January 1, 2025: we will set cohost.org to redirect to the wayback machine to prevent link rot. this is something we will be paying for out of pocket since ASSC will no longer be an operating concern, but it’s max $100 per year total so it’s fine.
I appreciate this, and wish more websites would make such arrangements before shutting down.
Reminds me of this. The mailbox part happened to my brother not long ago, and the getting hit by a car part happened to me more than once as a teenager. I doubt I'd fare so well now.
If Labour had any sense they would’ve got Ed Miliband to make a move to immediately reform the electricity market so that wholesale prices aren’t largely determined by the price of gas fired generation. A bold but long overdue move would potentially halve the domestic unit rate, with an immediate win for inflation, and render the whole question of the winter payment moot. That would’ve been smart joined up strategy benefitting everyone. Doesn’t look like they’re capable of that.
In the wake of Roe v. Wade being overturned, online privacy is on everyone's minds. But according to privacy experts, the entire way we think about and under...
Gads but I owe @SimonTesla for letting me know you can include a terminal comma in a list in both Javascript and C#. It's saved me *so* much needless fussing.
Have you *any fucking idea* how *utterly impossible* it is for me as a 60+ year/old to follow your *fuckingly stupid animated gif crap documentation video* which wizzes by at an speed impossible to follow for anybody over the age of 8?
Why can't you bloodywell give us a chance and *write a few fucking sentences*?!?!!
Actually, what I wanted to say was "no, thanks, I won't use your project. Have a lovely day."
“Smart” technology Spend way more money for basically the same damn thing Won’t work when you lose internet Is actually less convenient than what it replaced Is likely spying on you Can’t even sell it when you’re done with the fucking thing Fffffffffff
No, I don't want to work at a "fast growing company", I want to work for a slow rolling company that has carved itself a comfortable niche where the owners aren't gunning for a big exit.
WM Motor filed for bankruptcy in October 2023, and Singulato and Aiways have left the market, too. An estimated 160,000 Chinese car owners are left in the lurch.
Some of this stuff is a risk for all cars as we head towards an ever more computerized future. Not only that, but imagine millions of vehicles with outdated firmware, collecting data on us for years and becoming more and more vulnerable to hacking as they age.
The future is a Black Mirror episode, and it sucks.
As much as I like that computers have gotten a lot more accessible to people, I still wish that people on the whole had gotten more computer literate and tech savvy instead of computing becoming what it is now. Computers making things easier for users often comes with vendor lock-in and things "that just work" all only just working because they're from the same manufacturer.
Also people seem pretty incapable of learning new tech and different workflows now which is... frustrating. We used to use raw HTML on our MySpace pages.
There is a huge difference with being taught to understand computers and being taught to use a product that just happens to be ON computers (or to be more accurate tablets)
@avon_deer Only kinda related, but Apple really needs to ditch iPadOS and just stick macOS with a modified interface onto their tablets. And also yeet the menu bar while they're at it. It's wild to me that iPads are as powerful as Macbooks but have the operating system of an iPhone.
@odoben I shall teach my spawn how to do everything in the command line first. Their first OS will be Alpine Linux and no GUI till they learn to install the GUI themselves @Rusty
Oh wow, LinkedIn is the worst... They have suspended my account, due to "suspicious activity" (aka me getting annoyed with all the notifications and therefore not using it for several weeks). To recover the account, they want me to submit a photo of my ID, and I am obviously not doing that. So, the next step is account deletion: The only documented process is through the account settings, but I am not able to access these, since I am prohibited from logging in. But not all hope is lost: Thanks to the power of the GDPR, we can submit a data deletion request. Unfortunately, submitting the form fails with an error, and I get redirected to a help article that describes how I can send them a picture of my ID. What a weird coincidence...
Today, I replaced two double mains sockets in the bedrooms (one by my dad's bed, one next to mine) with double sockets with built-in USB power ports, tested all four of the TV sockets scattered around the house (they all work), and also scooped nearly half a bucket of mossy slop out of the gutter on the front of the garage. Home ownership is phun.
Disclaimer: While I'm sure it's lovely, I have yet to actually use Postgres. I've just never had the push to do so yet — everything I've used so far has wanted MySQL (or SQLite, or…). Also, I wish I had the energy to pick up new things like I used to.
@Soatok Dreamseeker @Q ✨ MySQL and co have certainly grown up a *lot* since mysql was first being compared to Postgres. I've definitely had MySQL/MariaDB databases very occasionally shit themselves in various ways over the years, but at least I know enough I can usually clean up and make it work again. I've read quite a few times (admittedly mostly a long time ago) how much better Postgresql is but I don't have the experience to know if corrupted tables and the like are any less common there. I'm sure I'll give it a go someday, maybe I'll find out! In the meantime, agreed, mysqld certainly does the job, without fuss, pretty well, pretty much of the time.
