For photos, immich is great if you’re willing to self-host. It’s pretty much a drop-in replacement for Google photos, and lets you tweak the machine learning and stuff like that if you want automated identification of your photos. A raspberry pi is enough to get going, maybe something fancier if you want the machine learning. Google Drive can be replaced with Nextcloud as well if you go down the self-hosting rabbit hole.

Ente is probably your best bet if you don’t want to host anything yourself. I used proton drive for photos before but thought it wasn’t particularly suitable as if you’re looking for a particular photo it takes ages for it to load from their servers.

Also an autistic vegan here! I’d wager that the % of autistic people in the vegan community is higher than in the general population. I didn’t do it for any health reasons, but going vegan was a nice way to find out I’m lactose intolerant and food isn’t supposed to hurt.

The Dark Hedges. Not our number one tourist destination, but probably the most overrated one. It’s some trees that appeared in Game of Thrones and the over-tourism + the increase in stormy weather thanks to climate change is killing them.

We’ve more popular places like the Giant’s Causeway and the Derry walls, but those places are worth visiting at least.

Same, I’ve had my chipolo for nearly two full years now and haven’t needed to replace the batteries despite them being in constant use. Especially on my keys which must get rung about once a week actually never mind I just checked the app there and the keys died a few days ago. But still, nearly two years and a quick swap of a button battery to get them going again is probably better than 6 months where the USB port or the battery could easily degrade.

Been watching destination x, which airs its finale tonight. It interested me because it looked a lot like jet lag: the game meets the traitors with a bit of geoguessr thrown in. But it really suffers from the usual reality tv show bullshit, with hyped up drama, pointless twists, and so many red herrings and rule changes as to make the whole thing a bit pointless. I don’t think I’ll be watching a second series, but I think it’s amazing that a bunch of youtubers can nail this sort of show first time while the BBC makes an absolute mess of it.

I graduated university a couple years ago and I felt in the same boat coming up to final exams. Like others have said, you almost certainly know more than you think. You’re at the start of the final year as well so you have a lot of time to get ready.

Most IT/programming jobs will train you on the job and I haven’t heard of anyone coming into a role who’s expected to know everything, so I wouldn’t worry about that too much. Getting the job will be the harder part, and the best thing I did was to consider my past experience and apply to jobs tightly related to that. I’ll not dox myself so these will be fake details but that meant if I’d done a work experience position doing tech support for an accountancy firm, I’d have focused my applications on those companies. If you have a final year project to complete for a dissertation, see if you can tailor that to what you think are your best chances of a job. E.g. you did work experience doing IT support for a law firm, and your final year project has to be related to improving human rights, so you could develop a CRUD application to connect defendants to good pro bono lawyers. If there are law firms near you hiring for IT, that sort of thing that will help you stand out in an interview with them. I think I did only two interviews before getting a job offer with that tactic and I know others with the same degree who graduated the same day as me that still haven’t found anything.

And outside of uni/college, is there anything in IT and computer science that interests you? I found that university killed my joy for it and I’ve only rediscovered it since graduating. Building a JavaScript web app for my final year project, led me to wanting to program some discord bots, from there onto using a raspberry pi to host them, and then into doing some self hosting and networking with the likes of Docker and WireGuard. Some of that has come in handy in work, especially when using linux servers, but it’s stuff I do cause I just enjoy it and it so happens to give me some experience. There are tons of open-source projects you can work on to get experience with different parts of IT, and you’re on a good website for it since most of us on here are Linux nerds.

That’s a fair point. I suppose like any movement there’s a wide spectrum of people and one end of the spectrum would be those who are as strict as that. I don’t think it’s very productive to be that strict though, certainly where I live and with the health conditions I have it would be impossible to live life so strictly compared to someone in top health living in a major city.

There is a surprising amount of debate over that in vegan circles. Beyond Meat taste test their burgers against cow burgers to compare the flavour and some vegans will say you can’t consider those burgers vegan while others would say it’s a very small amount of animal consumption to allow for a vegan burger that might help convert more people and so the benefit outweights the harm massively. I’m vegan and I don’t really know what side to lean towards, but there’s debate over everything from honey to almonds, and debate on whether it’s acceptable to order vegan food from non-vegan restaurants, just as examples.

I saw it mentioned in this Cory Doctorow article a week or two back about some of his issues with bluesky, but he mentions here that the cost has came down from tens of millions a year down to tens of dollars a month

Hadn’t heard of wafrn until seeing it on f-droid this morning but I might give it a try, a tumblr-like platform would be nice since tumblr seems to have given up on using ActivityPub.

