I don’t think Mozilla running a Mastodon server is losing focus. The ethos of Mozilla and the Fediverse have a lot of overlap, and Mozilla should desire to have a foot in it.

An official Mastodon server is also a useful platform for marketing and outreach. In contrast an organisation claiming to be all about privacy and open source retreating from a social media platform that embodies those is not a good look.

High energy bills and misinformation about energy saving seems to be causing some odd behaviour here in the UK.

I have relatives who go round turning off every device and appliance at night, despite the negligible power draw they have in standby. Another will only charge their phone at night during cheaper the electricity rate - but runs the tumble dryer during the day.

I also often hear stories about people fearing electronic devices will catch fire if left on standby over night. Which may well be a risk for charging a dodgy Chinese e-bike but probably not for a home router.

I think the difference here is that medical reference material is based on long process of proven research. It can be trusted as a reliable source of information.

AI tools however are so new they haven’t faced anything like the same level of scrutiny. For now they can’t be considered reliable, and their use should be kept within proper medical trials until we understand them better.

Yes human error will also always be an issue, but putting that on top of the currently shaky foundations of AI only compounds the problem.

But it will make it a nicer day out for tourists.

Isn’t that what Oxford Street is, more or less a tourist attraction? I don’t imagine many people going for their weekly shop.

You’re never lonely with all your Demodex friends.

They are fairly crap as a hand dryer too.

The carbrained can’t see cycling as a form of transport, only as a type of exercise. In their minds people only cycle to cycle, not to fulfil other tasks. Only cars are for going places, like shopping.

With RFC 1149, this would still work now.

According to the internet, he did it at university, eating nothing but mince, chicken, and mayonnaise for about 2 months. He did so to annoy other students in his classes who were vegan or vegetarian.

I’ve actually heard a few stories of uni students getting scurvy, although they were because they either didn’t know how to cook or couldn’t afford food.

They are more comfortable than they look. The lack of a second analogue stick is a big limitation though.

There was a prototype VMU MP3 player in the works before the Dreamcast was discontinued, alongside a music store.

Sega also produced a digital camera for the Dreamcast, the DreamEye.

The tech world could have looked very different if the Dreamcast went differently for Sega.

The P and D symbol is the DisplayPort logo. I'm not sure when it was first used, but the DisplayPort standard itself is quite a bit older than USB Power Delivery.

It's still confusing though regardless of which can lay the best claim to the letters P and D. I would have suggested Power Delivery could use some sort of lightning bolt symbol, but then I realised that would probably conflict with Thunderbolt, which also uses USB-C.

It's almost as if having all these different features would be easier to differentiate if they had different physical shapes.

Having a holiday threshold sounds like a good idea. Allow a set amount of days and fine beyond that to discourage excessive absence.

So long as it's not during exams or something I can't see the harm in allowing a 1-2 week holiday a year. It would be much fairer and more flexible for families, and less complicated than things like different areas having staggered term dates

I haven't done any channel optimisation so far, I probably should do. I have the P version of the Sonoff Zigbee dongle, I haven't tried the E version.

I've also been careful with picking router devices. I've tried to avoid router devices that have poor reported compatibility with Aqara. There is a page/thread somewhere online where people were compiling lists of devices that do or don't play nice with Aqara. IKEA devices apparently work very well with Aqara, I've been using their smart plugs wherever I can.

My Zigbee network also improved a lot when I set up some IKEA plugs in the loft. My house also has thick walls, but it seems Zigbee signal can propagate more easily through ceilings/floors.

Using quality brand batteries also seems to help a bit, at least from a battery life point of view.

Creating a cost barrier to participation is possibly one of the better ways to deter bot activity.

Charging money to register or even post on a platform is one method. There are administrative and ethical challenges to overcome though, especially for non-commercial platforms like Lemmy.

CAPTCHA systems are another, which costs human labour to solve a puzzle before gaining access.

There had been some attempts to use proof of work based systems to combat email spam in the past, which puts a computing resource cost in place. Crypto might have poisoned the well on that one though.

All of these are still vulnerable to state level actors though, who have large pools of financial, human, and machine resources to spend on manipulation.

Maybe instead the best way to protect communities from such attacks is just to remain small and insignificant enough to not attract attention in the first place.

I'm happy to see untracked energy devices covered in the energy graphs. I'd been using a Grafana dashboard to display more detailed energy visualisations including consumption of untracked devices before.

Still a win for Home Assistant to have a big brand like Aqara want to play ball at all.

if they are supporting the current Matter/Thread devices hopefully they will do the same for future devices, especially (if and) when they start to deprecate their Zigbee devices.

