I think the doomerism was all to get that moat. There’s no vendor lockin either, even if you’re using the API. You can switch between providers really easily.

100%. I’ve had the same email going on 20 years. It’s been hosted in a dozen different places. It was on proton for a while, it’s on mailbox.org now. I can move again in an hour.

Me too, was a paying customer for several years. Perks of using your own domain. I can switch providers in under an hour.

I’ve been explicitly told not to use any open source for a project. I don’t even know what language I’d write it in. We ended up not even quoting for it in the end.

Yeah this only makes sense if the builds start diverging from the open source code, extra features that are closed source.

Hertzner storage box. I think it’s €13/month for 5tb. Just storage with ssh interface. I use restic but most backup systems should work with it.

Back during covid we sent my wife’s grandparents a smart phone so they could video call. They only had a dumb brick phone.

I forget what model but it was one specifically aimed at easy of use for seniors. We had it delivered so I could set it up. Then delivered it to them ready to go.

It was impossible. Even just answering a call being touch and hold the green circle then slide it 2cm in any direction and release took nearly an hour.

My wife does social care now and a client yesterday had managed to enable audio description on his firestick. This is what i was explaining. Hold back and menu on the remote to turn it on/off. He’d probably done it by accident and now his TV is explaining everything on screen after every button press and he has no clue where to even begin to turn it off. It’s utterly incomprehensible. I’m sure they thought it was a good idea to have a way to turn it on that doesn’t need you to see the screen.

Yesterday describing how to do a thing to my wife over the phone “The menu button” “There is no menu button” “It’s a hamburger icon” “What?” “3 lines” “How is that a menu?”

I use this, works great. Have it on a server that is publicly accessible and has access to immich. I have it on a VPS which connects to my LAN over VPN. In immich you can configure a public domain for sharing where you put the proxy domain.

Then just share as normal and the url immich gives is the proxy.

The UI you get is very basic but functional.

I got the same email with 25% discount for this year. Can’t argue with lack of transparency on that and it’s a bit unreasonable to expect no price increases ever

One tip for persistant notifications, if you long press on it and go to settings then drill down through 2 or 3 screens there’s an option to minimise. It makes it smaller on the notifications drawer and doesn’t show on the starus bar.

Still sucks that apps have to do this to run in background.

Noticed parking meters here have prominent labels now stating they do not use QR codes. I’m sure that’s just providing the spot to put the scam QR code, but it’s better than nothing.

It’s from this report https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/69411a3eadb5707d9f33d7e8/E03512978_-_Un-Act_The_National_Security_Act_in_2024_Accessible.pdf

I emailed my MP about this before Christmas and am yet to get a reply

No. Its had external library support for quite a while now

100%. It irks when software has messages in the first person. The human-like TTS are very uncanny valley to me.

I needed voice over for a video recently and everyone is telling me to use AI, I tried dozens and they’ll all just off. Ended up getting a friend to record it. I don’t have a decent mic so my own recording sounded bad.

I just got a phone case that holds my debit card in the back and turned off NFC.

I had the same issue which is by I don’t self host bitwarden. If my house burned down the same day Bitwarden had a catastrophic outage I’d probably have issues but that seems unlikely.

Years ago now, they pushed an offer for lifetime subscription onto my server. I clicked it, went through to their website and bought it, paid, the subscription activated and worked.

The next day they emailed to say actually i wasn’t eligible for the offer, they cancelled it and refunded me and said it would actually cost $30 more.

I installed Jellyfin that same day, it was pretty buggy back then but was definitely the right decision.

I do this. I already had a cloud vps with a vpn on it for remote access so i figured i might as well set it up to route traffic as well.

Still get loads of sites blocking me

Yeah there was a period about 15-20 years ago when they were good, I used to get working codes all the time.

I can’t remember the last time I got one that worked.