Is this loss?

If they tell you they watched the Fallout TV series, what you really need to know is how often they paused it.

Couples who play MMOs together have that kinkiest sex lives. There, I said it.

TIL that NextCloud can use an external database.

It’s cloud all the way down.

There’s not many objects that you use with the same regularity and intimacy as a mouse other than footwear and furniture. If they’re a bit off you get used to them to the point their flaws become part of their charm. I got my Microsoft Sculpt Mouse when they were brand new. It’s still going strong and I’ll be heartbroken when it eventually dies but, at the risk of jinxing it, it’s showing no signs.

Back in the eighties my parents (British) bought a villa in Spain, all on it’s own on a mountainside. Over the following ten years fifty - yes, fifty - other villas were built, all independently, all by Brits, all on top of each other, most without planning permission. A group of busybodies formed a HOA-style association and took over the area, building an English Shoppe with a red phone box outside where you could buy the Daily Mail and Tetley Tea, an English pub, replacing the road signs with English ones, even an English radio station. The last time we visited and decided to sell, we arrived to find they’d illegally installed a gate across the road - the PUBLIC road - and were only giving the remotes to certain worthy residents, which apparently we weren’t.

But it’s okay. Because they weren’t dirty migrants forcing their culture on others and refusing the integrate; they were expats just looking for a little bit of sun.

Or, at least, that would last a thousand years.

One hundred percent go for USFF. Even the cheapest, most basic processor will smash server roles because it’s not having to power desktop applications, graphics, window managers, etc.

To be honest, I used to have an ISP with dynamic addresses and it wasn’t a huge deal. The address only changed every month or two. I used afraid.org’s dynamic DNS service to get a dynamic address that followed the changes and created CNAME records for my real domain pointing at that. The actual connection was fucking awful but the dynamic IPs never caused any problems.

As for services: Nextcloud is well worth looking into for file sync and photo backup, especially if you’ve already got a file server running.

As it happens, I’ve just finished setting up a system exactly like this for a completely off-grid setup. I needed a Raspberry Pi running Home Assistant to be completely self-contained to monitor an adjacent, larger system that is only powered up intermittently (close enough that the two systems have a common ground).

Short version: the Raspberry Pi and the Huawei LTE router I’m using for connectivity draw a steady 9W between them (there’s a lot of monitoring going on). I went with an old pair of 80W panels in very suboptimal positioning, a simple MPPT charge controller and a 110Ah deep cycle leisure battery which costs about €45, €30 and €120 respectively. The system has been running a few months now and the battery had never, ever dropped below 12.4V. The Pi uses WireGuard to connect to my VPS so Home Assistant can be accessed with a web browser since the network I’m using on-site doesn’t do public IP addresses.

But, yes, any self-driving cars should absolutely be required to have lidar.

So they think self-driving cars should have lidar, like a vacuum cleaner. They agree, and think it’s a good idea, right?

I don’t think you could find any professional in the field that would argue that lidar is the proper tool for this.

…then in the next sentence goes on to say that lidar is not the correct tool. In the space of a paragraph they make two points which directly contradict one-another. Hence my response:

What is your point here, exactly?

They could have said “oops, typo!” or something but, no, instead they went full on-condescending:

I think you’re suffering from not knowing what you don’t know.

I stand by my response:

arrogant sack of dicks

And while I’m not naive enough to believe that upvotes and downvotes are any kind of arbiter of objective truth, they at least seem to suggest, in this case, that my interpretation is broadly in line with the majority.

I think you’re suffering from not knowing what you don’t know.

and I think you’re suffering from being an arrogant sack of dicks who doesn’t like being called out on their poor communication skills and, through either a lack of self-awareness or an unwarranted overabundance of self-confidence, projects their own flaws on others. But for the more receptive types who want to learn more, here’s Syed Saad ul Hassan’s very well-written 2022 paper on practical applications, titled Lidar Sensor in Autonomous Vehicles which I found also serves as neat primer of lidar in general..

…what is your point here, exactly? The stakes might be lower for a vacuum cleaner, sure, but lidar - or a similar time-of-flight system - is the only consistent way of mapping environmental geometry. It doesn’t matter if that’s a dining room full of tables and chairs, or a pedestrian crossing full of children.

Honestly in rare situations that a device like that needs to be accessible from the wild Internet I think it’d be mad to expose it directly, especially if it’s not manageable as you suggest. At the very least, I’d be leaning on a reverse proxy.

Yeah, it’s also exactly what the EU and it’s predecessors exist to prevent. We’ve never had a period of prolonged peace in Europe like we have now. And these utter fucking slabs want to undo it.

SUKBRICK sounds like a demeaning act that we brought on ourselves so lets go with that.

It’s the Express, so you can safely ignore it.

Recent front page headlines from the Express (if some of these aren’t real yet, they will be at some point):

• Evil EU Bastards Forcing Millions Of Innocent Brits Out Of Retirement Homes
• Revealed: Why The Woke Leftist BBC Won’t Heap Praise On The Neo-Nazis
• Statins Found To Cure Cancer, But Why Won’t The NHS Supply Them?
• Out-Of-Touch Woke BBC Bosses Ban Cockfighting
• Frage BLASTS Starmer, EU: “Britain Should Be Free To Take Statins.”
• Join The Express’s Campain To Get LIFESAVING STATINS On The NHS.
• EXPOSED: The £1,000,000-a-Night Hotel That Illegal Immigants Are Being Housed Near
• Farage Hails Latest Brexit Victory: “It Hurt The EU Too”
• Statins Add Ninety Years To Life, But Kier Starmer, EU Wants You Dead
• Exclusive: BBC Pervert Bosses License Fee Funded Sex Pit Imagined.
• So-Called NHS So-Called Experts Say: Statins Dangerous. The Express Says: Hunt Them.
• Collapsing EU in SHAMBLES As Trade Deal Blows Up In Their Dirty Foreign Faces As Euro PLUMMETS 0.002%
• Farage: Trade Deal Deaths “Will Only Make Britain Stronger”
• Express Success: NHS Statin Trial To Begin.
• Another Brexit Victory: Brown People Die At Sea
• NHS Statin Deaths: Why Did Kier Starmer, EU Do This To Us?
• All Foreigners Are Rapists

Tom Hunt, if you’re reading this, I’ve just done your job for the next year.

No. Yes. Kind of.

My home setup is three ProLiant towers in a ProxMox cluster. One box handles all-the-time stuff like OpenWRT, file server, email, backups, and - crucially - Home Assistant and is UPS protected because of how important it’s jobs are. The other two are powered up based on energy costs; Home Assistant turns them on for the cheapest six hours of the day or when energy costs are negative and they perform intensive things like sailing the high seas, preemptive video transcoding, BOINC workloads and such. The other boxes in the photo are also on all the time basically being used as disk enclosures for the file server and they are full of mismatched hard disks that spend virtually all their time asleep. At rest the whole setup pulls about 35-40W.

Right, but they’re not particles travelling through a vacuum. Even a tiny contact at highway speeds is enough to send one or both cars rolling.