Could technology just leave me alone for a bit? Please?
Also, why, Google, did you send this to an email address I didn't use when buying the phone, didn't use when setting it up, but added to the phone only to be able to access some spreadsheets I needed to access a while back? Huh? I have no idea which of zillions of Google things I need to poke to change where these type of emails go.
Get the T-shirts here! :) bigbeaverenergy.comHere is my Patreon https://www.patreon.com/physicsduckYes, I do write books! https://amzn.to/331JrxPIf you like...
Love the way that the media is deliberately ignoring the fact that these bush fires are going from a semi-rare event to a several-times-a-year event just in case anyone uses that opportunity to ask inconvenient questions.
Wildfires continue to burn in the northern Highland Council area of Scotland in the UK, where firefighters have been battling blazes for more than three days...
Man, I could really go for a complete overthrow of the capitalist hegemony and the ushering in of a new era of peaceful cooperation between all peoples on a bountiful Earth that we care for and nurture. I just think a complete overthrow of the capitalist hegemony and the ushering in of a new era of peaceful cooperation between all peoples on a bountiful Earth that we care for and nurture would fix me, you know?
Conover may not be everyone's cup of tea, but he makes some good points in this video. "AI" is making the people that use it less intelligent, and leading to a loss of critical thinking and basic mental skills. It started with the Smartphone, but it's getting so much worse.
We have the numbers to prove it, AI is turning our brains into AI slop. Visit https://groundnews.com/factually to stay fully informed, see through biased med...
Oh, grrrr. When I moved into this house last year I noted the Swish Fibre toby box in the pavement outside, and found via their web site that I could get symmetric gigabit over fibre. I set up an Openreach fibre line to get started with, using my own reseller account, intending to get Swish installed later. I also asked Swish whether they could do a point-to-point connection, like a leased line, and the clueless customer service people didn't have a bloody clue what that was.
But I still intended to get a line from them, which would be independent of Openreach, and hopefully would give me the same resilient connectivity I was used to at the old house, where we had a VDSL over Openreach and DOCSIS from Virgin Media (plus my own OSPF-over-tunnels setup to my colo network routers in the datacentre to make switchovers seamless).
But I've just gone to look at Swish again and it now seems they've merged with other altnets and apparently stopped providing connections over their own network in preference for just reselling Openreach - if I search for my address they just return the same asymmetric offerings you'd get from any Openreach-based ISP and claim they can get me connected without an engineer visit, which can only be the case if they're using Openreach. Just... why!? Why build your own fibre network and then throw it away? Why buy a company with its own network just to not use that network? Do I really have to order a full leased line just to get a second (wired) net connection at this property? Grrrrrrr.
Looking around for leased line quotes (which are hard to get without having to submit a quote request and give them your phone number and email address so you can be on their pestering list forevermore), the cheapest look like nearly £300/month. That'll be not including VAT, either. Urgh.
Three friends on the beach spotted a log by the shore. The red panda climbed on top to keep watch. Below, the golden retriever and the bunny put on their masks and took a deep breath. *Splash!* they jumped in.
Down in the water, everything was different. It was deeper than what they could imagine, the rocks looked like caves, and they found a chest full of treasures. All this while they were just on the shore, barely splashing their paws on the water, but for sure imagination is better when you share it with others.
Traditional. Watercolor and gouaches. 30.5 x 45.5 cm (12 x 18 inches) Made for Anthrocon 2025. The original will be shown at the Art Show.
Also on Patreon and Ko-Fi you can see high resolutions of the scan of this piece, the high resolution of that video, high resolution of pieces I've been sharing on galleries and also some I haven't shared yet. Plus WIPs and more exclusive content. And you support me to keep creating art. The full of this piece was shared on May 5th on Patreon, so subscribers got to see this picture almost two months before anyone else. Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/pandapaco Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/panda_paco Thank you!