@DeltaWye @FlitsFlash @Foxytosin @Jencen The whole point of this game is to get the pet lizard doggy. Once you do that everything else is side quest. ;)
I don't actually play it. I watch over @CheetahObscura's shoulder, though, and I hear a lot about water and conveyor belts and pasta, so I'm pretty sure the end product is fish for baby seals.
Lionizing Terry Pratchett's work as universally progressive and incisive denies the early stuff where he happily used racist tropes for a cheap laugh, and the *climb* he made from there to where he ended up.
This is important because it's not just any given book saying "We can do better"; it's the author, doing better, as you go.
There are two professors named Kate Baker at the University of Cambridge. One works in the department of genetics studying pathogens while the other works in the department of pathology studying genetics.
Factoid time! In 1973, there was a Great Pizza Funeral -- due to bad mushrooms with botulism, a ton of pizzas got recalled, and as a publicity stunt, they had a funeral for 'em all
A trio of ‘Fursuit Slice’ collages I put together around 2020/2021. There was no particular theme to these ones, just a selection of fursuits I quite liked. The positioning is a bit uneven - I tried to keep the eyes level along each row but the results were variable.
Content warning: :boosts_ok: transphobia 101: a quick lesson for everyone, abuse, death (especially for people who already think they're allies)
If someone uses the incorrect pronouns for someone, especially a trans person, after being corrected and/or uses their deadname (necronym), you're looking at a transphobe, full stop.
No matter how much social justice and anti-bigotry language they may bathe themselves in, no matter how they may position themselves as "advocating for the marginalised", no matter how much you may respect them for other actions, these are *bare minimum* things, right up there with not using ethnic slurs.
p.s. for a trans person, having a necronym outed to the public is literally life-threatening, whether that leads to direct physical abuse (including death) or discrimination and abuse from entities like companies and communities (which can also all too easily lead to death)
it used to bother me that all the art in star trek was really mediocre. the paintings are banal and poorly executed. the music was bland. the games were all sort of slow and lame. but like. now it...
I did an achievement today: fixed one of the wall lights in the lounge which didn't work.
I *had* thought the problem was going to be a broken wire somewhere under a floor/above a ceiling/inside a wall, but thankfully it turned out to be simpler. I had already (days after moving in) replaced the light switch, which was a dimmer switch and was apparently faulty in some way because the light that worked would be much dimmer than it could be (I tested by putting the G9 bulb in a floor lamp and it was much brighter) with a simple on-off switch.
Today I took that switch off again to properly test the cable to the dead light fixture. There were 4 wires coming into that switch, 2 to the common side and 2 to the switched side. I assumed the 2 on the common side were the two directions on a ring, and the other 2 went one to each wall light. Identified which one went to the working light and tried to test the other.
In the end I figured out a method of testing: I used an extension cord as a temporary wire, pushed an earth pin I got from a spare plug into one of the sockets on the extension reel, attached one probe of my multimeter in beep continuity mode to that, connected the other probe to one of the wires coming to the light fixture, then touched the earth pin at the other end of the extension cord to various wires behind the switch with the beep telling me which were connected. (That was the method I finally used; at first I did it the other way round, connecting at the switch end, running across the room to the lamp and touching probes to things there, going back, etc.)
I got really confused because, while the voltage proximity wand had previously told me the live wire to the light worked, and I was guessing the neutral was broken, I now failed to get any continuity at all! In the end I took almost all the wires out of the back of the switch (thinking I was remembering which was which, but actually I lost track) and tested *everything*. Turns out, only one of the 4 wires went to both lamps! That changed things a bit. I now assumed there must be a junction box somewhere splitting the cable between the two.
A bit more testing and I figured out where most of the other wires went. Figured out a testing method for that too: replace a low-energy bulb with an old incandescent one, then, if the wire pair I'm testing goes to that light, the resistance will change significantly when the switch is flipped on and off. I worked out that one wire went to the hall light, and one went to both the study and the dining room lights. Leaving the wires all disconnected I turned the circuit back on at the consumer unit and found the hall light didn't work while the study and dining room ones did, so that was the supply cable and the hall light was daisy-chained off the lounge lights. The beepy voltage-detector wand confirmed that.
(So there's still a wire that I don't know what it does. I've connected it to the switched side of the lounge lights because that's where it must have been before, but I wish I knew what it was for.)
