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…

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.

Does this guy live in The Backrooms or something? This layout is mental.

“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).

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.

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.

I will never forgive Apple for fucking over the open web. When the iPhone launched it was web-only. You could ‘install’ web apps, and any device APIs - accelerated graphics, hardware sensors, location, offline storage, intents, contacts lists, push notifications - were user-selected and presented as standard JavaScript interfaces. One app, literally every platform, and iPhone was there first. It was in a period where every platform was rushing to support web applications with high-performance browser engines and Apple looked like they were going to do for websites-as-applications what they had done for USB ten years earlier: recognise it as the best way forward and push it hard, compatibility be damned.

Then the iPhone started selling well and they got fucking dollar signs in their eyes, realising how much money there was to be made forcing everyone to develop on their platform, in their language, for thier devices. Apps, distribution channels, operating system, services, devices, development, all of it on their terms and on thier platforms. The second they became mainstream they started locking everyone into their vertical ecosystem and wringing as much cash out as they could, exposing their hipocracy and showing that they were as anti-competetive and destructive as Microsoft at their 1990s worst.

In 1980, a large number of experts in business and general tech predicted that by 1990 most written communications would be fully electronic, something akin to email. What they didn’t predict was the appearance of the fax machine, which was novel enough to be exciting but simple enough to be understood, and people flocked to it. As a result, electronic communication was stalled for about twenty years. I have no doubt that at some point in the future, Apps will be seen the same way but I think it will take a lot longer to get there.

Ja. Ich habe Deutsch gelernt. Kaffee mit Milch, bitte.

Nothing beats “Crying With Laughter And Staring Eyes”.

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 80W 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.

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.

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.

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.

I disagree with the more than 4K being a theoretical need thing but, regardless, 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 and, depending on the desk, 10Gb ethernet, multiple cameras and conference audio. The cable also charges the laptop, of course. 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.

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] charge all out things using a single connector, reducing e-waste, and, uh, ensuring there’s lots of futureproofing built-in. BASTARDS.

Wait until they’re not looking to put on the wig. Otherwise it’s kinda a bit weird.

Gary forgot the five Ibuprofen.

You eat cigarettes?

Something, something, neighbour’s lawn, sprinkler, something.

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 your cigarette after filling in a form which asks for your date of birth which is the 7th August 1968.