Oh nice. If I was still in London I might give cycling across it a go again. It's been a few years since I cycled from south-west London to the Docklands to do a datacentre visit. (Sadly it left me with too little remaining energy to actually work effectively, but anyway.) But now that I live in the middle of nowhere, cycling in London isn't really something I can do any more. (I could cycle in my local area, and my brother-in-law keeps hinting, heavily, that I should, but urgh. I don't know the area's cycle routes yet and I just don't feel like cycling these days. And mainly, I don't have anywhere I need to go that's actually a reasonable cycling distance from here.)
Cycling in London has changed my life in more ways than I could have imagined. I really hope you like this one. It's been a passion project of mine to show j...
I'm fed up with being tired all summer. I know it partly comes of going to bed late, but the rest of the year that's not a problem and it's what I'm used to. In summer I have the choice of either sleeping with the window open and being woken up at 5am by traffic noise, or keeping it closed and roasting all night. Opening the curtains (in the old house) or blind (in the new one) adds cooling potential, but also wakes me up after too few hours of sleep with the early-morning blast of daylight. And I hate insects coming in, too (that can be fixed with flyscreens, though).
I just took the car round to the nearby service centre for its service tomorrow. I should have picked up some gloves before I went because the steering wheel was so hot it was hard to keep hold of it. Thank god the car has aircon, even though I only had the benefit of it for a few minutes.
Why does the weather forecast say that this evening will be "fine" when it's absolutely not fine for it to be roasting hot? Roll on Wednesday, when it's meant to be several degrees cooler.
I cannot function properly in this kind of weather. It's outside my specified environmental operating parameters.
I'm not sure there's a good solution to this. I'm the opposite, I go to bed early and get up early, I've drifted that way because of insomnia more than anything, and I have exactly the same problem every year.
I did get a portable ACU about five years back too. I've done as much as I can with that, with ducting through the bedroom wall for the exhaust, and it's far from ideal. It's a lot louder than expected, and the flow of air seems to disrupt my sleep. Despite being one of the more decent ones from the time, I can't position the air outlet such that it doesn't bother me for some reason.
I'm already considering a split system, but don't know if this is just throwing good money after bad.
Anyway, enough moaning from me, and I do hope you manage through this difficult period. You are at least not alone, though I know that doesn't help at all.
No, Windows, how about *you* restart it? That's something a computer can very easily do, and I shouldn't have to be bothered about. Also, please tell me why my computer should be running a "threat service". Hopefully it's just badly named and is actually an anti-threat service. …Unless it's a service running on Microsoft's behalf whose job is to threaten me if I don't allow upgrades when they want me to. 🤷
I really ought to stop running Windows on this laptop. I never meant to, just didn't get round to replacing it with something better when I bought it back in 2018, then came to rely on, so the window of opportunity to wipe and reinstall is gone.
You know, the crazy thing is "threat service" from Microsoft I could totally see going either way.
For the last few years, the first thing I do with a PC laptop when I get it is to specifically remove Windows if it's installed. But I have the good fortune of being in a position where I don't need it for anything. All the things I could / would ever use Windows for are totally voluntary.
@Xoa Gray This is only the second laptop I've ever bought actually (I bought a second hand Toshiba brick thing back in… I think it was the early 2000s). I kept Windows for a while to try out and see what it was like; then, as mentioned, failed to remove it. (Also partly because it ran Steam and games nicely, and I'm not sure Linux would have been as capable of that back in 2018.) I run Debian on just about everything else and would have run it on this too if I'd got round to it. There's also the factor that I'm kinda fed up with computers which pushed me towards taking a path with less resistance. *sigh* I think I might still enjoy working with computers if it weren't for capitalism pushing so much crap.
I get that, I used to work in IT till about 10 years ago when I walked away from it completely. But my burning hate for what Microsoft has done to Windows pushes it to a priority for me anymore. The OS is basically spyware you can browse the internet on at this point. I hate it honestly. Windows 11 in and of its self I actually kinda' liked at first, back before they went and actively started to enshitify it with "AI" and spyware.
A film series I've been enjoying with my dad (and now with my friends). Since I was a kid I've been watching these movies with him. Recently I visited my parents and my dad told me he hadn't watched the very last one, so we had to go to the movies to watch it together, despite I had already seen it. Then in the dinner, I had to do the thing I tend to do while we wait for our food.
