That’s not quite true, water charges are part of your council tax. You get a discount if you have a septic tank because then dealing with the waste water is your responsibility.

But you pay a flat rate based on your property’s estimated value in 1991.

And Northern Ireland, but let’s be honest, Scotland has it’s own issues with nationalised bodies cough ferries cough so we Scots can’t sit here with too smug a grin on our faces. I’m sure Northern Ireland has it’s own issues in this field as well, but I don’t live there so I pay less attention to that.

I broadly agree with nationalising critical infrastructure like water, electricity and gas, some other key infrastructure like railways, the post office and probably a few others I can’t think of at this moment in time but it’s far from perfect and isn’t going to make everything perfect overnight.

I’ve got my instance of matrix working with voice calls. It’s not built in, but it’s just another service in my compose file alongside the bridges I use to have my unified chat app.

I’m using coturn and it just works when doing voice and video calls with federated users.

I think I’ve seen people using jitsi as well, so it seems there are many options available

I know it doesn’t help you at the moment, but at some point between June last year and last week they’ve updated the kickstand to include an extra little crossbar up at the top of the metal u shaped piece of metal that makes up the stand so that you need to lose both pins for it to fall off now. (I ordered one last year and ordered a replacement kit for a 2nd steam deck that I’ve gifted to my wife) And I’m liking the look of the new design.

I’ll see if I can take a photo later on and share it to explain as I suspect my words aren’t doing a great job.

Edit: here’s a quick photo I’ve taken to try to show the new crossbar thing in action.

I considered trying that then read about some kernel versions not being compatible with certain versions of the dkms package so decided to give up, go to bed and deal with the issue later. (This was Saturday night and sadly time hasn’t permitted me to start investigating again yet)

I have the same issue on my desktop. I’d assumed it was something I’d done (it usually is) but I had to admit defeat and resort to switching to booting into a backup OS so that I could get on with all the tasks I need to get done but I’m assuming it was a problem with the Nvidia-dkms package that’ll be resolved in time as people have reported similar issues in the past.

Ah, thanks for correcting me there. I knew that EA were involved at some level and I didn’t think to research that part of the post I was replying to, so I stand corrected, but I think the main point I was making is still valid, that the team that initially developed the game weren’t behind this re-release.

The original was EA, this re-release is Aspyr, so as bad as EA are I’m not convinced that they’re to blame here.

I’m more interested in matrix having worked with meta to actually bridge from a matrix home server to WhatsApp. Thanks to the EU’s DMA WhatsApp were required to do something.

Element has been working with Meta since the end of last year to help test their DMA interoperability (given we’re probably the world leader in interoperable end-to-end-encrypted communication) - and Matrix announced last month at FOSDEM that Element has successfully integrated 1:1 chats between Matrix and WhatsApp via the DMA APIs, while maintaining end-to-end encryption (having implemented full Signal compatibility in vodozemac). We’ve also formally requested interoperability with WhatsApp, as of yesterday. https://element.io/blog/the-eu-digital-markets-act-is-here/ (That full post is quite a long read and some of the technical bits went way over my head as I’m more focussed on dev-ops than the inner workings of the protocol)

As for how it will look, further down that same post there is the following:

The biggest concern right now is around “reachability”: whether DMA interoperability will default to off or on for EU citizens - and so whether users on Element would even be able to contact users on WhatsApp without the WhatsApp user having to explicitly opt in in advance. According to the public information available at WhatsApp Chats Will Soon Work With Other Encrypted Messaging Apps | WIRED on Feb 6th: “WhatsApp users who opt in will see messages from other apps in a separate section at the top of their inbox.”. We all know the power of defaults, especially when applied to competition law, and we’re interested to see what the final user experience is.

So sadly it looks as though you may be able to contact people if they’ve opted in for cross platform messaging, but they’ll need to look somewhere else for your messages.

I currently use matrix and have bridges for discord, WhatsApp, RCS, Google messages and possibly a couple of others running so that I can just chat to whoever I want from one place and not care which platform they’re using.

Oh, I’m fine with my setup, I have a couple of external servers that can monitor all my web accessible stuff with kuma and then I’ve got another local one to monitor my non-web accessible stuff.

Thanks for those tips though, definitely useful to consider other options

On the uptime monitoring I’ve been quite happy with uptime kuma, but… If you put it on the same host that’s down… Well, that’s not going to work :p (I nearly made that mistake)

Haha, that’s fair. I was being sincere.

I’d initially scrolled past thinking “I played this whilst I was still at Uni, why is anyone talking about it now?”

Now that I know this person’s focus is intentionally looking at older games I’m willing to go and give it a watch.

Thanks for that additional insight into this channel. This completely changes the way that I will now look at this content.

If the extra charger that covers with the official dock doesn’t work to you (fair enough since you mention that portability is key) I backed the jsaux case on Kickstarter and am quite happy with us: https://jsaux.com/products/omnicase-2-storage-docking-station?variant=43986713772252

I got the pro version, but there’s no reason that you can’t get the standard one and it came with a nice little travel pouch, but I don’t know if that covers with the ices you buy directly.

That sounds like a rather unpleasant experience indeed! I’ve never looked into it in more detail than scrolling through the lsio containers they offer, so thanks for that insight and saving me a headache in case I get around to a similar project I’ve also been meaning to embark upon

I’m going to choose not to answer that for two reasons…

1. I don’t know the answer
2. solar panels and batteries are great.

But yes I’m in a position where I was more willing to pay for the power than I was to buy additional storage space as I’m hitting the top of what I can do without significant expense.

Ah, fair point. I don’t use torrents, my media comes from usenet, so that doesn’t need to factor into my thinking.

My (overly?) Complex setup does allow me to resort to torrents as a last resort, but that happens on another machine outside my home network and gets synchronised into my home via a one-way syncthing share, so even on the rare occasion I have to resort to torrents I can leave it on that server seeding for a few weeks or months.

Could Snipe it work for you? https://docs.linuxserver.io/images/docker-snipe-it/

It looks like an asset management tool. The description copied and pasted from above reads:Snipe-it makes asset management easy. It was built by people solving real-world IT and asset management problems, and a solid UX has always been a top priority. Straightforward design and bulk actions mean getting things done faster

I’ve just recently started using tdarr to convert all of my media to x265on 14/02 and so far I’ve saved 4.02 TB of what was 28.12TB media collection. (The number isn’t a true reflection though because new episodes and shows have been added to that library since I started)

I’m letting tdarr manage the conversion process and once up and running meant that my NAS, desktop, my NUC and a mini pc are all plodding through and converting when I’m not using them for other things.

If you are worried about the disk space being taken and have some CPU time you can devote to the conversion process then I’d suggest it’s worth looking into tdarr.

One time I ran out of disk space due to it having created since 200gb log files (not sure why that happened) then another time I think I broke something whilst moving from I’ve got to another. I can’t remember what else happened to break my instances but it was always big enough there I couldn’t restore it to working it after hours if work, so if just export the vaults from everyone’s machine, nuke it, start again and try to learn how I broke it so I didn’t do it again.

I believe I was the problem for most of them except the massive log files one, but still, it was probably my fault as the things usually are. (Guess whose wife has them well trained at accepting the blame 😋)