I’ve gotten more aggressive with blocks lately. Feels like there’s been a lot more arguing and drama on here lately than usual, and I haven’t been on as much because of it. Blocking at least drowns a lot of that out.

Ours was “{town} Free Wi-Fi” when we lived in the town centre for a while, just to confuse tourists. It was more of a getting stabbed area than a fun SSID name area though.

I’m really angry with the British government right now. In some ways they’re worse than the Tories, because at least with them you knew where you stood. With Starmer he keeps trying to outdo the far right, which leads to them adopting even further right policies, and him adopting them and so on. The cracking down on freedom of speech is genuinely scary, whether it be through the online safety act or abusing terrorism legislation to proscribe direct action groups. They need to fix the housing and healthcare crises urgently, but they’re tinkering at the seams while the far right are on the cusp of taking power in 2029.

On the local level, I don’t like our elected assembly much either, and I feel like all they do is pose for photoshoots and blame all their mistakes on the government in London.

They did pay for the “shit your pants” spell, and that does happen shortly after death…so in a roundabout monkey’s paw sort of way I guess that one worked

I think a lot of non-techie people only know signal from the Trump admin using it illegally earlier in the year. In a lot of people’s minds because of that they think Signal = insecure because they don’t get the nuances of why using it in that specific context – on personal phones, using a third party app, with a random journalist in the mix – was bad, but that for most people it’s still one of the best options. WhatsApp on the other hand has a lot of marketing around it and if you didn’t know that Meta is Facebook I think some people wouldn’t even realise who the owners are.

The Dark Hedges. Not our number one tourist destination, but probably the most overrated one. It’s some trees that appeared in Game of Thrones and the over-tourism + the increase in stormy weather thanks to climate change is killing them.

We’ve more popular places like the Giant’s Causeway and the Derry walls, but those places are worth visiting at least.

I graduated university a couple years ago and I felt in the same boat coming up to final exams. Like others have said, you almost certainly know more than you think. You’re at the start of the final year as well so you have a lot of time to get ready.

Most IT/programming jobs will train you on the job and I haven’t heard of anyone coming into a role who’s expected to know everything, so I wouldn’t worry about that too much. Getting the job will be the harder part, and the best thing I did was to consider my past experience and apply to jobs tightly related to that. I’ll not dox myself so these will be fake details but that meant if I’d done a work experience position doing tech support for an accountancy firm, I’d have focused my applications on those companies. If you have a final year project to complete for a dissertation, see if you can tailor that to what you think are your best chances of a job. E.g. you did work experience doing IT support for a law firm, and your final year project has to be related to improving human rights, so you could develop a CRUD application to connect defendants to good pro bono lawyers. If there are law firms near you hiring for IT, that sort of thing that will help you stand out in an interview with them. I think I did only two interviews before getting a job offer with that tactic and I know others with the same degree who graduated the same day as me that still haven’t found anything.

And outside of uni/college, is there anything in IT and computer science that interests you? I found that university killed my joy for it and I’ve only rediscovered it since graduating. Building a JavaScript web app for my final year project, led me to wanting to program some discord bots, from there onto using a raspberry pi to host them, and then into doing some self hosting and networking with the likes of Docker and WireGuard. Some of that has come in handy in work, especially when using linux servers, but it’s stuff I do cause I just enjoy it and it so happens to give me some experience. There are tons of open-source projects you can work on to get experience with different parts of IT, and you’re on a good website for it since most of us on here are Linux nerds.

That’s a fair point. I suppose like any movement there’s a wide spectrum of people and one end of the spectrum would be those who are as strict as that. I don’t think it’s very productive to be that strict though, certainly where I live and with the health conditions I have it would be impossible to live life so strictly compared to someone in top health living in a major city.

There is a surprising amount of debate over that in vegan circles. Beyond Meat taste test their burgers against cow burgers to compare the flavour and some vegans will say you can’t consider those burgers vegan while others would say it’s a very small amount of animal consumption to allow for a vegan burger that might help convert more people and so the benefit outweights the harm massively. I’m vegan and I don’t really know what side to lean towards, but there’s debate over everything from honey to almonds, and debate on whether it’s acceptable to order vegan food from non-vegan restaurants, just as examples.

I saw it mentioned in this Cory Doctorow article a week or two back about some of his issues with bluesky, but he mentions here that the cost has came down from tens of millions a year down to tens of dollars a month

Hadn’t heard of wafrn until seeing it on f-droid this morning but I might give it a try, a tumblr-like platform would be nice since tumblr seems to have given up on using ActivityPub.

+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.

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.

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.

This is from the Age Verification Providers Association, who have a vested interest in forcing more and more people to use age verification. Most of these companies charge per check performed so they’re losing money every time we use a VPN to bypass it. I wouldn’t trust a thing they say, but it is worrying that they’re pushing to go further because they were successful lobbying for the age verification checks in the first place, and our tech secretary is an idiot. If they do convince the government to pass a law forcing companies to try and detect VPN usage, that will be devastating for online privacy even outside of the UK. That they now want websites to ask for a users location is quite scary.

I’ve correctly predicted the result of every US & UK election (plus the brexit referendum) since 2016, based mostly on vibes