well aware of their existence, so hiding their names has no benefit.
Case in point - uBlock and uBlock Origin are not the same, with the former being a bastardised version that does ‘acceptable ads’. There are plenty of other poor blocking options out there for the unsuspecting to stumble into to besides that.
Personal setup is Librewolf/uBO on the client and pfBlockerNG/Snort for network level blocking/additional security layer.
And welcome to .zip :) Hope you enjoy the new home!
- Comment on Welcome to Lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago:
More folk still wandering in, love to see it. A shame about the circumstances though.
Hope you get on well here :)
- Comment on Welcome to Lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago:
It’s a genuine concern, if a bit overkill. On release, .zip domains were quickly seized upon by bad actors land grabbing anything they could roll into a phishing attack. If you’ve got folk on your network that may be prone to that, then blocking the TLD is an effective bludgeon to the problem.
Blocking is unlikely to cause issues for the Average Internet User, due to the lack of popularity in mainstream services that use .zip. There are always ways to make exceptions where needed - a restrictive policy with exceptions is more secure than a permissive policy with selective blocks, as it prevents new malicious .zip domains getting through. It’s a security cat and mouse game otherwise.
As for how they are here - I guess it’s through federation with .world, so they’re not accessing .zip directly.
I also block .zip domains, but at work rather than home. No complaints yet.