If you enjoyed Talon, please help us greenlight the next episode through these links!!!SHOP: https://lunar-dragon-ent-shop.fourthwall.com/ FOURTHWALL (member...
Started off my morning with a rare YouTube recommendation that was actually fun - "Cinema Sings" where the classic Gorillaz Teck "Feel Good" is recreated using clips from 198 movies 😁 https://youtu.be/rk0NzRu6Wr0
Feel Good Inc. by Gorillaz gets the CinemaSings treatment, as 198 movies recite its lyrics!Follow me on social media: https://linktr.ee/rjsuspect0:00 Gorilla...
What would you say to your younger self if you could walk beside them for a moment? Maybe not advice, not warnings. Just the kind of words that feel right when you needed it, when there’s time ahead and questions without rush. Nothing needs to be solved yet. But a little clarity, a little kindness... that goes a long way.
Traditional. Watercolor. You will be able to see this in person at the Anthrocon Art Show as well.
----------
Also I recorded the process video, you can watch the short version on the first comment of this picture on my Telegram art channel: https://t.me/panda_paco There is a longer version of this one, submitten on May 15 exclusively on Patreon and Ko-Fi, as well as the high resolution version and other pictures I haven't shared yet, more process videos and WIPs. Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/pandapaco Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/panda_paco Thank you!!
*sigh* Reality intrudes, as it so often does! I really ought to start making a proper effort to find virtual server customers — I have the physical servers, I have them colocated in my own cabinets, on my own network, at the centre of the UK internet (Telehouse in the London Docklands), I have spare RAM and SSD space on those servers, and I really ought to find people to make use of them so the machines can pay for their own upkeep!
So, is anyone I know looking for a good virtual server provider at the moment? I have been doing this a long time, tweaked my setups for rather high levels of reliability (I hosted a financial price index's servers at one point and they were really concerned about reliability) and I think I'm pretty good at it, I'm just awful at marketing and promoting myself and my services.
One big problem I have with promoting these things is seeing people here talking about VPS providers, usually very much from the point of view of price. It seems there are *very* *very* *extremely* cheap VMs available if you know where to look, and it's hard to figure out what to say to give anyone a reason not to go to them. Obviously *I* think what I do is better because I've spent over a decade tweaking and rebuilding and working on reliability and (to a lesser extent maybe) performance, but how to convince people to part with money for it.
So I guess here's a couple of questions for anyone who feels they have an answer: what per month would you be willing to pay to get your stuff reliably hosted, if you wanted a better than bog standard VPS provider? And also, what extra things (features, services, whatever) over a bog standard VPS provider would you be willing to pay a bit more for?
“Elon #Musk and the #TechBros say they want humans to become an interplanetary species. They say the great priority of humanity should be to colonise Mars. That’s not just mad, it’s dangerous.
It encourages the notion that Earth is temporary and expendable, that we don’t need to cherish and protect it because we can just move on. In reality Earth is the only place where humanity can thrive. The problem is, we’re trashing it.”
“If #Musk and #Bezos really want to live on Mars, fine, go for it, do it. Just don’t expect the rest of us to come with you. That’s why we’ve built a rocket at #Glastonbury so we can send them to Mars while we party on Earth.”
I just think Bowie covered the deadening reality of life that we’re not really focusing on despite it being thrust in our faces all the time, because we all enjoy the distractions of modern life and would rather ask ourselves facile questions like is there ‘Life on Mars?’ than how do we save life on planet Earth…because that’s too grim and hard.
Do you think he has read the Parable series by Octavia Butler? It’s exactly what is depicted in it, essentially an apocalypse and a group with one destiny, to go to Mars.
Making Mars even a little bit habitable for humans is going to be a massive, generational endeavour.
The invasion of the new world on Earth was big. But that was putting people in a place that humans can already survive in very successfully. Using conventional transport.
