• 5 Posts
  • 86 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 21st, 2023

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  • 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.




  • 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




  • You could be behind CGNAT - I’m not sure the best way to tell but it could be the reason.

    I would also highly recommend buying a cheap domain to use - it would be the price of a coffee per year but makes life so much easier and you don’t have to depend on duckdns. You can buy through cloudflare, porkbun or many other options which you can search for a good DDNS service to update them.



  • A small percentage of humans are knobs, so if you split into drivers, bikers, cyclists and pedestrians, then within each one there are knobs. I regularly see all go through red lights, go the wrong way up a road, don’t give way etc.

    The impact of these are different though. Drivers kill, and can kill other drivers and anyone else on the road. Motorcycles can kill cyclists and pedestrians but are more likely to be killed themselves by drivers. Cyclists can hurt and even kill pedestrians (although lower chance), and can be killed by drivers and bikers. Pedestrians are just exposed as fuck.

    We should design the roads to reflect that - pedestrians first, [transit maybe here?] cyclists, bikers, then drivers.

    I think bikers should be factored in and in some cases fuckcars includes them as victims of car brained culture (and acknowledge they are smaller, less harmful up the environment etc) and in some cases say fuckbikes (they can kill you and do emit green house gases).