Finally I could get all the wires reconnected and make things safe, so I did that. Then I had a brain-wave and realised the second wall light might simply be daisy-chained off the first, in which case there might not even be a junction box involved. I pulled the first lamp fixture off the wall (which I hadn't tried before because that fixture was working fine) and, lo and behold, there were 2 wires going to it! And one of them had a loose neutral wire! Re-made the connection, put it all back together, and it works!
Wow, that took a long time, a huge chunk out of the day, but it's very satisfying to actually diagnose and fix stuff like that.
(Yes, I've written "wire" when I probably should have said "cable" in many places, but I'm not going back to edit it all again...)
I seem to be in the process of doing something similar with the satellite feed. The house came with a dish strapped to its side, and a pair of F-connectored cables go from it to the corner of the lounge, where they couple to a pair of cables running under the floor to the TV area. While there's a terrestrial aerial on the roof (and another in the loft, I think) none of the TV sockets around the house are within cabling reach of the TV area, so satellite it seems it must be. I've got a Freesat box (Foxsat-HDR) and have plugged it in and tried to set it up, but it doesn't seem to see the signals it needs to set up Freesat properly, although it does get a few random unencrypted channels, mostly home shopping stuff and some religious and arabic (I think?) news channels).
I've tried adjusting the dish angles but don't seem to be able to find any other satellites near the direction it was already pointing. I'm pretty sure it's pointing approximately the right direction already, and I've adjusted it to get the signal it was already seeing as good as possible. I'm not sure where to go from here, though. Swapping the cables around and tuning again results in losing most of the channels, and still not getting the 11428MHz signal that is supposedly the Freesat "home transponder" and the one to make sure you get a good signal on, according to various forum posts. I don't know if both LNBs work, whether they are the same or need to be treated differently (maybe one's for vertical polarisation and one's for horizontal? Do they do it that way?), I don't know if the dish aim is good or whether it's pointing at some other satellite position, or how to figure out which, if so, so I can work out which way to adjust. I don't even know if the cabling is all good. Coming to a dead end, I suspect, and wondering if I need to give up and pay someone to come and make it work. :(
Satellite dishes need a decent coax cable and if there's any doubt at all about the LNB it's a good idea to replace it. Have you got a signal strength meter to help you with the precision alignment?
@TundraWolf Oh yes, I found https://www.satsig.net/maps/satellite-tv-dish-pointing-uk-ireland.htm was very helpful. It could even tell me the point on the roof of my neighbour's house I needed to align the dish with to get the correct bearing! I think I came across lyngsat too - also interesting. But even though I'm pretty sure I'm pointing the dish the right way, I don't seem to be getting several of the signals I'm sure I'm supposed to be getting.
I'm sure I bought a signal strength meter when my sister moved into her house and I helped get the satellite dish working there, but of course I have no idea where it is now... The way I worked it was to use a couple of long (5m) HDMI cables, linked together with the A/V receiver, to extend the output of the Freesat box into the garden, then plugged it into the spare TV, powered from the garden socket and positioned so I could see it from the ladder while adjusting the dish. I could then use the live signal meter on the freesat box's manual tuning screen to get it tweaked for best signal. I managed to get it to 80% strength and 100% quality; after tightening the nuts I could push on the sides of the dish to bend the mount slightly each way and see the strength/quality drop off from 100% in each bend direction and spring back to 100% when I let go, so I'm pretty sure I got it fairly near as good as it can be.
But while I'm sure it's pretty accurately pointed at *something*, I'm finding it hard to believe that that "something" is the 28.2E Astra cluster, because I just don't seem to be receiving what I should be, which is making me think that either I've pointed it accurately at the wrong cluster of satellites, or there's a fault somewhere else in the hardware here, or (unlikely) the frequencies/multiplexes/whatever have all been changed recently. It's doing my head in a bit, to be honest.
Speaking from experience, it's very easy to point it in the wrong place. We originally set up one dish at the 28.8°E cluster first time, but I think that was as much luck as anything. Trying to do the second pointing at Thor at 0.8°W was aligned everything beautifully for a lovely quality signal, but then realised it was aligned at a totally different satellite (or cluster).
We were using a DVB-S2 tuner card, so had one person trying to tune to a know frequency and looking at the stats whilst the other was adjusting the dish positioning. This eventually got us to find the right one by a bit of trial and error moving left and right, as we got a lock. Then we fine tuned knowing we were in the right ballpark. Not very scientific, but it did work.