Mars is going to take a planetwide cooperative effort. Making things right here on Earth is how we settle Mars. Not some billionaires having a rocket competition. #space #mars
Well, I guess we won't be using the A/V amp with the separate speakers for a while, not after it went "bang" a couple of times. At least I could just reroute the inputs directly to the TV and use its internal speakers so my dad can still watch the film he was about to watch. I'll have to take the lid off sometime and see how much magic smoke has been released!
I did a cooking. (Admittedly all I did was follow the instructions on the sauce jar, but still - it came out okay!)
(Actually I do a cooking most days, but this time was just slightly less straightforward than the "remove packaging, place in oven at temperature X for time Y, remove, eat" that I normally do.)
In the morning, Archer is the first one out, lying in the grass, watching how the city awakes, and that kite in the distance. Denali shows up a bit later, racing the wind with the string in his paw. By sunset, it’s Archer again, this time heading back, backpack slung over his shoulder, and as night arrives, Denali takes a moment to rest, still smiling, enjoying the city lights and how quietly the world sleeps. Tiny visitors that come and go with the changing light; little reminders that time moves, but life stays curious.
Acrylics on canvas. Paintings for Archer
There’s a 6 minutes time-lapse video of the process on the first comment of this picture on my Telegram art channel: https://t.me/panda_paco
And there is a longer version (more than 30 minutes) of the process of this whole project, as well as high resolution picture, scanned versions, and other drawings I've been working on that I haven's shown on my galleries yet.... exclusive for Patreon and Ko-Fi monthly supporters. At supporting me you are also helping me to keep creating art and living out of this.
it wasn't all great though, I distinctly remember sharing a computer with family and every day the usable screen size on the web browser would get smaller and smaller because of more and more toolbars
And closing the web browser, then closing all the pop up children it gave birth to behind it
I think its been through good and bad times, for me peak was probably around '07-12 though
Provided to YouTube by WM UKThe Draize Train (2008 Remaster) · The SmithsComplete℗ 1986 Warner Music UK Ltd.Bass Guitar: Andy RourkeMasterer: Christian Stegm...
We need to bring back the concept of people with a net worth in the billions receiving justice in a Star Chamber system. We need to start understanding that they are not like normal people.
it amazes me that people talk about the freedom of open source software, but somehow can't understand that it also means the freedom to not work on something, it's not some conspiracy if a project is not being developed, people just don't want to work on it and you can't force them to
Alt Text: ‘A covertly-installed Neighbour-Source Heat Pump takes advantage of the fact your neighbour keeps their house cool in the summer and warm in the winter’. Image of two houses, one with a heat pump and then pipes underground leading to the other, extending up the walls in a loop system.
Word!! My neighbours keep their home at 72F summer and winter. Their AC compressor turns on when it's 74F and dry outside but they have no idea it's like paradise out there.
Just a red panda chillin’. Red pandas really do love a good ice cube, zoos often give them giant blocks to help them cool off and stay playful on hot days. So of course this little guy made himself comfortable.
Drawn with crayons over a Denny’s paper tablecloth, again!
This piece will be part of my biggest exhibition yet at the Anthrocon Art Show.
A red panda this time. I don’t even know what he’s looking at, perhaps someone who is giving apples away but not to him, but I liked painting him just like that.
This is part of the same quiet rhythm I’ve been in lately. Simple paintings, small format, brush in hand, no rush. I think I needed to go back to that. Not to chase meaning, not to impress anyone, just to enjoy it again, to let myself feel okay with doing something for the sake of doing it.
Painted with acrylics over a tan toned sheet, made to fit an old frame I had already. This one will also be shown at the Anthrocon Art Show.
----
I want to keep doing art pieces that comes from me, I have a lot of ideas, a lot of projects and comics but I can't do them all real because I need to combine them with commissions, and in the end of the month I need to prioritize the commissions more than anything. I want to change that and keep a good balance. If you want to help me to make that dream come true, you can do it at supporting me on Patreon or Ko-Fi, and you'll receive exclusive content, you will see my WIPs, drawings and paintings before anyone else, high resolutions and full process videos. Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/pandapaco Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/panda_paco
it sounds like the situation in the UK has worsened more than I realised :\
stay safe over there