“Append…before”, AKA “prepend”!

What’s sobe?

The irony of the autistic person using a metaphor, and someone else taking it too literally. You have to laugh!

And people who have no time install gentoo? Pull the other one :D

I started in 2012, and it wasn’t that difficult. I’d say I do about 30mins of maintenance every other month. It took me a while to work out the config originally, but I wrote a guide afterwards which was really popular for other people doing the same thing (it’s quite out of date now but the principles are the same).

Started out using a raspberry pi (which was also hosting a website at the time) but when I moved house to somewhere with a worse internet connection I migrated to a VPS, so there is a cost but it’s not enormous, maybe £20/month.

Don’t even bother if you can’t use a static IP, because all your email will be bounced if your PTR record for the IP (reverse DNS record) doesn’t match your domain name.

It got a bit more complicated when people started adding extra layers of spam protection like SPF, DKIM and DMARC, but those are mostly set and forget.

Overall, I’d say it’s worth it but only because I find it quite interesting/fun.

Google is unavoidable but I do my best to mitigate the worst parts of their privacy intrusions.

I have a pixel phone running grapheneOS with Google Services Framework installed but without Google Play or Gboard or any of that stuff. For me that’s a balance that works.

I host my own email server so no Gmail.

I also host my own Matrix server and avoid WhatsApp where possible (not Google but just as bad if not worse).

I use YouTube but via Newpipe or using Ublock origin on Firefox (not logged in obviously).

Chrome is genuinely worse than Firefox now that Google have made adblocking more difficult with manifest v3.

You just have to decide what the best tradeoff is between privacy and convenience.

Thanks for the info! I’ll have to give Element another go and see if it’s more reliable for me nowadays.

Is the fix a client thing or is there an interaction with the server as well? I had really bad issues with message decryption on Element for Android last year (July 2023 based on the date I installed a different matrix client).

I’m self-hosting synapse on Debian Bullseye (from bullseye-backports).

Interesting, I think it’s different for structural engineering because you’re doing calculations in accordance with a code of practice and the spreadsheet needs to be adapted to tweak the inputs and outputs of a standard formula and apply it slightly differently for different bridges / structural arrangements. I’ve written loads of spreadsheets that have been used and adapted by other people in my company, I honestly don’t think they are that difficult to understand (or people wouldn’t have been able to build on them and adapt them).

I can see that lab software is quite different, especially if you have very well defined procedures and you are repeating exactly the same test again and again with the same inputs and outputs.

In structural engineering (bridge design etc), we use quite complicated spreadsheets for calculations; a database wouldn’t be the right tool for that job. We use excel because everyone knows how to use it and it’s easy to print to PDF and see the inputs and outputs and any graphical summaries you have added. Using a spreadsheet makes it easy to check and easy to adapt/change when you want to do a slightly different calculation next time.

I’ve tried building spreadsheets of similar complexity in libreoffice and it’s true they are very slow in comparison and more prone to crashing.

Libreoffice works well for some tasks and I enjoy using it at home but honestly if I tried to use it at work it would cut my productivity significantly. I’m probably using it more intensively than most people though.

Sleep Token

These guys have an incredible range and mix up different styles in a way that is quite unique. I’m not normally someone who pays that much attention to drums but their drummer really is amazing. The singer can do both clean and ‘dirty’ vocals.

First time in ages I’ve been excited about a new band!

Chokehold

The Summoning

Take Me Back To Eden

Hypnosis

The Offering

Vore

Was not expecting that! What a dark character arc :D

What do you use nowadays?

Wew lad

Well in this case the reputation for “warm beer” is true and I’m willing to die on this particular hill.

Proper cask ale should be served at between 8 and 12C, AKA cellar temperature, cool but not cold. Nothing beats a traditional pint of ‘best bitter’ in an old pub!

Plenty of people in the UK drink lager and other styles of beer that are more highly carbonated, stronger ABV, and served colder. Personally I’m not a fan but each to their own.

I live about an hour from London in a rural area with loads of great pubs but I find it difficult to find a nice beer in most parts of London. It’s much easier to keep a keg of carbonated beer under pressure than a cask ale that you have to finish within a few days of tapping, which is why when a certain proportion of a pub’s clientele start drinking other styles it just isn’t worth it for the pub to keep real ale. Hopefully it won’t become a niche thing.

None with flavor, plenty with flavour

Auto updates works really well for me so far!

I’ve wanted this for years; in the past manually flashing the privileged extension after every system update was such a pain that I quickly gave up on it.

Wouldn’t this be quite slow to transmit messages? When you send email between federated servers your mail goes in a queue on your server to be sent and depending on the connection speed and how busy it is you could easily wait 5 minutes before it’s delivered at the other end. Not that the messages caused by this app would be big enough to slow things down a lot, but if the server you are using is also being used to send normal emails with large attachments then you could end up waiting a while.

Species appropriation

HP are pretty awful when it comes to shenanigans with ink cartridges and all that, but HPLIP is great and deserves some credit.