When NIMBYism clashes with the fact that the UK abuses the world's climate to power it's first world lifestyle, I don't even know what the answer could be.

On one hand, we have destroyed the biodiversity of our own island so should try to save the little that is left and try to regain what we have lost. On the other hand, we are happy to buy and power, air conditioners, fancier larger cars and LLM tech, where the ecological costs are born in other countries.

The solution from a societal point of view is for the UK to consume less and truly factor in the true climate cost onto all products. From an individual human point of view though, how do you sign up to a worse and more expensive lifestyle by choice with the "cost of living crises" and child poverty on the up.

Sorry if waffling, this post is highlighting my own sense of doom and frustration here...

I just started using some docker containers I found on Docker Hub designed for DB backups (e.g. prodrigestivill/postgres-backup-local) to automatically dump from the databases into a set folder, which is included in the restic backup. I know you could come up with scripts but this way, I could easily copy the compose code to other containers with different databases (and different passwords etc).

I would recommend it as it is fairly easy to understand and most Foss services give you an example to use. You can also convert docker run examples to compose (search docker composeriser) although it doesn't always work.

I found composer files easier when learning it, to digest what is going on (ports, networks, depends_on etc) and can compare with other services to see what is missing (container name, restart schedule etc). I can then easily backup the compose files, env files and data directories to be able to very quickly get a service up again (although DBs are trickier but found a docker image that I can stick on the compose files which backups the DB dumps regularly)

Just had to double check that Mick Lynch hadn't passed away or started moonlighting as an actor...

I am born and raised in England to Indian parents so always had some internal tension. Sometimes, I don't understand my patents culture and sometimes I don't understand English culture. However, I've realised I am who I am, and can take the best bits from both. There are some bits I don't like so I'm the better for being / having that mix. I married an Irish person who moved over several years ago. Irish used to be the "other" and were screwed over, but now are sometimes considered "white", so just shows the target moves.

There has always been racism in British society and unfortunately I have felt it pick up since the Brexit vote and Trump's election (I think it empowered them). However, it is from a small minority of people. In some areas it comes from ignorance, which I can kind of forgive. Others will always see us as outsiders with our foreign names (and my brown skin) no matter what we do. I just think, screw them. I mean, can they trace themselves back before the Normans, the Romans or the Vikings etc? Where do you draw the line exactly?!? England has always been a mix of people and culture so they're the ones missing out. I'm happy driving my Korean car to a German store to buy ingredients for a Thai green curry. Oh, I'll grab a French pastry for breakfast, Chilean wine for the weekend and well, you get the idea! Let's make the most of this multicultural place and ideas, and who cares about bigots who you can guarantee, like a cheeky korma and Belgian beer...

Been using Duckduckgo for a few years now and found it very good, although it's also on the downward SEO ruined path. Have tried Google occasionally and wow is it juat completely full of crap.

Is an Amazon account any better? Not sure if it's just the new devices but things are much more difficult now compared to a Mii TV S for example

As an ebike user, I'd rather they legalise e-scooters with similar regulations, especially around battery safety. I had one and loved it for certain journeys, as I love my bike for other journeys. Wish I could legally buy one I can trust.

I sort of agree that cycle infrastructure improvements are much more important than these proposals but I don't see how you should block these as it's not exactly like the government needs to spend much to do this, so it's not reducing the money for infrastructure so why not do both.

Surely, they are not mutually exclusive and some form of this scheme has been in place for some countries (albeit mainly white commonwealth countries) for many years, even when the UK was in the EU.

Holy shit though, I just looked up the UK's scheme and you have to pay almost a grand in fees (mostly NHS surcharge) and have over £2,500 in savings. I don't want rich a-holes coming over for an extended holiday instead of normal people from more different cultures. Let's vote for better and fairer immigration polices

Capitalists

I use authentik but believe it's similar. You can create accounts for people and give them passwords, or send a welcome email asking them to register to create one. I would warn you though, not every service has the ability to use it and it does take quite some effort to get it working! It's interesting to learn about though

I tried the readarr and other options. They work sometimes but not enough to rely on it. As others mention, there's no standard naming and also, lots of people use their library card for Libby access. I also think there's a bit more of a direct link to authors so I'd prefer to buy the book unless theyre super well off anyway. To be honest, I can't see the arr's working with LibGen having looked at the open issues on integrating it, it just doesn't allow for scraping in the same way.