It’s become a bit frightening how much freedom of speech has been restricted in the UK this year. Seems like anything with a word that even vaguely sounds like Palestine in the same sentence as the word action gets you sent to jail.

In Northern Ireland, which is part of the UK, a community group tried to organise a peaceful vigil in support of Palestine and were intimidated into hiding it by an actual terrorist organisation. And of course no arrests were made here and their local MP suggested they abide by the threats of the local paramilitaries and hold it indoors.

I’m not spreading bullshit for worthless internet points, I couldn’t give a fuck about the karma system or whatever it is on here. I’m just expressing my personal view that his opinions on the matter are strong enough for me to not want to watch media with him in it again.

I don’t know if you’re from the UK but he went much further than just criticising one charity’s policies, he also aligned himself with multiple anti-trans bloggers and labelled himself a gender-critical feminist. When he was asked by the parent of a trans child in an interview, who called his views “scary,” he made a vague attempt to dissociate himself from the comments then asked for the entire segment to be removed from the interview.

He’s no JK Rowling or Glinner, but there’s so much transphobia in this country I’m not willing to give an inch of grace to anyone who tries to make life worse for the trans community. But your entire comment history seems to be nothing but arguing with people so I’m quite happy to leave it there and hit block.

Shizuku + Canta on f-droid are great for accomplishing this as well, you just start wireless debugging and tick the apps you want to uninstall.

I deleted mine in January, after all the tech CEOs went to kiss the ring at the US inauguration. I don’t trust them at all to delete anything but at least they aren’t getting more data from me.

I’ve had my account since 2012 when I got a Nexus 4 so a lot of my life was tied up in it. It’s not something you can just up and decide to do one day and I’d been working my way to deletion since last summer and just went faster with the process in January. If you self-host things it makes it easier because there’s a lot of good replacements for their services e.g. nextcloud if you need an office suite, immich to replace Google photos. So I’ve got thirteen years of my life backed up to a raspberry pi sitting under my TV instead of being mined on a google server to train an LLM.

The only issue I’ve had is my phone keeps complaining that I’m not signed in with a google account, and there’s a few email addresses I hadn’t updated from gmail to my new accounts. But it’s been surprisingly plain sailing without having an account, and at least one of those issues will be sorted by moving to a phone with custom ROM support.

Really excited to see if they get celebrity traitors right. I don’t usually like reality stuff, especially when it’s “celebrities,” but they seem to have gotten a fairly interesting group. The first two series of the civilian edition were great but this years version was filled with too much nasty bullying, and neither of the winners were very likeable.

I wish I could get excited for new Mitchell & Webb stuff, but Robert Webb has some pretty nasty views on trans kids so there’s no chance I could watch it.

+1 for Navidrome. As simple as pasting the album into the directory and it sorts the rest. I use subtune on my phone to access it and it works great.

Two kids smeered their shit on the bathroom walls then climbed on the roof. There was some much more serious stuff but that was the funnier one I guess.

It was in the countryside as well, so we’d get a farm animal wandering about the grounds about once a year which was always exciting.

Thanks, a good rant is nice to read sometimes. Completely agree on Pixels – even if I got second hand, they seem so unreliable based on having one in the past and knowing a few that have had one. There seems to be so much toxicity coming from that project.

I might try it out then. I’ve heard mixed things on e, something about security patches coming months later than other ROMs, but I see murena claim that they are in line with most android manufacturers, just not as quick as hardened ROMs like graphene. Maybe I’ll see this week about swapping over.

I’m very tempted to get one, at least once there’s a lineage build for it, since it will let me finally degoogle completely. Currently on an S24 and even with ADB it’s still a nightmare with the phone constantly telling me there’s an “issue” with my google account (which doesn’t exist anymore) and google services like gemini reinstalling after updates.

Been doing some server maintenance the past few days because I’ve been neglecting them and everything has broken at once, so I may as well infodump on that.

The Raspberry Pi’s fan got clogged up with dust and started screaming but with a new fan it is so silent now. It was averaging 57°C for the couple of days with no fan while I waited for the spare part to arrive, 52°C when the broken fan was still in use, and now down to a nice 47°C with a fresh one. My VPN on the pi stopped working as well, but it was easily fixed with PiVPN, and the arr stack on my mini PC stopped working entirely – it seemed to be a networking issue with the containers under gluetun. But now everything’s up and running again and with a bit more storage space from clearing off old docker volumes. Then I’ve got a pinetime watch coming this week to give me something to tinker with until the new Pebble starts shipping.