danielquinn
@danielquinn@lemmy.ca
- Comment on UK bans EU cheese and meat imports to prevent foot and mouth disease spreading - BBC News 1 week ago:
- Comment on UK bans EU cheese and meat imports to prevent foot and mouth disease spreading - BBC News 1 week ago:
Well shit. What good is pasta without parmesan? And no feta? Gouda? How is life worth living without good cheese?
- Comment on Are there any Trek episodes where they enforce the Prime Directive to protect a developing world within Federation space from an external influence? 1 week ago:
In Star Trek: Insurrection, the Enterprise protected the Baku from the So’na, though if I remember right, there was some debate as to whether the prime directive applied as the Baku weren’t native to the planet.
- Comment on Which non-US domain registrar to use? 4 weeks ago:
I’m quite happy with EuroDNS. They even include free email housing if you want it.
- Comment on How do you like to transfer large files between friends across the internet? 1 month ago:
- Comment on Petition Apply for the UK to join the European Union as a full member as soon as possible 1 month ago:
- Comment on Petition Apply for the UK to join the European Union as a full member as soon as possible 1 month ago:
I am a strong supporter of the EU, and won’t sign this. This country is too xenophobic, fractious, reactionary, and delusionally self-important to let them back into the union when it’s still reeling from the damage the UK caused just a few years ago.
If the UK is serious about rejoining, it will first have to stop treating EU membership like a glorified trade agreement and stepping stone to national power and influence. The EU needs community members and partners, not self-aggrandising parasites.
- Comment on Petition Apply for the UK to join the European Union as a full member as soon as possible 1 month ago:
…let alone the rest of the EU. They’d be crazy to accept a UK petition for membership right now.
- Comment on YouTuber travels to the filming location of Veridian III and shows what's left of Soren's rocket launcher and Kirk's burial site. 1 month ago:
I couldn’t watch it. I tried, but that dude is too annoying.
- Comment on Digital driving licences to be ‘put on phones this year’ 3 months ago:
Neat trick! I’ve enabled it on my phone now, though it does say that it’s probably better to use a guest user for such situations… I don’t know how to do that either.
Still, this is additionally handy when I want to let my kid briefly use my phone.
This may all be moot though, if the state requires you to install a government app with invasive permissions just for this situation. Yet another reason to give up driving!
- Comment on Digital driving licences to be ‘put on phones this year’ 3 months ago:
Just we need, an excuse for a cop to take your unlocked phone away to his car to do whatever he likes with it.
- Comment on Solar powered server rack 3 months ago:
You might be interested in this project where someone has hooked up a low-power system to Mastodon and is tooting through it stories about the experience. The project author may also be worth contacting.
- Comment on Post your bandwidth usage 3 months ago:
What exactly are you self-hosting that’s gobbling up that much data? I’ve been self-hosting my website for decades and haven’t used that much over all that time let alone in one month.
Most of my bandwidth consumption is from torrents and downloading Steam games.
- Comment on Junk food ad ban legislation progresses to curb childhood obesity 4 months ago:
Where are kids seeing ads these days? Is this just for people who watch tv rather than streaming, or would this include any sort of product placement you see in streamed shows? Honestly, it’d probably be a lot more effective (and better for adults too!) if we just taxed the shit out of junk food.
- Comment on TIL Connor Trinneer & Dominic Keating have a podcast called "The D-Con Chamber". Here they are interviewing Nana Visitor on her new book! 5 months ago:
Nevermind I went back over and found it. It was Marina Sirtis at 20:35.
- Comment on TIL Connor Trinneer & Dominic Keating have a podcast called "The D-Con Chamber". Here they are interviewing Nana Visitor on her new book! 5 months ago:
At one point in the interview, Visitor says something about an acres who refused to be interviewed because she didn’t want Visitor to make money off of her. I didn’t catch the name though. Who was it?
- Comment on Post your setup. no matter how uggo 5 months ago:
Each Pi 4 has 8GB of RAM. With six devices, that’s 48GB to play with. More than enough for my needs.
- Comment on Post your setup. no matter how uggo 5 months ago:
Actually, as a web guy, I find the ARM architecture to be more than sufficient. Most of the stuff I build is memory heavy and CPU light, so the Pi is great for this stuff.
- Comment on Post your setup. no matter how uggo 5 months ago:
They’re fanless and low-power, which was the primary draw to going this route. I run a Kubernetes cluster on them, including a few personal websites (Nginx+Python+Django), PostgreSQL, Sonarr, Calibre, SSH (occasionally) and every once in a while, an OpenArena server :-)
- Comment on Post your setup. no matter how uggo 5 months ago:
- Comment on Disease spread in dog poo could be 'disaster' for cows 5 months ago:
Cambridge checking in. It must be payback for the cows leaving their shit all over the walking path.
- Comment on Scientists dismayed as UK ministers clear way for gene editing of crops - but not animals 5 months ago:
This will make rejoining the EU much more difficult.