For me, I self host openbooks (uses IRC) and select a download straight away, which to be fair, is about the same time as searching / finding a TV show if you are after one book. I have exposed it behind an SSO so can access it on my phone and download the book straight away when someone gives me a recommendation. Most of the time I just add to a running note on phone and go through it every few months when I need more books.

It's fairly quick for multiple books but not sonarr levels of ease. The downloads go into a calibre monitored folder which then does the automation (naming, conversion if needed etc). I bulk email the new books to my kindle with one click. Calibre-web is on read only for a nice browsing experience and to read on other devices if I need to (althogh no page sync). It's a bit of manual work but I find it is not too bad and in 10 minutes I can load up enough books for months.

Occasionally IRC does not have the book so try manually searching on prowlarr, and download on sab or transmission. The downloads are almost instant so I then just wait and copy them to my downloads folder (I could probably automate this step too with tags but it's so infrequent).

My parents had a Post Office which I effectively grew up in. I remember them having to report things on a desktop and loading these discs. I also remember when they got the Horizon system and how much trouble they were having trying to get it to work.

They moved to the city I was born and raised in just to buy the PO, and both worked full time in it. I feel so lucky they didn't get caught up in it all. I have asked if they paid anything they weren't sure about and they said there was nothing, although my mum paused before answering so think there might've been something.

It would have ruined our lives completely so all this scandal stuff really hits me hard. I couldn't even watch the Norman Bates show past 20 minutes as I just got so upset and angry. Fuck all the people involved (at every level) and hope they suffer for all time...

I just tried it out on a couple of random questions (one on docker, the other on proxmox networking) and it looks very promising. I didn't even have to login, it showed the sources, it gave step by step instructions, and suggested follow up questions that were helpful. Thanks for sharing!

Given how important a router is and how easy it is for something to wrong with this, even with just a random update, I'd personally not even try this. I actually just use a tp link omada business router as my family wouldn't be too happy if the internet is broken. It has VPN and I just bought a couple access points so I can improve the WiFi whilst setting up vlans to compartmentalise smart home devices. Everything else is nice to have but if something goes wrong with the services below overnight and I need to work from home, at least I can just switch them off until I got time to fix them.

I got a cheap second hand thin client off eBay for pihole and home assistant (using proxmox), and another custom desktop acting as a headless server with the rest of my services running in docker (plex and arr stack, vaultwarden, nextcloud, imich, loads others etc. It allows flexibility so if the server goes down, or runs out of memory, or I'm messing around and broke it, my family's streaming isn't impacted.

You cannot put pihole on a router but yes, those are good ideas. A router with openwrt will have VPN settings, as do many proprietary ones. Alternatively, you could look into opnsense, which is router software on computer hardware (not a router), which you could also put pihole on. I'd say it's way more tricky though.

I have dynamic IP and there are several ways around it. I use Cloudflared (updates DNS records regularly) and a script I found to update duck DNS as a backup. Both very simple.

Accessing the services is not the problem, the problem is keeping them safe. I've tried lots of different ways (although not tailscale yet) and have a few services exposed directly to the internet behind authentik \ NPM \ Cloudflare \ fail2ban \ ufw. Others, I access through my router openvpn server, with keys for my laptop and phone as clients. There are so many guides online for all VPN types. Its just finding the right approach between ease of use vs safety

I'm hesitant about it too for the same reason but not sure if I'm being unreasonable given that I rely on so many other free services. However, this is one that would potentially have access to everything I do.

I'm watching headscale with interest until its safe enough for me to try breaking it!

