DeltaTangoLima

DeltaTangoLima, 21 days ago

Not really. Here in Australia, our supermarket duopoloy does the same thing, offering discounts per litre. At the time it all started, the supermarket chains started buying into/acquiring petrol stations and rebranding them. This has been going on for over 20 years.

Recently, both supermarkets sold off their petrol station chains, but the sales included long-standing agreements to continue to offer discounts and loyalty program points for those that shop at the associated supermarket brand.

DeltaTangoLima, 22 days ago

I use Home Assistant, and install that on all my old, re-purposed smartphones (usually as cheap CCTV). Each phone is plugged into a smart power socket.

I then use automation to turn a phone’s charger off when it hits 80%, then back on when it reaches 50%. No overcharging, no overheating, and actually helps keep the batteries in good shape.

DeltaTangoLima, 22 days ago

I already use Home Assistant for a number of other things, so not really complex. Also, you’re assuming Android only.

DeltaTangoLima, 22 days ago

For my wife, I have a separate library folder, mapped to just her account in Plex. It doesn’t appear in my library at all, so I don’t really care. Even better, I’ve spun up an Overseerr instance for her, so she can just search and auto-add anything she wants for herself.

DeltaTangoLima, 22 days ago

Depending on the local climate, yes - evap cooling is typically the go. The data centres I work in here in Melbourne use evap free cooling (EFC).

For much of the year, due to our temperate climate, the cooling simply uses (filtered) outside air. During bouts of warmer weather (typically 29C+), we use evaporative cooling. Waste water from the EFCs is discharged into storm water drainage, and reported to our local water authority for billing.

DeltaTangoLima, 22 days ago

An excellent question, that I suspect the answer to will vary in many jurisdictions.

We do re-use the water we use in our EFCs, but only a limited number of times. After a specified number of uses, local regulations require that we discharge it into storm water, to mitigate against the risk of things like legionella and other potentially deadly airborne bacteria.

We’re also required to test and treat all stored water monthly.

DeltaTangoLima, 23 days ago

The payment is designed to help ease cost-of-living pressures

the money will be made available as credit … towards educational expenses in certain categories

The money can not be put towards school fees or used for household expenses

it appeared the $400 payment would cover uniforms, excursions and sports activities, but not laptops

So, seems to cover things that many hard-up families probably aren’t paying for already, which means this won’t ease the cost of living pressure for them at all.

DeltaTangoLima, 25 days ago

Oooh! A wiki article! Look at you, educating people with science and stuff.

/s

DeltaTangoLima, 24 days ago

Lol - the sheer volume of people who completely missed my /s, and didn’t cotton to the fact that I was making a joke about the very subject…

DeltaTangoLima, 24 days ago

is ambiguous

Ah - like a double negative? I didn’t realise I cancelled out my sarcasm with more sarcasm. I need to spend more time on the internet. I’d hate for my sarcasm to be misunderstood.

DeltaTangoLima, 28 days ago

May your chickens turn to emus and kick your dunny door down

DeltaTangoLima, 28 days ago

Yeah, but in a light-hearted way.

DeltaTangoLima, 28 days ago

Straight to HR - that fucker needs sacking. This is the very definition of bullying and harassment.

DeltaTangoLima, 28 days ago

Ditto - divorcing my first wife. Now I’m married to my soulmate and we have an amazing daughter together. Best thing I ever did!

DeltaTangoLima, 29 days ago

Would they agree if Biden used his absolute power to pass a federal law guaranteeing safe access to abortion?

DeltaTangoLima, 1 month ago (edited 26 days ago)

Early 80s, maybe 83 or 84, we got a Dick Smith VZ200 (rebadged VTech Laser 210 - Dick Smith here in Australia was kinda like Radio Shack). It had 8Kb of RAM but Dad bought the 16Kb expansion - 24Kb of RAM!

I got a book from my uncle on how to write BASIC programs, and wrote a heap of stuff. We could backup and load programs from a regular cassette tape recorder that plugged into the computer, sorta like the Commodore 64 later on.

Early 90s, guessing around 93, I got a Nokia 101 analogue phone. I even bought a car kit for it, and installed it in my Datsun 180B. It had a snake game on it, and I actually used it to make and receive phone calls.

