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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Captain Picard very much became a Captain to all of us, I think.

    Of course he’s got some flaws for sure (his stubbornness, for one!) but he really set the bar for what a civilised person and a good leader should be.

    He’s principled, fact-based, fair in his judgement, respects the differences of others (both individually and culturally), solves problems with understanding and empathy rather than force, and he’s forgiving of mistakes.

    And he does all that while still being a “strong” man. In fact, it’s these very traits which earn him the respect of his crew.

    I’m glad I had Captain Picard as an influence in my childhood, rather than whatever youtube channel trying to make me angry for all the wrong reasons.


  • Wireguard doesn’t necessarily need to have those limitations, but it will depend in part how your VPN profile is set up.

    If you configured your wireguard profile to always route all traffic over the VPN then yeah, you won’t be able to access local networks. And maybe that’s what you want, in which case fine :)

    But you can also set the profile to only route traffic that is destined for an address on the target network (I.e your home network) and the rest will route as normal.

    This second type of routing only works properly however when there are no address conflicts between the network you are on (i.e. someone else’s WiFi) and your home network.

    For this reason if you want to do this it’s best to avoid on your own home network the common ranges almost everyone uses as default, i.e. 192.168.0.* and 10.0.0.*

    I reconfigured my home network to 192.168.22.* for that reason. Now I never hit conflicts and VPN can stay on all the time but only traversed when needed :)




  • Tough one. I’d probably end up being the person who just kept politely listening while trying to shut down the conversation amicably like “well anyway” and “I must get cooking dinner now” and “my plants need moisturising” or something.

    Neighbours are extremely high on the list of people I want to avoid pissing off, because a neighbour with a grudge against you could be an absolute nightmare (especially when you live in a townhouse and share walls)



  • “The squeaky wheel gets the grease” is an adage that is unfortunately true, and I find it absolutely infuriating.

    I would much prefer that we can all be polite and courteous to each other, so when being polite fails but having a screaming tantrum gets results it really makes me annoyed at the unfairness.




  • I recently swapped my Dad’s Windows computer with my old machine, which I installed Linux on ahead of time.

    I told him it was a faster machine - which it was just slightly in the hardware sense, a very minor upgrade. A half-truth to encourage the transition.

    But of course, it’s running Linux, not Windows.

    Next day he phones me up really happy that it’s “so much faster than the old machine!”

    And it really is a lot faster, but it’s not the hardware. It’s just not getting bogged down with all the crap Windows constantly does in the background.

    Either way, mission accomplished.







  • I use my air fryer a lot, despite having a fan oven also.

    The fan circulation is more powerful than in a typical oven, so air fryers are really good at is crisping things up, and doing it quickly.

    If you ever get take-out and have left over fries, you can put them in the air fryer and they go from fridge-limp to deliciously crisp in just 3 minutes, it resurrects them perfectly. Can’t get results like that in the big oven.


  • I agree that it’s a huge fuck up, my comment wasn’t in defence of the post office, just a related story :)

    Whenever I have delivered code for a client it has always been in a way where the client has complete ownership of the code and can maintain it themselves later (or ask a different company that isn’t us to come do it) because that’s the only sustainable approach, and all companies should absolutely demand that all work done for them is done this way.


  • I did consultancy work as part of renewing and replacing ancient software systems for an insurance company, and it’s amazing how little people actually know about how their own business processes are actually supposed to work.

    Orgs are in the position where everyone who built a system is gone, and all the current people who work there defer to the system for how the processes work, without actually properly understanding the rules. And so the system itself becomes the arbiter of correctness.

    This is obviously horrible because it ends up where nobody dares to touch the current system in case they break it in some way nobody understands.

    We ended up speaking to people across the whole business to painstakingly work out what the rules really were, putting together a new system and effectively “dual running” that side-by-side with the old system, so we could compare outputs and make sure they were the same. In some case they were different, and in some of those cases it was actually because the old system was actually wrong, but nobody noticed!

    It’s a mess.