Would you trust rsync.net to be around for a long time? They're doing a $540 lifetime 1TB offer which is interesting as I'm luckily in a position to do but would take 6 years plus to "pay off".

Interesting. Here, with automated cameras, the letter also goes to the registered keeper of the car. There used to be a way out where you could say I don't remember who was driving, but you'd both have to be on the insurance for it to work. Now I think your have to name the driver and can't not name them, or something along those lines. From memory, somebody took it to court saying you shouldn't be compelled to incriminate yourself but think they lost.

Most cameras now though are forward facing so take a photo of the driver too. You can't get out of that!

To be fair, the owner should know who's driving at that time and they need to be on the insurance. Maybe this is different here because every driver is named on the insurance for each car. Am I right in thinking it's different there? If you named someone who wasn't insured on your car, you're letting someone drive your car without insurance which is also an offence. You have to pay for each person so it's not like you're going to have multiple random drivers.

In the UK we have a points system and if you get enough points you lose your licence and have to reapply. This was introduced because the wealthy didn't really care about getting tickets if it was just a small (relative to their wealth) fine. You can get points for any automatic fines from speeding, running red lights, illegal U-turns, etc, plus any court issued fines.

In the first two years of getting your licence, you have a lower threshold.

Speed cameras are generally signposted or painted in yellow, although there are some speed traps or police patrols which might catch you too. Often, you are not sure if the cameras work but people will slow down just in case. There's also average speed cameras on some roads which completely stop speeding.

You could argue that some people will still drive without a licence but I there's not many who would do that.

I have noticed in my driving lifetime (20 years) that drivers have slowed down, especially in urban areas. Roads in urban areas have been designed to decrease speeds though which probably had more of an effect - more curves, tighter roads, prioritising buses/pedestrians/cyclists, etc. Plus we've always had more roundabouts which have been proven to lower speeds.

Of course, we have a centralised driving licence authority and not the state differences you guys have.

Well obviously this was orchestrated by the Western Pigs, but luckily the people have overcome these shenanigans by voting in such great numbers for Our Great Leader, that they could not achieve their vile goals.

On a serious note though, that shuffling "covert" action is hilarious...

I'd much rather see this than any of the commercial adverts.

It is useful information too. Most people won't interrupt or help, and partly because they are not sure how. I saw this recently and it did make me think, if I did see something happening I have a better idea of how I can help.

It also creates an environment where you cannot justify not acting because you don't think you can help, and that we as a society are saying it is not acceptable. If one person challenges harassment that would not have done so before seeing that, I'd count it as a success.

I only use docker images supplied by the devs themselves or community maintained (e.g. Linux server.io) so they essentially tell docker what needs to be installed in the container, not me. It takes the hassle out of trying to figure out what I need to do to get the service running. If they update their app, they'll probably know best what else needs to be updated and will do that in the image. I guess you are relying on them to keep everything updated but they are way more knowledgeable than me and if there is a vulnerability, it is only in that container and not your other services.

A stack of 15 floppy disks for one program. Please insert the next disk to continue (I can't remember the exact wording). Command prompt to A:\ and having to see what the install program might be called. Bring amazed that CDs could autorun programs.

Bamboozled!!! Highlight of my day!

Lots of little things really. Obviously I couldn't say for certain but they seemed to on top of it without causing us too much difficulty in doing our jobs.

Sometimes things were blocked like if a new email, or questioned after to check it was expected and followed policy. Policies were clear, and there were helpful prompts or warnings.

We were involved in something where we had to copy a sh*t load of files from a shared folder to a hard disk. There were like three automatic blocks that kicked in at different times, which was a pain at first to figure out but because we had a good reason, someone in IT just kept at it to get it done and looking back, that should have raised flags given the size of it all.

They changed from passwords changing every 6 months to no changes but had to be longer and mandatory 2FA. We were told to use keepass for all passwords for things that weren't SSO for various reasons.

Interesting! What would be some good use cases for this?

