• 7 Posts
  • 108 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • It doesn’t need to be black & white either. For absolute privacy, sure, it is a PITA to get everything running, but you don’t need to go all in to reduce your footprint on the internet. Moving email out of gmail is a start. Signal on the side of whatsapp is a step forward. Bazzite instead of Windows on your old gaming rig is a pretty decent leap. And so on.

    And self hosting is getting more and more feasible. Home Assistant is something you can just buy and plug in to start moving from Alexa to FOSS variant. Immich is fairly easy to get running to move from Google Photos / iCloud to your own devices (just remember backups).

    And even if you want to just consume services, there’s other options than just Google/Microsoft/Apple around. Every small step counts and affects on what data “they” have on you to sell.


  • I would go with separate devices. You can add a button with two set of terminals to trigger both the traditional chime and IOT thingy on the same time. Personally I don’t see the appeal on video/audio with a doorbell, but I’d guess there’s some raspberry pi project around to achieve what you want. SIP just for a single house doorbell at a first glance sounds like a massive overkill, camera with a two-way audio, possibly integrated to home assistant, works equally well without the overhead of running a whole IP telephone system with it.


  • And moving borders isn’t that hard.

    It actually kind of is. Depending on the laws on both countries. There was a petition that Norway would’ve gifted a top of one mountain to Finland when Finland celebrated 100 years of independence. Border would’ve moved something like 20 meters in the middle of nowhere, without any resources or pretty much anything else of any value. It would’ve just made the officially highest spot in Finland a bit higher.

    It just wasn’t legally possible. Constitution in Norway says that the only way to lose land is to lose it in a war and changing their constitution isn’t really practical just for that kind of feat. Also there was more or less serious discussion that what if Finland claims a “war” against Norway and conquers that hilltop, but that would’ve meant that Finland (not a NATO member at a time) would be in a war with a NATO country, which is not trivial either.

    There was also legal issues on Finland side of things too, but those would’ve been far simpler to resolve.

    I don’t know about legal situation in Russia nor in China, so that might not apply, but in general countries tend to have legal limits on how they can lose or gain land. China has not annexed areas from Africa, they’ve just bought the rights for resources and use them as they see fit, but internationally agreed borders stay where they are. If they actually took land from Russia that would cause other kinds of legal issues, like having to build stuff in there to meet their legal minimum standards, set up administration and whatever their legal system requires. So, in many ways it’s just far easier to buy what they want and leave the border and land ownership politics out of the equation.


  • If they don’t actually take over land by the end of this, they will effectively control all the resources in large parts of modern day Russia.

    China has plenty of land already. Why would they officially want something with piss poor infrastructure and corrupt officials. It’s a lot easier just to buy what they want, specially now when Russia doesn’t really have an option but to sell. It’s also politically much, much more easier than actually moving borders. Also, that’s what China has been doing already for quite a while in Africa (and likely in other places too).




  • News agencies brought everyone and their dogs to give their opinions on why using foregin (and USA specifically) provider for voting systems was a bad idea. Then there was plenty of articles what the decision is being reconsidered and eventually a handful of items noting that we are actually staying in domestic datacenters. Rational decisions apparently don’t get as many clicks.

    But there’s still plenty of our data (banks, insurance companies, etc) using AWS/Azure which should be considered as a national security issue, but those are private companies, so government can’t (or won’t) interfere as strongly.



  • I agree with division/multiplication issue. Or maybe just simply an assumption that VAT is always there and sanity checks on the systems just won’t allow 0 (or negative number) as a tax percentage.

    I meant that in general even ‘official’ systems have stupid bugs or practices just because things have been in a certain way for long time. Years ago I wrote a small invoicing program which had obviously manage VAT and it would’ve been a simple mistake to assume that VAT (or any tax percentage) is just a whole number since that’s what I’ve ever seen before. That particular piece of software is well obsolete now, but that would’ve managed the decimals since it handled all the numbers in the same way just to keep things simple and monetary values obviously need decimals. However, without any verification it wouldn’t been a crazy assumption to store tax percentages as a two digit integer everywhere.


  • I’ve used local supplier for years who has spesifically selection for UPS batteries. Even APC ones tend to be pretty standard, just rip the APC stickers off and get the actual battery model number and ask from your local shop for replacement. I got a pair for new-for-me UPS a few weeks ago. Official APC kit would’ve been several hundred euros, the ones I got were ~50 with postage. They might not last quite as long as ‘brand name’ ones and power output is a slightly lower even on spec sheet, but that unit is running at around 15% load anyways, so in my case it doesn’t really matter.


  • How could you possibly build something this stupid?

    Out gereric VAT rate changed to 25,5% about a year go. It’s been a whole number since current implementation was introduced in 1994. There was quite a few big systems running on accounting, cash registers, payment processors and whatever which couldn’t store decimals on VAT value. And obviously all the official information never stated that VAT couldn’t have decimals at some point, it just never had them before and thus vendors have just stored it as an plain integer and quite a lot of systems needed upgrade or on some cases full replacement.

    So, apparently it’s pretty easy to build something that stupid.


  • Most likely not. However, proxmox is a bit strict here and there on how it wants drives, networking and other stuff laid out. Also the hypervisor itself is quite strictly only for that. So, if you want to tinker with something without virtualization platform or use your drives for something else than just proxmox-installation it’s likely not officially supported at least and might cause some headache or even bigger problems, like potentially losing data, if you run it in a way it’s not meant to.

    However, if you just want a pretty capable hypervisor and run all your stuff on top of that it’s perfectly fine, specially for hobbyists. For bigger enterprises it has some issues and management for a bigger server fleet, at least for now, isn’t as polished as the ‘big players’ have, but, again, for home gamer it’s pretty good solution.






  • There’s also --delete-before which might help if your destination is tight on available space. And, as usual with ‘traditional’ tools, man-page is pretty good, there’s a ton of parameters which might be helpful. And, as @[email protected] already mentioned, compression (-z) may actually hurt performance if you have a lot of bandwidth or if you’re copying over already compressed data like JPGs.