Looks like the story of the night is going to be not that Labour gained lots of votes but that Reform has split the Conservative vote and collapsed their vote as a result and its gifted Labour a lot of wins. Lots of tactical voting has led to the Lib Dems gaining a lot of seats too.

Reform has gained enormously, the Greens and Lib Dems less so.

It really depends on the project. Some of them take breaking changes seriously and don’t do them and auto migrate and others will throw them out on “minor” number releases and there might be a lot of breaking changes but you only run into one that impacts you occasionally. I typically don’t want containers that are going to be a lot of work to keep up to date so I jettison projects that have unreliable releases for whatever reason and if they put out a breaking change its a good time to re evaluate whether I want that container at all and look at alternatives.

So no its not safe, but depending on the project it actually can be.

There is nothing seasonal about Covid, we get a wave every time it mutates sufficiently. Initially that was about five waves a year in 2022 but the past year it’s been two to three. The lulls however still have substantial constant infection usually in the region of 1 in 50 to 1 in 100 while the peaks of waves can be 1 in 10. Now the gaps in waves are large than the peaks of infections in 2020 and 2021.

The risk of Long Covid hasn’t changed much, there are still substantial deaths every year. It’s all bad news really, no treatments on the horizon to solve it just declining life expectancy and health the more we catch and spread it.

The main issue is with longevity, once they solve that, I am hopeful they will then this will dominate the Solar market completely and replace all the Silicon based single band gap panels. Even someone with relatively recent panels of 20-22% would benefit a lot from 35% panels, that is a lot of extra power in the same space.

Ideally for your router you want something that runs an open source firmware (OpenWRT, DD-WRT, OPNSense, FreshTomato). Its better because you get a completely unlocked everything you need system with security patches for the hardware’s true lifetime. Every router company stops with the security updates after a few years and then at some point it becomes part of a bot net or one of this mass hack events. Its best not to play in that game and instead run some open source firmware from the outset.

The best way to start is to look at the website for openwrt.org and use their filtering to find a device that supports your needs (at least 5 LAN ethernet ports I guess and some wifi but AC sounds like it will do). The other option is a more typical 4 LAN port router which will give you a lot more options and then add a switch to that, doesn’t sound like you care too much about it being managed or >1gbps so they are also dirt cheap.

Metube is great and also has some browser plugins as well so it’s as simple as right click and send to metube on a YouTube link. Wish there was one for android too but alas not yet that I have seen.

I don’t think modern Raspberry pi’s make much sense unless you are using GPIOs or really need the low power consumption. The 3 and the 4 were OK price wise but the pi 5 is quite close to all these N100 mini computers and they are a lot more performance and expansion compared to a raspberry pi 5 and still quite low power.

Either a Topton or similar N100 based machine or a mini PC second hand is the way to go at the ~$100 mark. The mini PC will be faster and probably more expandable and cheaper but also more power consumption.

Another possibility for cheap VPS is Contabo they are quite good value. Netcup is good value as well.

I used Invidious for about a year and it was a constant string of bugs. Every release was a risk and quite often updates would get lost or the database would explode in size and consume all the drive space. Its not a project I currently use or recommend until it stabilises.

Hugo? As in your generated site or you have some sort of service that costs hugo that generates and deploys your site or something else?

I have used Bitcoin a number of times for international purchases. Its not really got to the point of currency so much as a medium mostly of speculation and often interchange for crime but it can improve your privacy. The user experience of the payments isn’t the best but international transfers are often hard to do anyway and in that particular field it can often be a lot quicker, cheaper and easier.

Most of the cookie banners are breaking GDPR. The requirement under GDPR is that privacy must be the default and users can select to opt in. So most of the banners you come across that default to all tracking are against the law already. The legislation didn’t stop them being annoying in this way but a few prosecutions for the breaches and dark patterns would set things off on a better path.

It has been slowly improving. It used to be a lot worse but I have a lot less issues with it now than I did before all the changes. Its not the fastest best way to do anything, there are better calendar, file sync, email etc etc applications out there in every category that run better but its also quite an easy way to make a lot of things happen.

Suffering from Long Covid. In the UK (and other countries) the number of newly disabled shot up by 600k since 2022. The US is reporting 25% of its population is suffering from Long Covid and the studies show 25% of that (so 6%) are severely unwell and bed and housebound. By the 3rd infection in Canada they found 38% had Long Covid, its about 15% per infection and despite the news saying all is OK only about 5-15% recover.

Labour is disappearing across the world due to Covid in enormous numbers. The last count by the WHO was 110million but the individual studies late last year show a picture of the problem being much larger than that, probably more than a billion people with new health conditions and hundreds of millions who need permanent care. Its bad enough about 30 million have died world wide and still are dying every week at rates 20-40x that of Flu, but all year around, but its disabling a much larger number of people.

Its going to collapse the economy, people that disabled can’t work and don’t spend money. The problem is its well hidden behind all the profiteering and labour wage suppression from 2008 so a lot of people are thinking its more of the same tactic but the high employment percentages and move to using teenage labour and reduction in skilled workers and shortages in doctors, teachers and other high contact social work shows a picture of a massive societal problem.

The EU law explicitly says no consent by default and users have to opt in. All of these cookie banners are breaking the law, the law doesn’t need to change it just needs enforcing and these banners will disappear. We already have a do not track header and that could be complied with but it’s enforcement that is the problem.

The new Linuxserver.io docker image at the very least has solved the annoying update cycle NextCloud has and seems to have fixed the need to do that every few months. I haven’t ever had it die but I don’t push it hard and I keep the plugins to a minimum because I just don’t trust it and it doesn’t run all that well.

I tend to go off the https://grid.iamkate.com/ website which is a good day by day look at power generation and summarises the year. Renewables have so far surpassed fossil fuels 10.7GW compared to 10.3GW with other sources taking 5.9GW of which biomass is 1.52GW. I don’t personally think biomass is renewable because its burning old forests and at a rate far faster than the wood is replanted and we know that old forests store much more CO2 than new ones. With hydro and Nuclear its a pretty close run thing if we consider them green renewables are the majority of power production.

Still a way to go, obviously more capacity is required and more storage and this will inevitably lead to excess power in the summer which is how renewables will work and hopefully we will find a good use for free power capturing CO2. A lot of projects are held up by the grid in the UK, more than enough to complete this transition, companies want to install the production its just the grid holding everything up with plans out to 2035.

I can see in the future a standard for DC power with a completely different power socket that saves up the round trip of DC to AC then back into DC for all our electronics. There are fairly substantial benefits to be had but as I think it through the usable DC is 3 to 12V and appreciable load will mean those cables will push a lot of amps. Not sure the economics will work out without it being high voltage and that fits nothing DC today. If it’s high voltage then everything needs a converter again.

Setting a DC standard today will be a world wide nightmare, we need it but it’s got to be dumb for longevities sake. It’s far off I think.

Its not directly in the article but the primary reason Solar is its a lot cheaper than electricity production from fuel, something like 1/4 - 1/10 the price depending on where in the world you are. An energy company is basically foolish to invest in oil based electricity production when Solar is so competitive and cheap and easy to maintain. Wind is a little cheaper where there is good airflow but the maintenance cost is higher especially for offshore. Both however are so much cheaper than Nuclear and especially than oil/drilling fuels that its hard to see much real investment in those older technologies.

There has been a lot of recent complaints around the UK’s granting of further drilling rights in the North sea for Oil. I think the companies taking those up haven’t yet come to terms with the fact there is a good chance those ventures drive their companies to bankruptcy because they wont be competitive as EVs and Solar/Wind take over due to cost savings.

Minecraft, playing a 1.20 modpack