Up the chuff = good, down the chuff = bad

The irony of the autistic person using a metaphor, and someone else taking it too literally. You have to laugh!

And people who have no time install gentoo? Pull the other one :D

Checking in

I started in 2012, and it wasn’t that difficult. I’d say I do about 30mins of maintenance every other month. It took me a while to work out the config originally, but I wrote a guide afterwards which was really popular for other people doing the same thing (it’s quite out of date now but the principles are the same).

Started out using a raspberry pi (which was also hosting a website at the time) but when I moved house to somewhere with a worse internet connection I migrated to a VPS, so there is a cost but it’s not enormous, maybe £20/month.

Don’t even bother if you can’t use a static IP, because all your email will be bounced if your PTR record for the IP (reverse DNS record) doesn’t match your domain name.

It got a bit more complicated when people started adding extra layers of spam protection like SPF, DKIM and DMARC, but those are mostly set and forget.

Overall, I’d say it’s worth it but only because I find it quite interesting/fun.

Google is unavoidable but I do my best to mitigate the worst parts of their privacy intrusions.

I have a pixel phone running grapheneOS with Google Services Framework installed but without Google Play or Gboard or any of that stuff. For me that’s a balance that works.

I host my own email server so no Gmail.

I also host my own Matrix server and avoid WhatsApp where possible (not Google but just as bad if not worse).

I use YouTube but via Newpipe or using Ublock origin on Firefox (not logged in obviously).

Chrome is genuinely worse than Firefox now that Google have made adblocking more difficult with manifest v3.

You just have to decide what the best tradeoff is between privacy and convenience.

Redreader uses the official API, they have an exception from paying (for now) because they have accessibility features that most apps including the official one lack.

Have you turned off Firefox’s built-in enhanced tracking protection? If not, turn it off but leave uBlock Origin on and see if that solves your issue.

I looked into these before and believe the inverters shut off if the mains shuts off. The DC side of the circuit would still be potentially dangerous though.

The inverters need there to be power in the mains circuit because they convert DC to AC and match the phase of the AC power they are generating to the mains supply.

More info on this here:

https://www.mississippifreepress.org/12782/the-troubling-past-of-forced-sterilization-of-black-women-and-girls-in-mississippi-and-the-south

I had assumed the women weren’t sterilised by the normal contraceptive meds, but it seems they used a large dose of Depo-Provera which is a legit contraceptive injection. Not the usual pills but still.

There are also stories in that article of people having forced hysterectomies.

America’s history of racism is so dark.

Aren’t they implementing manifest v3 for addons soon, which will cripple adblockers on chrome?

Same, deliberately avoided Nvidia and I’ve had zero issues

Interesting, I think it’s different for structural engineering because you’re doing calculations in accordance with a code of practice and the spreadsheet needs to be adapted to tweak the inputs and outputs of a standard formula and apply it slightly differently for different bridges / structural arrangements. I’ve written loads of spreadsheets that have been used and adapted by other people in my company, I honestly don’t think they are that difficult to understand (or people wouldn’t have been able to build on them and adapt them).

I can see that lab software is quite different, especially if you have very well defined procedures and you are repeating exactly the same test again and again with the same inputs and outputs.

In structural engineering (bridge design etc), we use quite complicated spreadsheets for calculations; a database wouldn’t be the right tool for that job. We use excel because everyone knows how to use it and it’s easy to print to PDF and see the inputs and outputs and any graphical summaries you have added. Using a spreadsheet makes it easy to check and easy to adapt/change when you want to do a slightly different calculation next time.

I’ve tried building spreadsheets of similar complexity in libreoffice and it’s true they are very slow in comparison and more prone to crashing.

Libreoffice works well for some tasks and I enjoy using it at home but honestly if I tried to use it at work it would cut my productivity significantly. I’m probably using it more intensively than most people though.

Yeah I don’t disagree with what you’re saying, we don’t put fresh grads on jobs without adequate supervision on the design side either. On both sides of the “fence” you need the experience to produce a good product; the two jobs are different and should be complimentary.

The schemes I have worked on that have been the most successful have had the designer and contractor working together closely from an early stage to produce something that works well, drawing on the past experience of both to anticipate potential issues and design them out.

Personally it took me about 6 years before I felt I was good at design. Experience really does count.

I think unfortunately most people shy away from technical things including reading technical documentation. The answer to that problem is to have someone in the team on site who does read it and supervises all the people who can’t or won’t (i.e. an actual engineer). I can see how the profit motive drives companies to cut these people out but it should be seen as essential part of the process for safety reasons.

In civil / structural engineering, quite a lot of UK legislation and codes of practice has been developed following government reports into engineering failures, such as:

Loddon Bridge disaster --> Bragg report --> BS5975 code of practice for temporary works design

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loddon_Bridge_disaster

West Gate Yara bridge collapse --> Merrison Report --> system of independent design checking and competency requirements

https://www.istructe.org/resources/blog/learning-from-history-box-girder-bridges/

I’m not an aerospace engineer but I’d like to think that something similar will happen in this case, although to be honest I’d be surprised if the legislation doesn’t exist already.

Yeah that’s exactly how I feel about it as well. Concrete spec is the classic one, you write a spec saying what you want and ALWAYS get a TQ back saying “hey can we use this completely different type of concrete from the supplier?”. Complete waste of time.

I don’t know about that, we have the same problem in civil engineering. At some point you just have to say that if someone can’t read a drawing and do what it says they are not doing their job properly. If that means you need an engineer on site to read and interpret the drawing for people who can’t or won’t read then so be it.

Brothers, brothers! We should be struggling together!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHHitXxH-us