- Comment on ChartDB - open-source database diagram visualization tool 5 months ago:
So my first impression is that the requirement to copy-paste that elaborate SQL to get the schema is clever but not sufficiently intuitive. Rather than saying “Run this query and paste the output”, you say “Run this script in your database” and print out a bunch of text that is not a query at all but a one-liner Bash script that relies on the existence of
pbcopy– something that (a) doesn’t exist on many default installs (b) is a red flag for something that’s meant to be self-hosted (why am I talking to a pasteboard?), and © is totally unnecessary anyway.Instead, you could just say: “Run this query and paste the result in this box” and print out the raw SQL. Leave it up to the user to figure out how they want to run it.
Alternatively you can also do something like: “Run this on your machine and copy/paste the output”:
$ curl 'https://app.chartdb.io/superquery.sql' | psql --user USERNAME --host HOSTNAME DBNAMEIn the case of the cloud service, it’s also not clear if the data is being stored on the server or client side in
LocalStorage. I would think that the latter would be preferable. - Comment on Former British colonies owe ‘debt of gratitude’, says Robert Jenrick 5 months ago:
It’s actually rather brilliant.
In an (d)effective 2 party system like ours, running to your extremes has few costs, since the electorate tend to vote parties out rather than vote them in. When the public tires off the ruling party (it helps if you own most of the media) and you do get elected, it’s by:
- your base that votes for you regardless
- new voters from the fringe you’ve been courting
- people who’ve convinced themselves that you’re just pretending to be crazy to court that fringe.
Now you can do whatever you like and if people complain they get shouted down by both sides: “What did you expect? They literally told you they were going to do this.”
In short, it’s how you drag the Overton Window toward that extreme. If only the Left in this country had figured this out years ago, we wouldn’t be saddled with Sir Red Tory.
- Comment on Britain will rejoin the EU within 15 years, former Brussels chief predicts 5 months ago:
It’ll take at least that long for the EU member states to forgive the UK for its fuckery. The memory of Brexit will have to fade enough in their minds before it’s even considered.
- It’s doubtful that the same deal will be on the table, as it would be politically untenable domestically.
- Getting France and Germany on board will be hard, given that they enjoy much more powerful in our absence.
- The risk of our exit again when our xenophobia acts up would have to be objectively low, or no member state would take the chance on approval lest we fuck over their economy again when we throw an egocentric racist tantrum.
- Comment on Concerns Raised Over Bitwarden Moving Further Away From Open-Source 6 months ago:
Generally, I agree. I think what I meant by the above is “how would you tell someone how to use the thing”. My favourite example is email vs email-with-PGP.
How do you send an email?
- Open client
- Click "send new email"
- Type your email
- Click send
How do you send a PGP-encrypted email
Let’s first talk about this thing called a “keyserver”. Once you know what that is, you’ll have to go out and find some keys to add to it. We’re not going to talk about styling your message 'cause that’s not something you should be able to do… etc. etc.
- Comment on Concerns Raised Over Bitwarden Moving Further Away From Open-Source 6 months ago:
This is a common problem with Free software, and honestly I think it’s our biggest one: we build stuff for ourselves and stop there. If we want our stuff to be adopted (which, for things that rely on network effects, we do) then we need to pay more attention to usability.
Here’s a suggestion for anyone starting a project they think they might share. Before you start writing any code, write the documentation. Then rewrite it from the perspective of the least tech-literate person you know who you’d still want to use the project. Only after you’ve worked out how easy it should be for this person to get started, then you can start writing the thing.
- Comment on Do you selfhost your own blog/website? 6 months ago:
I’ve been self-hosting my blog for 21years if you can believe it, much of it has been done on a server in my house. I’ve hosted it on everything from a dusty old Pentium 200Mhz with 16MB of RAM (that’s MB, not GB!) to a shared web host (Webfaction), to a proper VPS (Hetzner), to a Raspberry Pi Kubernetes cluster, which is where it is now.
The site is currently running Python/Django on a few Kubernetes pods on a few Raspberry Pi 4’s, so the total power consumption is tiny, and since they’re fanless, it’s all very quiet in my office upstairs.
In terms of safety, there’s always a risk since you’re opening a port to the world for someone to talk directly to software running in your home. You can mitigate that by (a) keeping your software up to date, and (b) ensuring that if you’re maintaining the software yourself (like I am) keeping on top of any dependencies that may have known exploits. Like, don’t just stand up an instance of Wordpress and forget about it. That shit’s going to get compromised :-)
The safest option is probably to use a static site generator like Hugo, since then your attack surface is limited to whatever you’re using to serve the static sites (probably Nginx), while if you’re running a full-blown application that does publishing etc., then that’s a lot of stuff that could have holes you don’t know about. You may also want to setup something like Cloudflare in front of your site to prevent a DOS attack or something from crippling your home internet, though that may be overkill.
But yeah, the bandwidth requirements to running a blog are negligible, and the experience of running your own stuff on your own hardware in your own house is pretty great. I recommend it :-)