Don't provide services to others, including your own family, actually especially your own family, until you are quite comfortable with what is going on and what might be causing issues. Focus on helping yourself or keeping whatever other services you were using before just in case.

Trying to fix something at night, with a fuming partner who's already put up with a difficult to use service, because of your want for privacy even though they don't care care, whilst saying "it should work, I don't know what's wrong", is not a great place to be 😁.

Overall though, I found it so interesting that I am doing a part time degree in computer science in my 30s, purely to learn more (whilst being forced to do it to timelines and having paid for it).

I have a very comfortable and 'forget about it' setup my family are now using. Every now and then I add new services for myself, and if it works out, will give access to others to use, keep it just for me or just delete it and move on.

I have a reason I don't think is covered. A few programs I have come across that I want to try recommend docker and some only provide instructions for docker. They can spend less time trying to help you with dependencies and installations knowing they've included everything you need in the docker file. I don't have a background in Linux or programming so unless they tell you exactly how to install something, I can struggle. Their installation page is then just the docker compose file with a note on the environment variables you can change.

It's painful but might be easier to just download the ebooks through other means. Try Openbooks.

It's really targeted at people who want to stay "off the books" or not pay any taxes, so is what it is. If you're getting paid cash up front then there's not too much issue for you.

Technically, you have an employee - employer contact by law automatically, and they legally need to provide you with a letter stating certain terms within x days of the start date. I can't remember exact details.

They should also be putting you through payroll, deducting taxes (if needed), and paying employers NI. Someone else mentioned the need to pay you minimum wage by law

These are all additional costs to them so if you raise it as an issue with them, I'd say they will cut you out and block you. You're unlikely to get any authority to really care, especially if they keep a low profile for this purpose.

It might be a good idea to personally tell the tax authority about your earnings (ignoring the employer) and keep track of it. If in a tax year (April to March) you earn less then £5k you won't pay any NI and less than £12.5k you won't pay any income tax. It's quite straightforward to do and if you're not paying tax then no real cost. However, you could also easily get away with doing nothing, especially if they pay you cash and there's no real record. Feel free to message me to ask any more questions about tax.

Either try to work out how to pass headers through to get around the service login or give up and find another app. On some services, the service auto logs onto one account so anybody who gets through Authentik sees the same stuff which is fine. I definitely don't have two levels of login!

I should say I use Plex's and vaultwarden's own login systems.

They serve two different purposes. You can have one, both or neither. Sorry if you already know all this below but thought it might be good to explain in detail.

NPM is a proxy provider so passes subdomains to the right service (e.g. service1.url.com passes to service 1 at IP x.x.x.x on port 5050). This allows you to only open one port to NPM but access other services through subdomains. I have NPM in front of myexternal apps so I can access each through a subdomain (e.g. service1.url.com). You could also use it for accessing internally if you setup your internal DNS to pass (e.g. service1.internal) to the IP address and port of your service, and set NPM only to allow access from internal IPs.

Authentik provides single sign on so instead of having different usernames and passwords for every user on every service, you have one set of users and it manages the passwords.

There are at a high level two levels of using it.

Some services have proper SSO integration so you setup Authentik to replace it's own login system. For instance, with Nextcloud you are going to the Nextcloud homepage but it then goes out to Authentik to do the login process and once passed, Authentik will tell Nextcloud user B has successfully logged in, I vouch for them and here are their details. You can do this for internal and external access. Obviously with Nextcloud you need to login either through it's own login system or via SSO so even if I go directly to the internal IP and port (and therefore don't need NPM to access it), I still need Authentik to login so it knows it's me and not my partner trying to access her account

Some services don't have SSO integration or have no login required. For instance, I have Stirling PDF which doesn't need user details or login. However, you don't want to just allow anyone to access so I have setup NPM to use Authentik as a proxy pass. If I go to stirlingpdf.url.com then it sends me to Authentik to login. You can only ever get to the Stirling app if you successfully log in. You can also set Authentik so that only certain users or groups of users can access certain apps but that's more than I need.

