You really gonna do the Blades dirty like that?!

Cable wasn’t as much as a thing over here except in specific areas, but if you were flush you might have satellite TV. Nothing so bourgeois for me though!

I was born in 89, so remember a good portion of the 90s. It was a much simpler time but obviously we tend to romanticise the fun memories and quietly ignore how vastly more inconvenient daily life was.

Mobile phones were not really a thing yet so getting in touch with your friends required a combination of patience and sheer luck.

The internet was a different place entirely and was experienced in 30 minute chunks of time, just long enough to download a song or two before being kicked off for tying up the landline.

Daily entertainment was 4, maybe 5 analogue TV channels, plus a collection of VHS tapes which are all degrading by being rewatched constantly.

Every piece of life admin that you would normally do online today was instead done with pen and paper.

Honestly, I’m amazed we ever got anything done.

Or, one (relatively) simple automation.]

As others have said, 100% a leak.

I would advise to stand on a chair or stepladder underneath the ceiling and check to see if it is still level. If you see an obvious deformation around the stain, this will be being caused by water pooling on top of the ceiling plasterboard. In which case, once the leak is sorted, you will likely need to drain the pooled water, cut out the damaged section, replace it, then replaster and repaint.

We had exactly the same issue in our last house. It was in a difficult to see spot hidden behind our kitchen cabinets. We only realised the severity of the issue when the ceiling boards gave way and fell on my head.

Because, unless you’re driving a forklift, the point of a vehicle’s rotation is in line with the rear wheels, meaning you can take turns at a much more acute angle when reversing than going forwards. Which makes backing into spaces much easier.

Notice that most of the half-assed parking jobs you see are generally people who have driven forward and left the car parked at a diagonal half out of the space, because getting the vehicle lined up in that situation is more difficult.

Well, I’m currently writing a service and frontend, both in C# (Blazor for the UI), and using docker-compose to build and deploy them to a Raspberry Pi running Linux. So not only cross-platform, but cross-architecture as well.

This is not a new thing either. Since .NET Core was released almost 10 years ago, it has supported cross platform development.

Right now none of the native clients support SSO. It is a frequently requested feature but, unfortunately, it doesn’t look like it will be implemented any time soon. As with many OSS projects it is probably a case of “you want it, you build it” - but nobody has actually stepped up.

For web access, stick it behind a reverse proxy and use something like Authentik/Authelia/SSO provider of your choice to secure it.

For full access including native clients, set up a VPN.

We refer to it as kew-bee-cuttle

As a developer myself I’m not sure if I would trust any application to safely handle a configuration that has become invalid due to a breaking change, especially not an app that is still under active development! Better safe than sorry.

Immich has completely replaced Google Photos for me, love it!

My only bugbear is that it is updated very frequently (what a nice problem to have!) which in my case requires a manual once-over of my docker-compose file every time in case there are breaking changes.

I decided to set up Fedora on my new laptop as it was either take a chance on that or spend like 3 hours debloating a Win11 install.

It’s been over 10 years since I last tried dailying Linux, we have come a long way in that time. Everything just worked out of the box. No fucking around needed.

Even relatively niche stuff like my thunderbolt dock and the laptop’s fingerprint sensor was picked up. And, thanks to the investment Valve has been putting into Wine and Proton, pretty much every game I’ve tried has worked with no issue.

Next time my desktop is due for a clean install I’ll definitely be doing the same there.

Not exactly crazy but just mysterious…this was at a software company I worked at many years ago. It was one of the developers in the team adjacent to ours who I worked with occasionally - nice enough person, really friendly and helpful, everyone seemed to get on with them really well and generally seemed like a pretty competent developer. Nothing to suggest any kind of gross misconduct was happening.

Anyway, we all went off to get lunch one day and came back to an email that this person no longer worked at the company, effective immediately. Never saw them again.

No idea what went down - but the culture at that place actually became pretty toxic after a while, which led to a few people (including me) quitting - so maybe they dodged a bullet.

Nah, the SWAT would have to arrest themselves.

I’ve tried Copilot and to be honest, most of the time it’s a coin toss, even for short snippets. In one scenario it might try to autocomplete a unit test I’m writing and get it pretty much spot on, but it’s also equally likely to spit out complete garbage that won’t even compile, never mind being semantically correct.

To have any chance of producing decent output, even for quite simple tasks, you will need to give an LLM an extremely specific prompt, detailing the precise behaviour you want and what the code should do in each scenario, including failure cases (hmm…there used to be a term for this…)

Even then, there are no guarantees it won’t just spit out hallucinated nonsense. And for larger, enterprise scale applications? Forget it.

Regarding battery degradation - I’ve owned my EV for 4.5 years now, and its battery is still at 93% of its original capacity. That equates to maybe 10 miles of range lost, from an original range of around 230 miles. At that rate, it’ll still be giving usable range in 10, 15 years from now. It’s even warrantied to keep over 75% of its original capacity for 8 years / 100,000 miles - if it fails to achieve this (likely due to some defect), it’s replaced for free.

And when it does eventually need replacing, it can be recycled into something like a home storage battery - where the power demand is not as high, but still more than enough to power everything in your home for days. Meanwhile, the car can be upgraded to a brand new battery, which will likely last even longer.

Edit: In fact, I tell a lie - I did have to replace a battery on my EV recently. The 12v lead-acid battery, that ICE cars also rely on.

I grew one during lockdown, decided I liked it and kept it. I suspect I am not an anomaly in this.

I use both. Pi-hole running in a docker container on one of my home servers which my gateway is configured to assign as the default DNS for all clients, and uBlock Origin on all my browsers to catch everything else.

Pihole is pretty good at catching ads on platforms that are not suited to browser based blockers (IoT devices, streaming boxes etc) but it isn’t perfect and is best used in conjunction with another solution.