danielquinn
@danielquinn@lemmy.ca
- Comment on Simple inexpensive cloud backup? 2 days ago:
Buy two 4tb extern drives. Copy your photos onto both. Leave on at your mom’s house in a closet. Leave the other in a locker at work or a safety deposit box.
No monthly fees, no techbro cloud capitalists.
- Comment on Green Party wins Gorton and Denton by-election with Labour pushed into third by Reform 4 days ago:
I’d say that it’s for a few reasons:
- In this country’s broken electoral system, “tactical” voting is quite common. Until now, Labour has been heavily relying on the idea that they’ll be elected by default: the not-Conservative choice. When Reform ate the Tories’ lunch, they continued to push that they were “the only party that can beat Reform”. This result suggests that this reasoning no longer applies and indicates that Labour’s dominance as an alternative to the right-wing forces in the UK is ending.
- By pushing the traditional parties into 3rd, 4th, and 5th place, this election may mark the end of these guys in favour of the new challenger parties theatre both advocating for more direct action to combat the problems we have.
- Reform took 2nd, consuming the Tory vote almost entirely indicating that they’re the force to beat. This makes the relegations of #1 all the more relevant for those of us who think that Reform are dangerous fanatics.
- The Greens are unabashedly socialists and this result indicates that their position is resonating with voters far more than Labour’s “Tory light” platform. When the “labour” party gets spanked by a party that’s advocating for wealth taxes, that’s a Big Deal™.
- Comment on Green Party wins Gorton and Denton by-election with Labour pushed into third by Reform 4 days ago:
That’s the really encouraging part of all this: Green is looking like the tactical choice now :-)
- Comment on Green Party wins Gorton and Denton by-election with Labour pushed into third by Reform 4 days ago:
Don’t ruin this for me :-)
- Comment on Green Party wins Gorton and Denton by-election with Labour pushed into third by Reform 4 days ago:
I just think it’s hilarious that Labour has for years been leaning on this “the Greens split the vote” line. Now that the shoe’s on the other foot, I’m betting they feel differently.
- Submitted 5 days ago to unitedkingdom@feddit.uk | 42 comments
- Comment on How do you effectively backup your high (20+ TB) local NAS? 5 days ago:
Honestly, I’d buy 6 external 20tb drives and make 2 copies of your data on it (3 drives each) and then leave them somewhere-safe-but-not-at-home. If you have friends or family able to store them, that’d do, but also a safety deposit box is good.
If you want to make frequent updates to your backups, you could patch them into a Raspberry Pi and put it on Tailscale, then just rsync changes every regularly. Of course means that wherever youre storing the backup needs room for such a setup.
I often wonder why there isn’t a sort of collective backup sharing thing going on amongst self hosters. A sort of “I’ll host your backups if you host mine” sort of thing. Better than paying a cloud provider at any rate.
- Comment on Guardian joins media coalition to protect original journalism from unpaid use by AI 5 days ago:
The Guardian has effectively got rid of 100 journalists. We actually leave the building next week. And shortly afterwards, it signed a syndication deal with OpenAI. Or as I think of it, it married its rapist
That’s from the tail end of Carole Cadwalladr’s excellent TED talk called This is What A Digital Coup Looks Like.
- Comment on Eurovision 2026: Electronic artist and YouTuber Look Mum No Computer to represent UK in Vienna - BBC News 2 weeks ago:
We shouldn’t be in Eurovision. If the UK had any self respect, we’d be boycotting it like Iceland, Ireland, The Netherlands, Spain, and Slovenia.
- Comment on Brushing fraud: Britons told to beware of mystery parcels as new scam soars 2 weeks ago:
All the pearl-clutching about how the product you receive may not adhere to good quality standards ignores the fact that “legitimate” companies like Hobbycraft were selling asbestos-laden products to kids right out of the brick random offer stores until about a month ago.
- Comment on Mattermost is no longer Open-Source 2 weeks ago:
From a read of that issue, it looks like it never was.
