I would highly discourage getting a fire stick, they've locked it down so much its just annoying. Yes, you can get there but found it much easier on android tv boxes, specifically the Xiaomi Mii TV ones. Which one you get probably depends on whether you need 4K and/or dolby

Been seeing these more and more common in London, along with most people buying massive cars generally. I just don't get it. They really struggle with the tight roads, parked cars, small lanes, car parks etc. Its embarrassing to watch frankly!

I like the Mii TV 4k sticks. They run android tv and have the usual apps, or you can install your own launcher, apps (look into stremio!) and everything through downloader or adb. Then you can disable the bloatware through adb, theres a few lists online if you search. With a launcher manager app, mine loads straight to productivity launcher (I also like flauncher).

Do not try a firestick, theyre heavily locked down now.

I then just deleted the network on my smart tv so it can't send anything. Along with my pihole, hopefully theres no telemetry getting out, although not checked it. Its impossible to find good TVs that aren't smart anymore unfortunately, the data selling either subsidises the costs pricing out dumb TV's, or more likely they make so much from the data selling that they only sell those.

When NIMBYism clashes with the fact that the UK abuses the world's climate to power it's first world lifestyle, I don't even know what the answer could be.

On one hand, we have destroyed the biodiversity of our own island so should try to save the little that is left and try to regain what we have lost. On the other hand, we are happy to buy and power, air conditioners, fancier larger cars and LLM tech, where the ecological costs are born in other countries.

The solution from a societal point of view is for the UK to consume less and truly factor in the true climate cost onto all products. From an individual human point of view though, how do you sign up to a worse and more expensive lifestyle by choice with the "cost of living crises" and child poverty on the up.

Sorry if waffling, this post is highlighting my own sense of doom and frustration here...

I just started using some docker containers I found on Docker Hub designed for DB backups (e.g. prodrigestivill/postgres-backup-local) to automatically dump from the databases into a set folder, which is included in the restic backup. I know you could come up with scripts but this way, I could easily copy the compose code to other containers with different databases (and different passwords etc).

I would recommend it as it is fairly easy to understand and most Foss services give you an example to use. You can also convert docker run examples to compose (search docker composeriser) although it doesn't always work.

I found composer files easier when learning it, to digest what is going on (ports, networks, depends_on etc) and can compare with other services to see what is missing (container name, restart schedule etc). I can then easily backup the compose files, env files and data directories to be able to very quickly get a service up again (although DBs are trickier but found a docker image that I can stick on the compose files which backups the DB dumps regularly)

Just had to double check that Mick Lynch hadn't passed away or started moonlighting as an actor...

I am born and raised in England to Indian parents so always had some internal tension. Sometimes, I don't understand my patents culture and sometimes I don't understand English culture. However, I've realised I am who I am, and can take the best bits from both. There are some bits I don't like so I'm the better for being / having that mix. I married an Irish person who moved over several years ago. Irish used to be the "other" and were screwed over, but now are sometimes considered "white", so just shows the target moves.

There has always been racism in British society and unfortunately I have felt it pick up since the Brexit vote and Trump's election (I think it empowered them). However, it is from a small minority of people. In some areas it comes from ignorance, which I can kind of forgive. Others will always see us as outsiders with our foreign names (and my brown skin) no matter what we do. I just think, screw them. I mean, can they trace themselves back before the Normans, the Romans or the Vikings etc? Where do you draw the line exactly?!? England has always been a mix of people and culture so they're the ones missing out. I'm happy driving my Korean car to a German store to buy ingredients for a Thai green curry. Oh, I'll grab a French pastry for breakfast, Chilean wine for the weekend and well, you get the idea! Let's make the most of this multicultural place and ideas, and who cares about bigots who you can guarantee, like a cheeky korma and Belgian beer...

Been using Duckduckgo for a few years now and found it very good, although it's also on the downward SEO ruined path. Have tried Google occasionally and wow is it juat completely full of crap.

Is an Amazon account any better? Not sure if it's just the new devices but things are much more difficult now compared to a Mii TV S for example

As an ebike user, I'd rather they legalise e-scooters with similar regulations, especially around battery safety. I had one and loved it for certain journeys, as I love my bike for other journeys. Wish I could legally buy one I can trust.

I sort of agree that cycle infrastructure improvements are much more important than these proposals but I don't see how you should block these as it's not exactly like the government needs to spend much to do this, so it's not reducing the money for infrastructure so why not do both.

