The irony of the autistic person using a metaphor, and someone else taking it too literally. You have to laugh!

I started in 2012, and it wasn’t that difficult. I’d say I do about 30mins of maintenance every other month. It took me a while to work out the config originally, but I wrote a guide afterwards which was really popular for other people doing the same thing (it’s quite out of date now but the principles are the same).

Started out using a raspberry pi (which was also hosting a website at the time) but when I moved house to somewhere with a worse internet connection I migrated to a VPS, so there is a cost but it’s not enormous, maybe £20/month.

Don’t even bother if you can’t use a static IP, because all your email will be bounced if your PTR record for the IP (reverse DNS record) doesn’t match your domain name.

It got a bit more complicated when people started adding extra layers of spam protection like SPF, DKIM and DMARC, but those are mostly set and forget.

Overall, I’d say it’s worth it but only because I find it quite interesting/fun.

Google is unavoidable but I do my best to mitigate the worst parts of their privacy intrusions.

I have a pixel phone running grapheneOS with Google Services Framework installed but without Google Play or Gboard or any of that stuff. For me that’s a balance that works.

I host my own email server so no Gmail.

I also host my own Matrix server and avoid WhatsApp where possible (not Google but just as bad if not worse).

I use YouTube but via Newpipe or using Ublock origin on Firefox (not logged in obviously).

Chrome is genuinely worse than Firefox now that Google have made adblocking more difficult with manifest v3.

You just have to decide what the best tradeoff is between privacy and convenience.

More similar to Sunak calling the current General Election. It’s very unlikely they will win but they have to do something rather than let it get even worse!

The questions I had are:

• Do we use flash pasteurisation in the UK?
• How high is the residual risk for flash pasteurised milk?

Yes we do use flash pasteurisation in the UK.

https://www.dairycouncil.co.uk/who-we-are/ni-dairy/field-to-fridge/pasteurisation

Residual risk for flash pasteurised milk is high enough to be concerning, but the study didn’t follow exactly the same process as industry does during pasteurisation, and those extra steps may also help to kill the virus. So we probably need another study to add in those other steps and see if the virus survives or not.

Not ideal though.

Heating the milk to 72 degrees Celsius, or 181 degrees Fahrenheit, for 15 or 20 seconds — conditions that approximated flash pasteurization — greatly reduced levels of the virus in the milk, but it didn’t inactivate it completely.

Milk samples heated for 15 or 20 seconds were still able to infect incubated chicken eggs, a test the US Food and Drug Administration has called the gold-standard for determining whether viruses remain infectious in milk.

“But, we emphasize that the conditions used in our laboratory study are not identical to the large-scale industrial treatment of raw milk,” senior study author Dr. Yoshihiro Kawaoka, a virologist who specializes in the study of flu and Ebola, said in an email.

That’s a good reason not to panic over the study findings, said Lakdawala.

Lakdawala said that commercial flash pasteurization involves a preheating step, which wasn’t done here. It also involves homogenization, a process that emulsifies the fat globules in milk so the cream won’t separate. Both of those steps would probably make it harder for the virus to survive, but she adds that the results of this study suggest full process of commercial flash pasteurization should be done “with all the steps in place.”

I don’t know about your personal situation, and it may be different for whatever you are suffering with, however the part you quoted is true for a lot of cases.

Having just looked after my wife through a period of ~3 years really severe depression I’ve seen it first hand, it completely changed her personality and outlook and she was saying all kinds of stuff she’s quite embarrassed by now. She genuinely couldn’t think straight at all or see any way out, and in that moment if offered the choice to die she might have taken it (a fact she is quite scared by now, having mostly recovered).

Similar story with my brother, who has bipolar… when he’s manic he has an absolute inability to hold a train of thoughts together for longer than 30 seconds. When he’s depressed it’s absolutely awful. He’s now stable and enjoying his life.

I’m not arguing that this shouldn’t be an option for some very extreme chronic conditions, but it’s obviously complicated.

Thanks for the info! I’ll have to give Element another go and see if it’s more reliable for me nowadays.

Is the fix a client thing or is there an interaction with the server as well? I had really bad issues with message decryption on Element for Android last year (July 2023 based on the date I installed a different matrix client).

I’m self-hosting synapse on Debian Bullseye (from bullseye-backports).

I’m just grateful to have a place to discuss niche topics where there’s a reasonable balance of power between users, mods, and admins.

Federation means no more rug pulling after years of building open source apps to access proprietary services.

Proper ‘competition’ between instance owners means nobody can degrade the quality of experience for a quick buck.

Thank you for your part in building a better alternative!

Wouldn’t this be quite slow to transmit messages? When you send email between federated servers your mail goes in a queue on your server to be sent and depending on the connection speed and how busy it is you could easily wait 5 minutes before it’s delivered at the other end. Not that the messages caused by this app would be big enough to slow things down a lot, but if the server you are using is also being used to send normal emails with large attachments then you could end up waiting a while.

Apologies if you’re asking for something different but I recently discovered https://annas-archive.org/ which is great for books.

Did you not switch to Nextcloud a while back?

We can all agree on the last point

Not a bad idea, however I’ve had problems with some of the firmware (I think, maybe it’s the kernel) on external HDDs causing them to power off when not in use for long periods of time. For some reason it doesn’t happen with internal drives so it must be the enclosure or the way the system deals with the drive.

I’ve had the drive on my kodi box fail a couple of times now, it’s annoying. Torrenting probably puts a lot of wear on the drive though so it’s to be expected.

I have two old NUCs, one DN2820FYK with an Intel Celeron N2830, and another D54250WYKH with an Intel Haswell i5-4250U. The former can only take one drive but the latter can have an mSATA as well as a 2.5" SATA. I’d like to use the latter with root on the mSATA SSD and a 2TB HDD for media in the 2.5" SATA, but for some reason I get better video playback on the Celeron than the Haswell. Both are supposed to have hardware acceleration for h264 and the Haswell is a more powerful processor so I don’t understand it!

Used it for the first time this week to install liftoff, it’s such a cool idea!

Have you tried Liftoff?