- Comment on Abolishing trial by jury: why is the government overlooking the obvious? 2 weeks ago:
This is just an attempt to avoid jury nullification verdicts on cases like Palestine Action and JSO.
- Comment on Alternatives to Mattermost 4 weeks ago:
I keep seeing Zulip tossed around as an alternative, but I don’t know what’s up with their licencing. There’s also Framateam, but I think that might just be Mattermost as a service.
- Comment on Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Starfleet Academy | 1x04 "Vox in Excelso" 4 weeks ago:
I really didn’t care for this one.
The premise of the debate was flawed from the start. The Federation has an obligation to offer help, but there’s no requirement anywhere that it must compel another race to accept that help. Indeed many, many episodes have gone out of their way to point this out. So the whole idea of a “debate” was pointless. Of course they should offer the help, but that’s the end of any moral or legal responsibility. Doing anything more would itself be unethical.
Interestingly as an aside, I found this whole prospect very American at its root. Not only should we accept that we must offer help, but of course we must compel these people to accept our idea of help. It stinks of regime change from without and I find the idea that the Federation would ever work this way ridiculous.
On top of that, we’re somehow supposed to pretend we didn’t all watch Esri Dax’s excellent critique of the Klingon Empire back on DS9 and instead accept that this lie of “conquest” is supposed to prop up the Klingon culture. Are we to believe that it’s been hundreds of years and the Empire is still built in lies they tell each other about honour and battle? Instead of showing any hint of evolution (and potentially stoking internal conflict at the idea of accepting charity from an enemy), we just had a 5 minute “battle” and it’s all ok now.
This wasn’t even a respectful battle. No blood was spilt by either side, no sacrifices made. Where is the honour in that? It was a mock battle to preserve a lie. Esri would not be amused.
- Submitted 5 weeks ago to unitedkingdom@feddit.uk | 5 comments
- Comment on UK government targets VPNs in new online safety consultation as Lords vote for ban 5 weeks ago:
I will never get used to the comfort Britons appear to have with surveillance. I guess it’s time to set up a Wireguard instance of my own in the Netherlands to proxy everything through.
- Comment on Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Starfleet Academy | 1x01 "Kids These Days" & 1x02 "Beta Test" 1 month ago:
Is anyone else concerned that they might making the same decision they did with Discovery and making the series into “Star Trek: Caleb Mir”? At this point, everyone else already feel like background singers to me.
- Comment on Israelis demonised as a ‘vehicle for hatred of Jews’, says UK terror laws watchdog 1 month ago:
I’d say it’s worse than that. If someone looks at a protest opposing genocide and they take from that that they’re antisemitic, then they’re essentially starting from a position of “Jews = genociders” which is pretty fucking antisemitic.
- Comment on 1 month ago:
Toward the end of 2024, Adam Something posted a brilliant video called “Why Centrism Won’t Survive 2025” and he made a very convincing case. Toward the end, he lays into Starmer’s Labour specifically, though he doesn’t predict the rise of the Greens here.
- Comment on Offline TTS in 2026? 2 months ago:
Ooh! Has anyone managed to do this with Majel Barrett’s (the Enterprise computer) voice yet?
- Comment on Creating apps like Signal or WhatsApp could be 'hostile activity,' claims UK watchdog 2 months ago:
This has to be the standard response to these sorts of claims. I would love to see a Labour MP try to respond to this on Question Time for example.
- Comment on What are your opinions of using Pi-hole for DNS within a homelab environment? 2 months ago:
Basically the IP stops responding to any traffic. At one point I set up a constant ping, and every once in a while I got something like “destination host unreachable”. It doesn’t happen often enough for me to move the service onto a physical device though. That’s work and I’m tired like, a lot.
- Comment on What are your opinions of using Pi-hole for DNS within a homelab environment? 2 months ago:
I installed a Pi-Hole largely to serve as a local DNS, but enabled the ad-blocking 'cause it seemed silly not to. My wife got very upset. Apparently she likes the ads.
