rmuk
@rmuk@feddit.uk
- Comment on Unpopular popular opinion - fiat 5 days ago:
Yeah, my response to this argument is always the same: I work in IT, how do I barter for potatoes? If you’re a potato farmer, how many potatoes is a hip transplant worth? Maybe assigning worth to things with an abstract unit isn’t such a terrible idea after all…
- Comment on finally got static IP from a new ISP 1 week ago:
To be honest, I used to have an ISP with dynamic addresses and it wasn’t a huge deal. The address only changed every month or two. I used afraid.org’s dynamic DNS service to get a dynamic address that followed the changes and created CNAME records for my real domain pointing at that. The actual connection was fucking awful but the dynamic IPs never caused any problems.
As for services: Nextcloud is well worth looking into for file sync and photo backup, especially if you’ve already got a file server running.
- Comment on Bluesky has started honoring takedown requests from Turkish government 1 week ago:
“Bluesky” itself is trademarked and all the rest, but it uses AtProtocol which is a completely open federation protocol. AtProtocol doesn’t have the support of ActivityPub because it’s much newer and also more complicated (for good reason, but still).
- Comment on The Fairphone 5 price has been dropped to €499. The phone is designed to be the most advanced environmentally friendly smartphone. 1 week ago:
The hardware is good and I like the idea in principle but Fairphone’s support and software QA is dreadful and you need to hope you never need the former because of problems with the latter. My FP5 was bricked by an update they pushed out and after six weeks of trying to get a solution from their support (four weeks of which they didn’t respond at all) I ended up claiming on insurance and buying a Pixel. According to the forums this problem is far from unique to me.
- Comment on The Fairphone 5 price has been dropped to €499. The phone is designed to be the most advanced environmentally friendly smartphone. 1 week ago:
A firmware update from Fairphone bricked mine last year. Not impressed. Apparently it’s happened to a lot of people who went to an alternative OS (Lineage) then back to stock. I just woke up one day to a paperweight on my bedside table and the support was horrendous: it took over six weeks to get any response and after another month of back-and-forth with responses taking a couple of days at a time I ended up just claiming on insurance.
- Comment on Off-grid hosting 2 weeks ago:
As it happens, I’ve just finished setting up a system exactly like this for a completely off-grid setup. I needed a Raspberry Pi running Home Assistant to be completely self-contained to monitor an adjacent, larger system that is only powered up intermittently (close enough that the two systems have a common ground).
Short version: the Raspberry Pi and the Huawei LTE router I’m using for connectivity draw a steady 9W between them (there’s a lot of monitoring going on). I went with an old pair of 160W panels in very suboptimal positioning, a simple MPPT charge controller and a 110Ah deep cycle leisure battery which costs about €45, €30 and €120 respectively. The system has been running a few months now and the battery had never, ever dropped below 12.4V. The Pi uses WireGuard to connect to my VPS so Home Assistant can be accessed with a web browser since the network I’m using on-site doesn’t do public IP addresses.
- Comment on China launches HDMI and DisplayPort alternative — GPMI boasts up to 192 Gbps bandwidth, 480W power delivery 2 weeks ago:
Also, one of the reasons the EU waited for USB-C is that it specifically supports Alt Mode, which allows non-USB-standard protocols - like this new video connector thing - to be encapsulated within it.
- Comment on China launches HDMI and DisplayPort alternative — GPMI boasts up to 192 Gbps bandwidth, 480W power delivery 2 weeks ago:
The whole point of USB-C is that it’s a standardised connector that allows anyone to shoehorn their own protocol down it if they want using Alt Mode. Moreover, they can do that without breaking compatibility with other USB-C - or even just specific features - if one of the devices doesn’t speak their crazy-ass moon protocols. This is a benefit of USB-C, not a failing.
- Comment on China launches HDMI and DisplayPort alternative — GPMI boasts up to 192 Gbps bandwidth, 480W power delivery 2 weeks ago:
Graphics cards come with as many ports as the manufacturer wants them to. My home PC’s GPU has two HDMI and two MiniDisplayPort. Also, there are cheap lossless adapters that will convert between MiniDisplayPort, DisplayPort, HDMI, DVI, etc, etc.
- Comment on China launches HDMI and DisplayPort alternative — GPMI boasts up to 192 Gbps bandwidth, 480W power delivery 2 weeks ago:
I disagree with the 4K being a theoretical need thing, but it’s moot because where I work, every desk has a pair of 4K monitors that connect to the user’s laptop via a single USB-C cable. That cable also connects a keyboard, mouse, gigabit ethernet connector and, depending on the desk, multiple cameras and conference audio and, of course, charges the laptop. At the moment that’s mostly done using USB-C docking stations, but we’ve started to deploy monitors that are USB-C native and can be daisychained together.
