I’m an accountant and tax professional but have always been into computers. I had a social media account breached although it was no issue as hadn’t used it did years. I used a terrible password as thought it did not matter but made me realise I needed to be better generally so started using a password manager.

Then Netflix stopped account sharing. I had just got a 4k TV and only their top level with 4 screens supported it so was pissed off. The fragmentation across services had started so was getting annoyed anyway. This led me to the arr’s.

I decided I could no longer trust Microsoft and hated their pricing structure so was interested in Nextcloud. By then I found the self hosted community (on reddit), bought a desktop PC and after getting the hang of it plus many mistakes I loved my services so will never look back.

Joined the migration to Lemmy. Am based in the UK and joined the anti-US feelings so am setting up more storage, better redundancy and more services for my family. A few family members are interested in helping so can share backups.

It’s not as elegant but you could always try to use a smart plug to turn the TV on or off instead (if it turns on automatically when the plug is switched on)

It’s not as elegant but you could always try to use a smart plug to turn the TV on or off instead (if it turns on automatically when the plug is switched on)

I found it a real struggle with the TV to find a non smart one, especially as the smart ones are cheaper. Best bet is to get a TV stick and never connect the TV to the internet

I have a Nvidia Shield (bought used on eBay) and works fine with my LG Smart TV, which has never touched the internet. I have a Xiami Mii TV S on another TV, which is the closest to stock android TV I found. Do not get a firestick! Both have 4k, can control TV volume through the remote, have auto turn on/off, plus the TV just goes to that channel so don’t have to touch the TV remotes ever. The Shield is faster and easier to setup but much more expensive.

You could also buy a mini PC but can be harder for certain apps and full video and sound quality (avoid if you want Netflix and other apps). I have stremio (with Real Debrid), jellyfin and TiviMate (IPTV) for all of our needs so could get away with a mini PC but considering the effort I decided not to.

Not sure about the sound bar as bought sonos years ago. It works flawlessly with the TV and runs through home assistant now (responds to Shield remote volume control or can play music through HA BUT I set it up with the original app so can’t comment on that part). It has great audio quality but agree that I would look elsewhere if looking now (although would still consider it).

I also use pihole to try to block any trackers etc.

I saw one last week in suburban London. It is fucking massive. I’m used to bigger cars on our roads but this monster dwarfed my hatchback and the other days. It could barely fit in the lane and was left hand drive so must be imported. It’s absolutely insane for somebody to buy that and ride!

Do you or anybody know if there is a good place to find tactics currently being battle tested and updated from Minnesota and other places? I feel like the HK protests also had lots of interesting findings. It might be useful for SUTR and other UK anti-facist groups

Oh, actually that does make sense. They say they’re only targeting “illegal” immigrants and have no authority to police against citizens so this adds to the blatant lies. Thanks for the input.

It is still galling to see though so hope you can see that it is horrible to see, especially as a minority. It’s hard not to interpret as only citizens (or in some way white people) matter

Why does it matter if he is a US citizen? Speaks volumes about what is getting covered and what is not

For something similar here on a pavement, im really tempted to spray paint a line up all the cars in line with the curb but too worried that I’ll be the only one getting into trouble. Maybe if theres a washable one or I could get a few people together to protest

The worst part of this is they see it as a “look, you’re going to defend your people so don’t come after ours, checkmate, we’re super brainy, our way wins” whereas in reality, if they broke the law, fuck em. Anybody who breaks the law and pulls some shit deserves what they get, regardless of “politic view”

Ooof, that’s bad!

I get the “why are you so western, what’s wrong with you, why do you want to do what your friends do instead of what I tell you”, erm, well you came over to this country and had kids, we were one of very few Indians or any other minority, where they chose to move to from a fairly diverse area they lived in before just before I was born - yes of course it’s my fault completely!

Same on an Indian forum. They’d all blame me. They blamed me for not learning their language. I didn’t refuse to learn it, they didn’t teach me properly and the lagoons I got were on reading and writing, not speaking and understand. I could read any books but had no idea what it meant and lost it. I was in a taxi and the guy asked where I was from. When he’s said he spoke to me in that language and I said I don’t understand. He asked me how that happened and I said my parents didn’t teach me. He literally said to me that it wasn’t their fault and that it I wanted to, I could learn quickly, blaming me effectively.

Luckily for me, it was mainly my dad. My mum was like that for some things but not as bad. Made it more bearable than lots of people I know.

Everything you said resonates unfortunately. The worst for me was my dad paid for my first year of rent at university. He kept bringing that up years later for any little thing.

I learned to just avoid doing things, do a bad job or forget to reduce what they ask for. I don’t ask or expect anything in return, which has it’s own problems though as I try to do too much myself and don’t trust/rely on others which harms me long term.

Im glad he mentioned enforcement cameras in London as they do seem to really work to stop the best majority of drivers but it also has to be seen in the wider context.

