The tech secretary is the biggest idiot in our government right now which is really saying something. He doesn’t have any professional experience with technology, gets his policy ideas from asking chatgpt, accused anyone who opposes the online safety act of being a paedophile, and when a constituent sent him emails about Palestine he had the police raid her home at 4am.
Been doing some server maintenance the past few days because I’ve been neglecting them and everything has broken at once, so I may as well infodump on that.
The Raspberry Pi’s fan got clogged up with dust and started screaming but with a new fan it is so silent now. It was averaging 57°C for the couple of days with no fan while I waited for the spare part to arrive, 52°C when the broken fan was still in use, and now down to a nice 47°C with a fresh one. My VPN on the pi stopped working as well, but it was easily fixed with PiVPN, and the arr stack on my mini PC stopped working entirely – it seemed to be a networking issue with the containers under gluetun. But now everything’s up and running again and with a bit more storage space from clearing off old docker volumes. Then I’ve got a pinetime watch coming this week to give me something to tinker with until the new Pebble starts shipping.
I’ve tried tailscale and cloudflare tunnels in the past and ended up just using PiVPN to set up a WireGuard VPN on my Pi5. Tailscale for some reason was very slow for me, and cloudflare tunnels have a 100mb limit iirc which isn’t ideal for streaming. PiVPN is quite straightforward, it sets everything up for you and all you have to do is forward a UDP port. That was the bit I was most worried about, but, unless I’ve misunderstood something, because a UDP port will just ignore invalid requests to the outside world it will appear closed so it’s not very risky. It then generates a key for each device which you can scan from a QR code onto your VPN client. I have my phone set to auto-connect to the tunnel when I disconnect from my home wifi network and the tunnel is fast enough that I’ve accidentally turned off my phone’s wifi connection before and streamed a TV show through the tunnel over mobile data and not noticed any difference in speed.
I love mine. Being able to play Baldur’s Gate 3 on a handheld feels insane, never mind playing it multiplayer with a bunch of mods and it still running fairly smoothly. They’ve really improved the rendering for BG3 since the final patch came out. Emudeck has been great for reliving some childhood nostalgia as well.
Saying that, 90% of the time I’m using it as a balatro machine.
That’s good to hear! I’ve ADBed almost all of the Google & Samsung stuff off my phone already so I’m well used to fighting with Aurora to download certain apps by now. Nearly all my apps are from F-droid as well so that will make the transition a lot easier, and I do a lot of self hosting so I’m not relying on any proprietary services that are going to demand play services be installed. Balatro on my steam deck already steals enough of my time, so honestly if my phone won’t let me install it that’s probably for the best.
Going from One UI 6 to One UI 7 on a Samsung has made me very excited to go get a used pixel or fairphone and install a custom ROM instead. Absolutely abysmal update.
I think it would be great if at the next protests the crowds were filled with these nonsense t-shirts and signs to waste the police’s time. It is completely legal to protest a proscription order so I don’t think they have any legitimate grounds to arrest anyone. And if they do, they look very silly.
Having a rescue dog of my own with behavioral issues made me appreciate Krypto a lot in this. James Gunn really nailed what it’s like to have one, he is an asshole but I love him still. Every time Krypto was on screen I was just thinking of similar things my own little monster has done in the past. Especially Krypto being hypnotised by squirrels, we can’t walk past a single squirrel in the park without him locking onto it. Not usually a huge superhero movie fan but I really liked this, feels like they had a good balance between action, humour, and nods towards real world events & David Corenswet was the perfect casting for Superman.
I’ve correctly predicted the result of every US & UK election (plus the brexit referendum) since 2016, based mostly on vibes
I’ve been here! Clubbing isn’t really my thing but it was a fun night. Haven’t been since covid happened, and it’s supposedly more of a tourist trap for straight people these days. I remember some Eurovision act got a lot of shit for “performing at the Kremlin” but it was actually this one in Belfast.
My favourite tidbit of queer history in Northern Ireland happened here after our former first minister’s wife, Iris Robinson, was caught having an extra marital affair with someone 40 years her junior, a 19 year old that she bribed to try and hush it all up. She was disgustingly homophobic to the point that there’s a whole section of her Wikipedia dedicated to her homophobic remarks. After the story broke of her affair, the DJ in the Kremlin stuck on the song Mrs Robinson by Simon and Garfunkel.
If it makes the transition easier for people and improves accessibility then it’s worth putting up with comments from meat eaters I think. When people have said it’s hypocritical to eat fake meat before I’ve pointed out that I still like the taste, I just don’t want an animal to die for it. I wish I could do completely whole foods but some health issues mean I can’t eat certain things and I don’t have the energy to cook from scratch, so the plant meats are great for that reason. Although I’ve been trying to eat healthier protein sources the past while like tofu, lentils, and chickpeas, and I much prefer it both for the taste and for the feeling of fullness afterwards that the plant meats sometimes lack.
In restaurants I’d go for something unprocessed over a plant meat everytime, restaurants mess up the order enough for it not to be worth the risk.
+1 for Navidrome. As simple as pasting the album into the directory and it sorts the rest. I use subtune on my phone to access it and it works great.