Tim

They’re labelled “oxygen removers”, so I rather assume that’s what they’re for. Dessicant is something else entirely.

I own a property & live part of the year in Thailand, and have worked in China for a decade - I don’t need grandma to teach me to suck ants. Amazingly, in all that time I’ve discovered that a single layer of plastic and a bag clip is, in fact, entirely adequate to keep both humidity and ants out of food.

If this helps Asia get off its addiction to wrapping absolutely everything in about 5 layers of plastic, there may be an upside here.

(For the uninitiated: if you buy a packet of biscuits in Europe, you’ll get a cardboard box, maybe one interior wrap of plastic, and the biscuits. The same packet of biscuits in China will see every two biscuits wrapped in its own sealed plastic bag. Each of those will have a small plastic bag of “oxygen remover” for God knows what reason. The bags will all then be carefully nestled into a thick plastic tray. The whole lot will then get another layer of plastic wrapped around it. Everything is like this there (and most of South East Asia in my experience) - it’s genuinely nuts.)

This gets repeated a lot - but for avoidance of doubt, practically no normal people use VPNs in China, and the government is very successful at blocking them.

You can set up a brand new, never seen before VPN on entirely new IPs and random ports today, and at 1am tomorrow it’ll be blocked. Commercial VPNs are basically unusable. (For a while, Cloudflare Warp was a very nice way around - but they put a stop to that too.)

IF you have a competent government willing to put the work in, blocking VPNs is entitely doable. That “if” is probably our best hope in the west, though.

I’m in Romania, and I have never heard of Blik. Maybe it’s behind Revolut’s instant payments or something?

There is a domestic instant payment solution - RoPay - but I’ve never actually used it; my bank does occasionally remind me it exists but I’ve never seen a merchant that accepted it. I would say Revolut’s solution I have started to notice - I’ve used it to pay for flights with WizzAir, for example.

I got a sitewide warning a couple of months ago for suggesting that Trump’s inaugural “board of peace” meeting was the apotheosis of the “you have one bullet…” thought experiment. “After reviewing, we found that you broke Rule 1 because you threatened violence or physical harm.” I’ll wager Trump’s secret service guys were absolutely shitting themselves when they read it, so it’s probably for the best they took it down tbf.

On the bright side, it was the kick up the backside that was needed to get me to try Lemmy, and I hardly use Reddit at all now.

When I’m on a plane I still idly think about the possibility of there being a gremlin out there on the wing eating an engine…

(I fly a lot and even learned to fly gliders/sailplanes back in the day, so definitely not afraid of flying, but if I’m ever sat next to William Shatner I’m deplaning. No point taking chances. ;-).)

Since imgur was blocked in the UK I was searching for an alternative way to occasuonally share photos on a Usenet group I’m in. (Text group, not binary, of course.)

I ended up just settling on a Hugo static site. It’s not quite drag and drop, but close enough for me - I just drag the photos into a content directory, run a build script and push the repo - argo deploys it.

Because it’s just plain old httpd serving static files, in a container, it’s about as safe/stable as I can make it.

That sounds sweetly naive. “Producing innaccurate technical advice, with a confident tone, at scale” sounds like the perfect credentials for a career in consultancy.

You seem to be under the impression that booking.com provides property management services. I’m not aware of them doing any such thing, but if they do them she should absolutely raise a dispute under her contract for those services. A quick scan of their information page for property owners is pretty clear, though, that it’s the property owners’ responsibility to get insurance if they need it (they even have some partner links for insurance providers.)

Using booking.com to advertise and resell her business does not change the fact that managing that business is entirely on her. If she doesn’t want to put in the minimum effort, or expense (e.g. insurance) required, she should get out of the business of property letting.

You can hate booking.com for many reasons, but “not running my spare property as a hotel for me so I can just sit back and count the cash” isn’t really one of them.

I hate not to join a pileon, but if the landlady didn’t want to deal with the consequences of letting random strangers into her property unsupervised for money, she shouldn’t advertise her property for random strangers to occupy for money.