We have standard signage across the country, and one agency who registers cars and provides driving licences. The same sign being used everywhere is super helpful.

Enforcement of all driving infractions are high (apart from speeding to an extent). We have lots of speed cameras, red light cameras and yellow box cameras (https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/driving/red-routes/rules-of-red-routes/yellow-box-junctions). We have highly motivated (often too aggressive) parking enforcers run by the councils who give tickets, and some councils aggressively remove cars in bus lanes or other areas where parking is not allowed. My friend got his car towed for parking on a double yellow overnight and I’ll tell you, the stress, annoyance and cost was enough for all our friends to be careful (in certain places which you learn or assume the worst e.g. Nottingham and Newham do this, Surrey does not seem to so see lots of misuse of double yellows and bus stops there).

We have mandatory, standard licence plates both front and back. You are likely to get pulled over by the police if it’s missing or not visible. There’s also a risk if it doesn’t match the car, which they have instant access to the details of through the one agency (name, model, colour).

We also have a points system as fines allow rich people to ignore these rules if you have fixed fines. Each infraction could be 2 to 6 points. If you get 12 points you lose your licence and I think you have to retake your test. You have a lower threshold for a while after first passing your test. I would love to see a fine being a percentage of income or wealth like some countries but the points system seems to work.

In central London, driving or having a car is seen as an expensive privilege. It’s also slower (because of bus lanes and restrictions), hard to find parking and we have great alternative transport. The suburbs are a different story where I don’t know anybody who does not have access to a car. If we improve public transport across the outside boroughs (I.e. not just into central), I really hope car usage will go down.

It’s very rare to see drivers using bus lanes in London as a result of these different factors, not just the cameras themselves.

Fun fact: diplomatic consider themselves exempt from these which is pretty annoying because they are not taxes, they are fines for bad behaviour (https://questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-statements/detail/2024-11-14/hcws218)

I would highly suggest a UPS. I use random external hard drives without RAID as part of my media setup. The electric went out overnight last year. I knew it had happened as my oven was flashing. The server restarted itself so thought everything was fine.

Then some things were glitchy and it took me a few days to release one of the drives was not mounting. Luckily I did not lose the data but it still took a while to fix. It takes even longer to restore a backup.

To mainly save myself time and effort, I bought a basic UPS with 2 plugs. It keeps the server and main router on for 15 minutes but I’ve set it up to send a command to shut down asap just in case. My server seems to automatically switch on when power comes back so not had any issues since.

Great work! Also, degaussing gives me major throwbacks… I had absolutely no clue what it did but really enjoyed the look of the screen wobbling around and even the sound of the thunk. I think I liked to do it so often enough for shits and giggles, that I never saw what gaussing is

I have a vps (hetzner dedicated server auction) as well as my home servers. The vps has a fixed IP so ive setup wireguard endpoints to all point to it with forwarding on so can access every device indirectly through the vps. It allows them to work across DDNS or remotely.

I used this guide (https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-wireguard-on-ubuntu-20-04). Tried different tools gui’s and other methods but always came back to this to work the best

Yeah, first try your ISP to see if you can get a dynamic or fixed IP instead. Check if their website/FAQ mentions dynamic IP or cgnat. They might outright reject it, or try to upgrade you to an extortionate business package though. I signed up for my service and checked the cgnat before signing up but they hadn’t got around to updating their website that they changed their policy. After the surprise of being behind cgnat and after screenshotting their own website, I complained and hit upgraded to a higher level package for free.

You can use tailscale to get around it, but then you need to install it on all devices and login. You can use cloudflare tunnels and think you can set it to not require login for some services. Both rely on third parties. Both are also safer than exposing directly to the public internet.

If you want full control, you have to rent a cheap vps and setup a tunnel between that and your home server, then use the public IP of the vps for your services. Wireguard is probably the best choice for VPN. You could try pangolin, which is an open source cloudflare tunnel so is more complicated than a VPN but also includes a reverse proxy.

In an ideal world this should be the case but I can’t afford to do this practically and my business is a service, based on UK laws and requirements, available to UK residents only. The website is for information only and nothing is new or interesting to anybody but a few potential clients, and if theyre looking at it on holiday, theres something wrong with them! Nobody is going to reach out based on my website from abroad and if they did, I would not trust them at all. They would reach out through personal contacts or linkedin. If the bots stop spamming my site or server, I can stop limiting it.

Another option to reduce (but not eliminate) this traffic is a country limit. In cloudflare you can set a manual security rule to do this. There are self hosted options too but harder to setup. It depends what country you are and where your users are based. My website is a business one so I only allow my own country (and if on holiday I might open that country if I need to check it’s working, although usually I just use a paid vpn back to my country so no need). You can also block specific countries. So many of my blocked requests are from USA, China, Russia etc

I didn’t know that, thanks for sharing