- Comment on China launches HDMI and DisplayPort alternative — GPMI boasts up to 192 Gbps bandwidth, 480W power delivery 2 weeks ago:
In case anyone is wondering, yes, this is utter nonsense. The EU made USB-C mandatory only as a charger for portable devices like phones, tablets, headphones and mice. That’s all. This new standard, unwelcome as it is, has nothing to do with charging phones so there’s no reason why it can’t be used in the EU.
But let’s not allow measley facts get in the way of having a moan at nothing, shall we? Fucking EU. Forcing us to [checks notes] chanre all out things using a single connector, reducing e-waste, and, uh, ensuring there’s lots of futureproofing built-in. BASTARDS.
- Comment on This is unfair! 2 weeks ago:
Wait until they’re not looking to put on the wig. Otherwise it’s kinda a bit weird.
- Comment on Thank you Gary ❤️ 2 weeks ago:
Gary forgot the five Ibuprofen.
- Comment on Thank you Gary ❤️ 2 weeks ago:
You eat cigarettes?
- Comment on New Survey that will determine your age. You are really old if you score a perfect 11 out of 11 3 weeks ago:
Some more:
- Smoking while observing a sheep.
- Smoking on the dancefloor at the hippest discotheque in town.
- Smoking while threading the film into the stedicam rig on the set of the Stanley Kubrick film The Shining (1980).
- Smoking while performing open-heart surgery.
- Smoking while restarting the computers at the dinosaur park.
- Smoking while Niel and Buzz are down on the surface.
- Offering a cigarette to a dodo
- Stubbing out York cigarette after filling in a form which asks for your date of birth which is the 7th August 1968.
- Comment on The cat turns him in 3 weeks ago:
“Cats can keep secrets, but choose not to. Change my mind.”
- Comment on Clean butt 3 weeks ago:
Yeah, but some people shit thrice daily.
- Comment on I love to send the most absurd messages I can think of to steam scammers 3 weeks ago:
In seriousness, though, one of these type of sites looked like a scam but they warned me that my Driver Registry needed defragmentation to avoid WiFi Corruption and had a free download to fix it so, y’know, swings and roundabouts.
- Comment on Implementing a spellchecker on 64 kB of RAM back in the 1970s led to a compression algorithm that's technically unbeaten and part of it is still in use today 3 weeks ago:
Yeah, but I’ve not got two hundred Firefox tabs open on Voyager.
- Comment on OpenWrt Two will be a higher-performance router with 10 Gigabit LAN and WiFi 7 support - Liliputing 3 weeks ago:
The 10Gb is full duplex, so you can transfer at the full 10Gb though that is split between upload and download. These and the kind of ‘problems’ I wish I had to consider.
- Comment on OpenWrt Two will be a higher-performance router with 10 Gigabit LAN and WiFi 7 support - Liliputing 3 weeks ago:
The idea is that you use the 10Gb port as a trunk, then you use your switch to split it into separate physical ports using VLANs.
- Comment on 90s band alignment chart 3 weeks ago:
Steady on with that kind of comment, please. They might be sequoia fuckers.
- Comment on 90s band alignment chart 3 weeks ago:
Yeah, especially printers. Fuck printers.
- Comment on Split Keyboards Are Superior And The Reason I’m The Writer I Am Today. 3 weeks ago:
Sawme here! Honmestly I dom"t thinkl I coukd ever go vack tp a mormal keyboard ¶¶¶¶
- Comment on Windows 11 is closing a loophole that let you skip making a Microsoft account 3 weeks ago:
I keep thinking of creating Linux BTW…
- Comment on Something Bizarre Is Happening to People Who Use ChatGPT a Lot 3 weeks ago:
“Modern Teens Killing Travelling Minstrel Industry”
- Comment on Something Bizarre Is Happening to People Who Use ChatGPT a Lot 4 weeks ago:
They’re clearly under the control of Big Train, Loom Lobbyists and the Global Gutenberg Printing Press Conspiracy.
- Comment on Why I recommend against Brave. 4 weeks ago:
I’ve still not forgiven them for prematurely cancelling BoJack Horseman.
- Comment on The Pebble Has Been Brought Back 5 weeks ago:
One pro of Withings is that they’re French, so their policies on data in general are pretty great.
One con of Withings is that they’re French, so it’s not actually pronounced how you think.
- Comment on The Pebble Has Been Brought Back 5 weeks ago:
One thing about the Pebble - and, I assume, these watches - is that they didn’t have WiFi or LTE, only Bluetooth. So it wasn’t possible for them to do any communication except through the apps already running on your phone. So, broadly, it’s a no.