Surely, they are not mutually exclusive and some form of this scheme has been in place for some countries (albeit mainly white commonwealth countries) for many years, even when the UK was in the EU.

Holy shit though, I just looked up the UK's scheme and you have to pay almost a grand in fees (mostly NHS surcharge) and have over £2,500 in savings. I don't want rich a-holes coming over for an extended holiday instead of normal people from more different cultures. Let's vote for better and fairer immigration polices

Capitalists

I use authentik but believe it's similar. You can create accounts for people and give them passwords, or send a welcome email asking them to register to create one. I would warn you though, not every service has the ability to use it and it does take quite some effort to get it working! It's interesting to learn about though

I'm a tax professional so can say with confidence that this is the Tories/shitty papersclutching at straws at a complete non event. It is absolutely pissing me off given how much tax evasion goes on by rich people, how much room there is for reducing tax for rich people (non Dom status, offshore trusts, various tax reliefs for owner managed businesses, etc), how complex the tax laws are (especially for normal people who can't afford a litany of advisors), and the other corruption scandals (PPE, party donations, expense scandals, etc). The tax owed might be nothing but at most orient 3/4k.

Also, my e-bike, which is my main and only source of transport, got stolen recently and it's in the same ballpark as this tax liability (1.5k) - how do I get 12 police officers to investigate this as reported it but they magically couldn't find anything even though it was locked next to ATMs on a busy London High street...

I tried the readarr and other options. They work sometimes but not enough to rely on it. As others mention, there's no standard naming and also, lots of people use their library card for Libby access. I also think there's a bit more of a direct link to authors so I'd prefer to buy the book unless theyre super well off anyway. To be honest, I can't see the arr's working with LibGen having looked at the open issues on integrating it, it just doesn't allow for scraping in the same way.

For me, I self host openbooks (uses IRC) and select a download straight away, which to be fair, is about the same time as searching / finding a TV show if you are after one book. I have exposed it behind an SSO so can access it on my phone and download the book straight away when someone gives me a recommendation. Most of the time I just add to a running note on phone and go through it every few months when I need more books.

It's fairly quick for multiple books but not sonarr levels of ease. The downloads go into a calibre monitored folder which then does the automation (naming, conversion if needed etc). I bulk email the new books to my kindle with one click. Calibre-web is on read only for a nice browsing experience and to read on other devices if I need to (althogh no page sync). It's a bit of manual work but I find it is not too bad and in 10 minutes I can load up enough books for months.

Occasionally IRC does not have the book so try manually searching on prowlarr, and download on sab or transmission. The downloads are almost instant so I then just wait and copy them to my downloads folder (I could probably automate this step too with tags but it's so infrequent).

My parents had a Post Office which I effectively grew up in. I remember them having to report things on a desktop and loading these discs. I also remember when they got the Horizon system and how much trouble they were having trying to get it to work.

They moved to the city I was born and raised in just to buy the PO, and both worked full time in it. I feel so lucky they didn't get caught up in it all. I have asked if they paid anything they weren't sure about and they said there was nothing, although my mum paused before answering so think there might've been something.

It would have ruined our lives completely so all this scandal stuff really hits me hard. I couldn't even watch the Norman Bates show past 20 minutes as I just got so upset and angry. Fuck all the people involved (at every level) and hope they suffer for all time...

I just tried it out on a couple of random questions (one on docker, the other on proxmox networking) and it looks very promising. I didn't even have to login, it showed the sources, it gave step by step instructions, and suggested follow up questions that were helpful. Thanks for sharing!

Given how important a router is and how easy it is for something to wrong with this, even with just a random update, I'd personally not even try this. I actually just use a tp link omada business router as my family wouldn't be too happy if the internet is broken. It has VPN and I just bought a couple access points so I can improve the WiFi whilst setting up vlans to compartmentalise smart home devices. Everything else is nice to have but if something goes wrong with the services below overnight and I need to work from home, at least I can just switch them off until I got time to fix them.

I got a cheap second hand thin client off eBay for pihole and home assistant (using proxmox), and another custom desktop acting as a headless server with the rest of my services running in docker (plex and arr stack, vaultwarden, nextcloud, imich, loads others etc. It allows flexibility so if the server goes down, or runs out of memory, or I'm messing around and broke it, my family's streaming isn't impacted.

You cannot put pihole on a router but yes, those are good ideas. A router with openwrt will have VPN settings, as do many proprietary ones. Alternatively, you could look into opnsense, which is router software on computer hardware (not a router), which you could also put pihole on. I'd say it's way more tricky though.