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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • I noticed today searching that the date search no longer seems to work right. There are some terms that only appeared since 2020 and up until my recent attempts those terms produced no results on DDG when date constrained but now produce terms in articles clearly after that date. I don’t know if this is some personalisation nonsense or always pulling but results if the constraints don’t match or what but its seriously problematic and means I can’t trust the date constraints anymore.





  • Over the years I have used OSMC for my TV. I have never used it for streaming however always internal across the network streaming of my own content. It worked reasonably well for the most part although I have had issues with Samba in recent versions and have stopped using it. I can’t say much about its streaming, mostly for that you need a supported android or similar device rather than an open source one.


  • I have done this a few times, so long as the drive isn’t mounted it works fine.

    One advantage of this approach compared to clonezilla is you can pipe it through netcat or similar and move it to another machine. You can also first pipe it through gzip as well to save on the transfer bytes a bit as well and then on the other end just store the compressed image or unzip it. Combine a few tools together and you have quite a lot of capability for complete image backups but its usually best done for the boot drives from a live USB.



  • Army painter or games workshop are very much trusted in the miniature painting scene. They have undercoat spray cans (which as the adult you might need to do yourself) and then the paint sets themselves have all been around a long time with good safety profiles. I haven’t had any issues with this process over pla other than the layer lines being tricky to paint and work with but paint adherence has worked fine.



  • I tend to go off the https://grid.iamkate.com/ website which is a good day by day look at power generation and summarises the year. Renewables have so far surpassed fossil fuels 10.7GW compared to 10.3GW with other sources taking 5.9GW of which biomass is 1.52GW. I don’t personally think biomass is renewable because its burning old forests and at a rate far faster than the wood is replanted and we know that old forests store much more CO2 than new ones. With hydro and Nuclear its a pretty close run thing if we consider them green renewables are the majority of power production.

    Still a way to go, obviously more capacity is required and more storage and this will inevitably lead to excess power in the summer which is how renewables will work and hopefully we will find a good use for free power capturing CO2. A lot of projects are held up by the grid in the UK, more than enough to complete this transition, companies want to install the production its just the grid holding everything up with plans out to 2035.



  • Its not directly in the article but the primary reason Solar is its a lot cheaper than electricity production from fuel, something like 1/4 - 1/10 the price depending on where in the world you are. An energy company is basically foolish to invest in oil based electricity production when Solar is so competitive and cheap and easy to maintain. Wind is a little cheaper where there is good airflow but the maintenance cost is higher especially for offshore. Both however are so much cheaper than Nuclear and especially than oil/drilling fuels that its hard to see much real investment in those older technologies.

    There has been a lot of recent complaints around the UK’s granting of further drilling rights in the North sea for Oil. I think the companies taking those up haven’t yet come to terms with the fact there is a good chance those ventures drive their companies to bankruptcy because they wont be competitive as EVs and Solar/Wind take over due to cost savings.


  • A change in thinking about energy needs to happen to truly understand why Wind and Solar and a bit of storage is enough. You have to accept that at times there will be overproduction of power because storing it to hit exact use capacity isn’t cost effective. Some storage makes sense, but its much cheaper to have more capacity.

    What I think will happen in the future once we reach the point this is how most energy comes is more people will be on Octopus like smart energy schemes where you might get paid for using electricity and there will be companies that use this to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. We are approaching a world of energy excess but only at certain times and there are opportunities to use that energy for the right reasons to reverse the damage we have done with CO2 emissions.



  • For not a lot more you can now get NUC like machines with Celeron’s, Pentiums and get to choose NVMe SSDS and RAM amounts and even Wifi cards (so wifi 6e or 7) and 2.5 gbit/s ethernet. At these sorts of prices they are running into the low end of NUCs at $100 and they don’t compete well on a whole range of factors. They are still cheaper but its not the 30-40 of the Pi before prices went nuts and this new higher price point isn’t as clear cut.