Looking at nature in our garden, helping my other half grow vegetables and herbs (not enough to ever be self-sufficient, but it feels nice to eat the results). Trying generate as much solar power as possible (which again, isn’t enough to be off-grid, but enough for an emergency). Watching our rabbits grow and interact with each other ❤️ Finding interesting people on the fediverse, and trying to get other people to try it (which isn’t very effective at the moment!)

Edit: We are watching Clarksons’ Farm, which is entertaining, but also raises important points about our food system.

Thanks! I will check that out. It’s a shame, as their hardware is otherwise pretty reliable. I expected better from them.

Haha! I reported it to ebay. Man that was a faff, there’s no category to report dangerous / lying listings. The chat system was crap too. I had to say “I want to speak to a human”, and it put me through.

no kidding. Even 35A is enough to melt a 12v plug spring into the plastic surround… don’t ask me how i know…

I’ve never seen that connector in a car…

Yes, I first found out about MorningStar when I was trying to find a charge controller that had a proper network port and didn’t need a stupid app to configure it. I bought one and I really liked it, so I have 4 of the now.

I’ve spent a couple of years trying to find a decent inverter (eg. not cloudy and supports standard protocols), and it has been hard work. So far so good with this one, although their modbus support is buggy :(

😊

Sorry! Added 😊

Yes!

I recently installed @q4os@floss.social on an old laptop that could only run a 32bit OS and a max of 4GB RA, and it’s great. It has up to date packages for Firefox, LibreOffice, Dino (for XMPP), VLC etc

It isn’t my main computer, but it totally could be!

This had potential: https://github.com/adulau/Forban, and i tried it at a hacker festival soon after it was released, but sadly it is rather rudimentary and hasn’t been updated in over a decade, which is a real shame. I did try and contact the developer years ago with some bug reports, but heard nothing 😢

Secure connection failed :(

Yes, quite: https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/23785/what-did-richelieu-mean-by-his-six-lines-quote

Absolutely. In a previous company, we migrated from on-site MS Exchange to Google Mail (ugh). Apart from it being a crap experience (it was a new service), and feeling like we were beta testers as things kept changing daily, so writing training material was a PITA, once there was an outage, and even though we had ~10K users on it, they basically said “get in line” when we were chasing for updates etc even though we were a paying customer!

Fuck them.

“For security, the car’s built-in online connectivity feature has been disabled to prevent remote access” - cool, can normals request that too?

so not really much of an apology…

No licence is required for this model. I wouldn’t give away something that needed a shitty licence without mentioning it (but then I probably wouldn’t have taken it for myself in the first place).

I made that mistake with an Infobox device at an auction a few years ago. You can use all functionality for 30 days, then after that you need a licence or NOTHING works and you have to wipe it all and start again. What a pile of shit, I only wanted to play with it and run a few DNS zones.

It’s a shame, I was hoping to learn something from it as they cost a fortune, and usually overkill for what I need, but instead i’m never going to recommend their products. I could open it up and see if I can run Linux on it, but I don’t need yet another device that runs bog-standard Linux - any boring hardware could be used for that purpose. 😞

Me: “Not enough” My other half: “waay too much!!!”

Most of it is from friends who know me well, tbh, although I will take old wood from skips :)

Not sure how Porn = Terrorism. Sounds like mission creep to me… Oh well, I guess it makes a change from using Anti-Terror laws to stop people putting the wrong things in wheelie bins: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/3333366/Half-of-councils-use-anti-terror-laws-to-spy-on-bin-crimes.html

Thanks for the update! Good luck with the next server update. Moving services is always stressful :(

One thing I think would be a good addition to your list (maybe step 3 or 4), would be to use a network-wide ad/tracker blocker for your house, as that would protect everyone using your network, as well as devices that you may not be able to install an ad blocker on.

I use PiHole at my gf’s house (https://pi-hole.net/), and Technitium DNS (https://infosec.exchange/@shreyasonline) at my own house, with some generic block lists.

Both are easy to set up, work really well and are very stable.

APC do a really crappy small one for telecoms cabinets, but none for servers

I wonder if the lower discharge current capability of LFP batteries is why? That’s the one thing I’ve read fairly consistently about them is that they can’t supply the same high current as lead acids but are otherwise superior in every way. Now that you mention it, the only place I’ve ever really seen LFP UPSs for servers is in the big, central UPSs where they can run batteries in series for a much higher voltage.

I don’t think so. Cheaper batteries have that problem, but a decent brand does not. Check out this one: https://www.powertechsystems.eu/home/products/48v-lithium-ion-battery-pack/48v-105ah-5-38kwh-lithium-ion-battery-pack-powerbrick/ I bought one for my house, and have a 5KW inverter connected to it. Its specifications say that can do 120A drain continuously. I have used it to boil my 3KW kettle a few times in one day (but not often - I usually use the power for other things), and it has been fine.

e.g. most of the LFP UPSs I see max out at 1000 VA where 1500 is more typical for lead-acid UPSs.

That’s just a limitation of the product, not the technology.