@Darkhorse WinterWolf 🇪🇺 I inherited the setup from the previous owners and, given how the rest of everything in the house was left, it seems unlikely it would be set up unusually. It certainly got a few frequencies and about 90 misc channels and as far as I can see the bearing it's pointing at matches up with the one for the standard Sky/Freesat 28.2E position, and I wasn't able to find anything on a frequency I think I'm supposed to be able to get within a few degrees left or right, so it seems likely it was pointing correctly to begin with. To be honest, faulty LNB sounds like it's the most likely thing now.
Two LNBs is interesting, are they offset? I've heard of this where you're trying to use one reflector to see signals from two locations. We used two dishes each with a "universal" LNB - this uses a combination of bias voltage and tone generated by the receiver to pick the polarisation and high/low block for the downcoverter.
It's unlikely, but our first LNB was faulty and wouldn't select one of the polarisations. We found this by accident trying to tune to different multiplexes, and found half worked and half didn't. We then bought a new cheap LNB and it all started to work a treat.
@Darkhorse WinterWolf 🇪🇺 Thank you! Maybe I should have said dual or twin LNB rather than two LNBs, it's a single chunk with two connectors, so I assumed it has two actual LNB circuits inside. I did wonder if it was one of the hybrid(?) ones which have an offset so they can point at two separate positions at the same time, but that seems an unusual setup to get some uncommonly used channels so I feel it's unlikely. And if it is, I guess the fix is still to replace the LNB! So that'll be the next thing to try. I've taken a look and I *think* it's a mk4 dish so the commonly available LNBs should fit with no problem.
Although, since then I found a page saying that a lot of problems are down to the connections at the LNB and that LNBs are difficult to kill so replacing them often makes it work just because the connectors are cleaned/reseated. So if the weather clears up I should try that first.
Ah, I see now, sorry for the misunderstanding! Our setup is a little complex - there's a dual tuner with one input currented to one LNB output on the Astra dish. The other goes to a DiSEqC switch, with one outgoing going to the other Astra LNB output and the other to the Thor one.
When looking at the LNB connections, I'm pretty sure someone like you knows how to make a decent F connector coupling. I've always then immediately wrapped the lot in self-amalgamating tape to create a water-tight connection. I also use the cable with the closed foam dielectric in it, as I'd heard that moisture can be a killer.
I've also not heard of anyone else with a bad LNB, but we definitely seemed to have had one, as I put it back again after several times, and the problem always followed the LNB. I do hope you get to the bottom of your problems!
@Darkhorse WinterWolf 🇪🇺 Ah yes, self-amagamating tape is a good idea - I still have some left over from when I was putting wifi point-to-point links on roofs. I should fetch tht on my next trip back to the old house :)
So yeah, I don't know. I first need to see how I can access the front side of the dish - there are water butts right underneath it and on one side I can fit a ladder between them and the corner of the house and get at the back of the dish without too much of a reach. I'll have to see how it is if I put the ladder the other side - might be able to reach the LNB from there. I hope it doesn't come down to emptying and moving the water butts just to get at the dish! Another alternative is bringing some of my dad's scaffolding tower parts and building a platform I can reach the dish from in front of the water butts. Oh how these things get complicated.
Finally. I brought some of my dad's scaffolding (1950's DIYer's kit) back from the old house a few days ago, and, now that the rain's deigned to stop for a bit, I have proper access to the dish.
I've checked the connectors at the LNB and they seem in good condition - clean and dry, no sign that weather's got into the cable. I swapped the cables over at the LNB and the freesat box then only managed to find 8 channels on one transponder, not channels it had found before. When I swapped the cables at the freesat box as well, it could only find the channels it had found before, not the 8 new ones it found today (although maybe not all of them - maybe I didn't do the connectors up properly). So I think that suggests the LNB is at fault, not the cabling. Or at least not *just* the cabling!
New LNB ordered, should be here in a few days, then I can hopefully put this whole thing to bed.
The new LNB arrived yesterday while I was out. This morning I climbed the scaffolding, unscrewed the cable connectors, unclipped the old LNB, clipped the new one on, did the connectors back up, pulled the weather shield down, and climbed back down. When I turned the satellite box on it recognised that it had an antenna (hasn't done that before), accepted the postcode, very quickly found 146 channels, and now it Just Works™! Hurrah, after being in the new house since early August we finally have all the usual TV channels, plus we can record and play back. Phew, that took a while!
I've also scraped a lot more gunge out of gutters on the garage, but also discovered that all the gutters I can reach on the house are nice and clean, so I'm not sure if the high-up ones are going to need cleaning at all. I'm hoping one of my nephew's drones will let us take a look and see if someone needs to go up there and clean at all.