Aqara devices can be finicky with non-Aqara devices, especially router devices.

I've personally also had much better results with Aqara devices since switching to Zigbee2MQTT and a Sonoff Zigbee stick, I had a lot more dropouts with ZHA and a Conbee II stick.

I have an X220 with an i5-2520M, I don't use it for gaming but I have briefly played Half-Life 2 with it and it was comfortably playable.

So I would say mid-2000s titles and before will be fine. It really depends on the age the Thinkpad you want is, and the age of the games you want to play.

It’s nearly the same for me, depending on what offers Dominos have that week.

We tend to mostly get Chinese takeaways now because it comes out at almost the same price as fish and chips but with a lot more variety. Even just a portion of chips from the chippy is pricey now.

Reducing suicide is always approached as trying to block pathways to death, rather than by improving life.

As always with this country it’s putting a plaster over the symptoms rather than addressing the cause.

Dedicated and separated cycle lanes are the way to go. Cars, cycles, and pedestrians all need their own space. The challenge for the UK is our often quite narrow existing roads. Making space for physically separated cycle lanes is often going to mean taking lanes away from cars. Which is not necessarily a bad thing but obviously creates a lot more friction to be implemented.

Many cities in Europe have had an easier time with this due to more post-war modernisation/rebuilding that created wider roads.

I wish more would be done to link up walking routes. There's a lot of footpaths in the country but they often poorly connected to each other. Local authorities are supposed to have plans on implementing new routes but progress seems very slow.

This is the inevitable path for nearly all proprietary smart devices. There’s a handful of manufacturers that will see privacy as a marketable feature, but most won’t be able to resist the sweet taste of data.

It’s a shame there are no “dumb” TVs left, except for expensive industrial options.

Isolate the smart TV in restricted VLAN in your home network that can access your local media server but doesn’t allow internet access.

Segmenting a home network like this is also a good idea for smart home/IoT devices.

Schools should not be giving in to bigots and banning books. The content of school libraries should have the same protections as the curriculum itself.

Many of these bans seem very knee jerk also, if books are being removed after single complaints.

So they come to power on a change platform promising to fix our “broken” country, but then invite austerity back for an encore. Urgh.

It seems Britain is breaking because our political class no longer believes in change itself.

Melon really has a bee in his bonnet about Britain at the moment.

The police response is does seem to be working, getting the key agitators off the streets and dissuading the hangers on.

But I think the public reaction has also been important. The public at large have rejected the mob, showing them this is not the popular “uprising” they might have thought it was.

I wonder how this period will shift political undercurrents in the longer term though, for better or worse.

The Pico 2 board is still using a Micro USB connector, would have been nice to see that changed to USB C.

I don't remember much problem with the connectivity with SCART. I do remember wasting many hours dealing with cheaply made cables that didn't even wire all the pins however.

Which come to think of it is now becoming an issue with USB-C cables. At least with SCART the connector could be easily opened for inspection, which became a habit of many an AV tech.

Keeping the same pin layout while upgrading to USB-C would have made more sense. USB-C is the future, seems odd to still be a Micro USB holdout in 2024.

The switch has got to happen at some point, and the Pico ecosystem is still young enough the change wouldn't be too disruptive.

Hopefully this is the turning point, and the disorder will now fade out.

Don’t let the fancy bottles trick you into ignoring the potential side effects though, you don’t want to get too spliced up.

They got round that a bit by having the player be a sort of prototype Big Daddy, who was more agile and human like. You still had to fight other Big Daddies to get Adam, but they added a new option to temporarily “adopt” their Little Sister as well as harvest or rescue them.

I haven’t played 2 in a while but from what I remember the gameplay was fairly fun, especially with the drill weapon.

Terrestrial evolution was a mistake. Don’t need to afford land if you don’t need land.

Some contactless payment systems like Apple Pay can have a receipt automatically emailed if the POS system supports it.

Avoids paper waste from unwanted, avoids missing a receipt when it was wanted, and much easier to organise.

I would guess that the exposure to BPAs from handling receipt paper for a few seconds would be incredibly minimal, especially when compared to other potential sources of BPAs like food and drink packaging etc.

Maybe don’t reuse receipts as paper towels or toilet paper, but briefly handling them enough to put in a wallet etc is probably safe in the grand scheme of things.

From the news I’ve seen this evening across the country the counter protestors seem to greatly outnumber the “protestors” this time around.

Considering how much worse Windows seems to get with each update and new version, Microsoft will soon be developing methods of invisibly install Windows updates to force them through.

I look forward to a future where the battle between Microsoft and malware brings Windows computers to a standstill in an endless loop of invisibly installing and removing updates.