With that aside though, it seems to work quite well. Just make sure to (a) use a reasonably-powered device (my Pi Zero appears to be taxed by it) and you should probably use an Ethernet connection 'cause my Pi Zero regularly flakes out so DNS requests fail due to the IP being “unreachable” for a half second.
- Comment on Met police agree to pay £7,500 to woman arrested over Gaza protest placard 2 months ago:
“Israel: what a cuntry”
Witty. I like it.
- Comment on Polling lead by age group, November 2025 3 months ago:
Jesus, the discrepancy between the Green vote among the young and old is… horrifying.
- Comment on Arguing for the car as a good method of transportation is like arguing that having personal diesel generator to power you home is a good idea 3 months ago:
Your math is waaaaay off. Let me help you.:
Let’s assume that you commute a rather conservative distance of just 25mi to work. That’s 50mi/day, 5 days/wk, plus let’s say half that over the weekend. Assuming an (again, generous) fuel efficiency for your truck at 25mpg, given a ballpark 300mi/week, that’s 12 gallons of fuel/week. The current average price of gas in the US is a remarkably low $3.071, and that adds up to $36.85/week.
Now consider the costs of maintenance. If you’ve really had zero problems in the last 20 years on a pickup truck (honestly this is far from average), you likely did an oil change every 3 months at the very least. These days it’ll run you about $100.
In terms of insurance, I asked this site for the average cost of insuring a Toyota pickup truck for one year: $1937. Let’s be grossly optimistic and pretend that those rates will never go up.
Initial cost: (Provided) = 11000.00 Fuel costs: (50 × 6 ÷ 25 × 3.071 × 52 × 20) = 38326.08 Oil changes: ($100 × 4 × 20) = 8000.00 Insurance: (1937 × 20) = 38740.00 Parking: = ? ------------------------------------------------------ Total 96066.08
Excluding the cost of parking, the purchase of your miracle never-needs-repair truck if purchased today would be roughly $100,000. Note also how very conservative these values are. It’s entirely possible that your real costs are well above what I’ve stated here.
The total cost of the rental was
$1000plus fuel costs, so using our above figures, that’s a grand total of$1042.99assuming you drove it roughly 50mi/day for all 7 days of the week. That’s assuming that you don’t opt for the much lower rates that appear to be available to you in the area of $250 - $350/week.So, if you didn’t own a car and instead only rented on when you needed to “move a couch”, you would save just over $95,000. In other words, your insistence that you absolutely must own your own vehicle has cost you the equivalent of a downpayment on a house.
- Comment on Arguing for the car as a good method of transportation is like arguing that having personal diesel generator to power you home is a good idea 3 months ago:
Car rentals are exceptionally cheap compared to paying to own and drive a car capable of hauling a couch for that one time 4 years ago when you needed that.
- Comment on Arguing for the car as a good method of transportation is like arguing that having personal diesel generator to power you home is a good idea 3 months ago:
As a big car-hater myself, I can agree with most of what you’re saying here (the “but it snows” argument is baseless though, see Denmark).
I think that if you’ve chosen to live in sparsely populated areas, then being car-dependent is your choice and you should be able to have that… but you don’t get to drive your car into the city.
Cars ruin cities. They’re loud, dangerous, dirty, and they kill millions. If you’re happy to live like that, then that’s on you, but you (I’m using the “motorist demographic” here rather then the personal “you”) can’t insist on having wide, multi-lane, high speed roads and plenty of free parking where most of the world’s population actually lives. You park at the periphery and take transit or a bike into town.
- Comment on Andrew will be banished from royal premises to King Charles' private and remote Sandringham estate 3 months ago:
“Oh no! Not Sandringham!” - Andrew, probably.
- Comment on Serverless Is An Architectural Handicap (And I'm Tired of Pretending it Isn't) 3 months ago:
If you build for a containerised environment, standing up your service in Kubernetes with HPA gives you all the scalability (and potentially cost) benefits of serverless without all the drawbacks.