Short term rentals are a business, not a free money machine. Even rent extraction requires slightly more effort than just depositing the cheques - dealing with customers’ behaviour is a cost of doing business. If, like most short-term let grifters, she is not capable of handing that responsibly she should get out of it (and good riddance - short term rentals do no good and plenty of harm to society.)

Yeah, I can totally believe it. Genuinely heartbreaking - for a while Russia felt like it was slowly heading in the right direction as well, and I’m glad in that brief window I got to visit and experience the place, but after 2014 it all just fell apart and they lurched into reverse.

Never been to Kazakhstan (hope to), but I believe you - I found people in Kyrgyzstan to be by contrast some of the friendliest and kindest in the world. Never felt uncomfortable hitching or travelling by marshrutka there, and had one of the most memorable meals of my life (beshbarmak, served to the honoured guest as a full, boiled sheep’s head with the top cut off…) with a family there.

Looking at the world today, and the barriers that fell during my lifetime being put back up just because three limp-dicked octogenarians think the whole planet should be carved up between them… It’s devastating.

Indeed. I was in Kirov once, visiting a (then) friend, and ended up in conversation with the sterotypical Russian street drunk - it was all friendly enough, and he was quite excited never having met someone who spoke English before, so we had a perfectly civil conversation between my poor Russian and my friend translating. Then at the end he asked one thing I didn’t really understand, and my friend didn’t want to translate. Eventually I pushed her into it - it turned out his final question, quite seriously, after a perfectly civil conversation, was “why are you an enemy of the Russian people?”

Said former friend is former because later I was in Kharkhiv when the Russians invaded in 2014. At that time there were plenty of little green men causing trouble (some wanted to lynch me as a NATO spy,) so when my friend contacted me to tell me I had to get out to stay safe I thought this was admirably world-wise for a Russian. I explained that it was OK, we used VK and Facebook to know where the Russians were causing trouble and I was taking care… And she was “no, no, the Ukrainian government is taking Russian speakers and putting them in concentration camps.” (Bear in mind that at this time I’d literally never met anyone in (as it was universally known then) Kharkhov who could speak a word of Ukrainian, so that would have meant rounding up the entire population, but anyway…)

I explained that I was literally standing there, and could swear nothing of the sort was happening… But she wouldn’t have it. It was more comfortable for her to believe the lies on Russian TV than a friend of several years.

Honestly, the Russian people are a lost cause.

Genuinely, visit Russia. Spend a bit of time in bith the Potemkim cities (Moscow, St Pete) and the 3rd world beyond them (every other Russian city.)

The level of unhinged, blind faith in whatever bullahit is fed to them is off the charts. As far as they are concerned the west has always wanted to destroy Russia and they have always been at war, physically and culturally.

It requires no doublethink or conflicting viewpoint whatsoever to think Russian elections are neither free nor fair, but that the majority of the Russian people are solidly behind what Putin does anyway.

Another perfectly normal day in Dumbfuckistan.

They know the user’s identity - they have the name and home address on the credit card used to pay.

If you mean “it doesn’t have the user’s ID card”, well that’s true. But that’s mainly because the UK doesn’t actually have an ID card or national ID database/reference number, so NO operator in the UK has “the user’s ID” in that sense.

You think they don’t already? Can you even use an iPhone without an Apple ID? I’m fairly sure you couldn’t install any apps without one, and if you’ve ever paid for anything they definitely already have your real data.

I’ve always preferred Gitlab to Github anyway, but I recently migrated all my repos to a self-hosted Gitlab and it wasn’t too painful. Despite the woeful documentation of the Helm chart configuration.

I know there are other options (Forgejo et al,) but the thought of migrating all my CI/CD pipelines to a new platform was too much to bear - moving from .com to self-hosted though is much more manageable.

You do realise that “not being afraid of the police” is actually the norm in most developed democracies, right?

The state of the US police force is not some kind of act of God that nothing can be done about. You’re just all too goddamned lazy and selfish to fix it (see also: healthcare, education, school shootings, …)

“Possibly replacing the sheet metal entirely” tells me you’ve never been to the UK…

Provided they are made with rolled steel and have a big-ass two-stroke diesel attached, I am entirely sure that routers are within the abilities of the US’s high-tech industrial base.

Can you power a router with Clean Coal™?