DeltaTangoLima, 29 days ago

If you grew up in the Dandenong Ranges, quite possibly.

DeltaTangoLima, 1 month ago

• Phone: yoda
• Desktop: bb8
• Firewall: c3po
• Switch: macewindu
• NASes:
  • anakin
  • r2d2
• Wireless APs:
  • biggs
  • garven
  • poe
  • typho
  • thane
  • wedge (virtual controller)
• Proxmox nodes:
  • chewy
  • hansolo
  • obiwan
• Raspberry PIs:
  • bobafett
  • lando
  • jangofett
  • quigon
  • rey
  • finn

DeltaTangoLima, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

I really feel for these parents.

A big part of the problem is just not enough funding going to education - we have nowhere near enough teachers to go around, which ultimately means lots of kids are missing out on the one-on-one education moments that smaller classes would enable (“Just draw a picture”).

But also, in my experience, some of the problem is also the attitude schools have towards this, which tells me they’re not trained enough to deal with the variety of mental and social issues kids face nowadays.

The default setting at my daughter’s school is to talk to me like I’m a parent that needs to be told how to parent, like I’m the one not doing something right. Admittedly, I feel a lot of this attitude probably comes from the school’s principal - he clearly loves the smell of his own farts - but it shits me when they get this haughty, arrogant attitude when talking to you because they’re “educators”, rather than partners (with parents) in teaching our kids how to be humans.

Kids today are dealing with so much more than what I had to deal with going to school in the 70s and 80s. They have information flying at them from all sorts of sources, and it’s nearly (nearly) impossible to raise a kid today without access to technology and the internet. Otherwise, you’re at risk of creating a social pariah, as they’ll invariably miss out on things.

These things have changed the mental and social game considerably, and I feel our education system has done a pretty shit job of keeping up with these changes.

DeltaTangoLima, 1 month ago

is an extremely bad thing for their development

I strongly recommend you listen to Dr Billy Garvey’s views on screen time and technology.

DeltaTangoLima, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

Not heaps, although I should probably do more than I do. Generally speaking, on Saturday mornings:

• Between 2am-4am, Watchtower on all my docker hosts pulls updated images for my containers, and notifies me via Slack then, over coffee when I get up:
  • For containers I don’t care about, Watchtower auto-updates them as well, at which point I simply check the service is running and purge the old images
  • For mission-critical containers (Pi-hole, Home Assistant, etc), I manually update the containers and verify functionality, before purging old images
• I then check for updates on my OPNsense firewall, and do a controlled update if required (needs me to jump onto a specific wireless SSID to be able to do so)
• Finally, my two internet-facing hosts (Nginx reverse proxy and Wireguard VPN server) auto-update their OS and packages using unattended-upgrades, so I test inbound functionality on those

---

What I still want to do is develop some Ansible playbooks to deploy unattended-upgrades across my fleet (~40ish Debian/docker LXCs). I fear I have some tech debt growing on those hosts, but have fallen into the convenient trap of knowing my internet-facing gear is the always up to date, and I can be lazy about the rest.

DeltaTangoLima, 1 month ago

It’s not just about data hoarding, though. It’s also about a social media company having considerable influence over the messaging seen by a very large part of the voting population.

Yes, it’s no different to other social media companies, but with one exception: the company in question is subject to the whims of the Chinese government. Something the US government is clearly fearful of.

DeltaTangoLima, 1 month ago

Yep, agreed, but at least the government of the day can try and reign them in with legislation and regulation. Not saying they are (or will), but they’d have the option, if they had the balls to do it.

DeltaTangoLima, 1 month ago

Yeah, 100% agree on the client devices. One of my VLANs is for the kids’ devices. I don’t trust their schools’ admins or their shitty BYOD policies, so I just let them access Plex (via Nginx reverse proxy); Pi-hole; and the internet.

DeltaTangoLima, 1 month ago

Believe it or not, a Netgear. Specifically this one. I don’t have any fibre connected gear (yet!) and 180W of PoE+ was more than enough for my few PoE cameras and WAPs.