It does take some effort to get SSO working correctly for each service and it's only really worth it if you do have multiple users or services that need logins.

You don't want just NPM unless you trust the service to have a secure login.

Others will probably say, you shouldn't have anything facing externally. You can setup Tailscale or Wireguard tunnels so you always appear to be on the local network. That way, you don't need NPM to be open externally. However you might still want it so you can type the address service1.internal instead of 192.168.1.1:8063 each time. You probably also want Authentik to make the login shared.

In terms of network access to get them working, NPM needs to be able to access Authentik internally on your network. You could either put them on the same shared Docker network or in my case, they are both on the same server so share an internal IP. I have opened the individual ports on Docker so they can access each other internally just like I can access both from my laptop. If I'm accessing away from home, I have my domain pointing my home external network ID, port 443 open on my router pointing to my home server with NPM. NPM then "talks" to Authentik through the home network so I login through that but I don't have to open the Authentik port externally.

In my case, in the NPM settings, instead of using the docker created network for Authentik (like 172.3.1.1 or something that might change), I use the internal IP of the machine (like 192.168.1.1:4443 {if 4443 is the Authentik port}). I also have an NPM entry auth.url.com that points to Authentik which some apps need instead of the internal address. It took some playing around to get it right but once you do, it's essentially copy and paste for new services.

It will be funny when they eventually decide the AI bureaucracy is the problem like they are blaming the civil service now. Nothing to do with their disastrous unworkable policies (Rwanda), pandering to the extreme elements of their party (Truss) or their complete ineptitude (pretty much everything else)...

One good thing that happened in recent years is the digital push and gov.uk websites. I have to say, getting a driving licence, renewing a passport, finding information on lots of topics has massively improved. Carry on with this, not wasting money on untested technology. Of course, that's silly for me to say. The money will all go to friends of the party with nothing gained.

Honestly, I am so glad my parents didn't move to the USA and moved to the UK instead. Me and my sister had several health issues including asthma, food allergies, broken bones playing sports, and as a result several hospital and doctor visits. Considering my parents were self employed shop keepers, I don't know if we'd be alive, let alone what sort of life we would have had. Then also having to pay for college would've been tricky. Having so few work holidays also completely sucks!

We are now both professionals with great jobs, paying lots of taxes and volunteer a lot to try to give back. Would that be possible in the USA - I honestly have no idea! Would we move to the USA - absolutely no way! We'd both actually earn lots more money in the USA in the same role but factoring in health and happiness, it's not worth it.

When you hear "greatest country on earth" and "the American dream", I think anybody in Western countries really roll their eyes. It's not a utopia here in the UK but nobody claims it to be, and stories like this just prove we are better off here.

However, we know the people themselves are great and don't deserve this position. We feel sorry for you and wish part of your population would travel and see things for themselves to push for changes back home.

In the UK, we are terrified that we will end up in the same position as our out of touch political elite and ultra wealthy would love to copy this.

It never went away but lots of people I know who did all that stopped bothering.

When the range in netflix went down, fees went up and everybody launched different services, I was really thinking of sailing but it was Netflix blocking sharing that was the final straw.

It says in the article 'Lightly trafficked roads or locations that just don’t make socio-economic sense can be excluded from the requirement' for the comprehensive network.

It'll be up to each country how they decide to implement it. In some countries the core roads are managed by a central government agency so they would need to arrange it. In others it is the the local municipalities or privatised. Some countries will offer to private companies. Others will provide it themselves. The governments would be ultimately responsible but Im sure they can manage this given they already have responsibilities about maintaining the roads and rest areas. In the worst case they might have to pay for some infrastructure themselves but can make it back with the charges.

This is just one area of the overall fit for 55 and general EU plans. Public transport is already being looked at under different working groups (e.g. https://rail-research.europa.eu/about-europes-rail/).

The aim of the overall plan look very promising. https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/policies/green-deal/fit-for-55-the-eu-plan-for-a-green-transition/