Mat @MatStace@hackers.town

@sungo I'm not sure if I expect to see Apple announcing a highly expensive paid-for API in 3...2... or if they really do want to lock it up and gain themselves that "advantage" over everyone else.

Under a week since my annual subscription auto-renewed, and #darksky goes and sells themselves to Apple, gives a three month notice that they're pulling the android app, and kills the API too.

I hate acquihires. I doubly hate it when they come with blog posts which have clearly come from the new owner's PR department.

"Our goal has always been to provide the world with the best weather information possible, to help as many people as we can stay dry and safe"

Right, sure, to help as many people as possible, you're removing both the android app *AND* killing the API, so that's both my mobile phone _and_ various integrations/automations.

Gah, this is why we can't have nice things.

I mean, yes, I am well aware that this is me taking out other frustrations on a silly little problem, compared to everything going on right now, but urgh.

Yup, coping well with the UK's lockdown, not even slightly bored ;-)

@Anarkat I's love a GPD Pocket, but I'm over-burdened with gadgets and toys at the moment, so it's on the back burner.

I'm actually looking into the SFF desktops at the moment, I like my X220 for cheap good enough laptop (this one cost me £80, plus the SSD that I moved from my old dead one), but it's struggling a bit as a streaming box with doing chroma-key/scene switching things, so I want a small, more powerful box I can hide away under my desk

If there's anything in particular that I'm learning about WFH with extensive video calls, it's that my ancient X220i laptop isn't quite machine enough for my green-screen adventures in making work video calls more entertaining.
And yes, I _am_ looking at small form factor/ultra small form factor refurb'd PCs on ebay, how did you guess?

OK, I'll admit it, the portable green-screen for the back of the chair has definitely made remote working more fun.
More than one colleague so far has been fooled for a moment by the youtube video of a coffee shop that I'm playing the the background, at least until they notice the green halo around me ;-)

@sungo Not so much concerned about all the shit behind me as I am looking forward to all of the exotic and interesting locations that my future google hangouts are going to come from 🌌​

@sungo I'm used to the UK being the poor relative when it comes to VoIP, so I'm definitely pleased to have found the one I did.
Also with the UK area codes, it allows me to _really_ mess with the heads of people who know I live in London 😖​

@sungo I have an account on Andrews & Arnold ( aaisp.net ) which costs me something like £1.20 a month, which is worth it to me for a non-changing, but not my mobile, number

Having had the "from Monday, it's mandatory WFH until further notice, please put your details on this spreadsheet so we can all contact each other if we need to" email, my current new number one priority is to get my VoIP number up and running again, so I don't have to give out my mobile number to $work

"I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of VPN endpoints suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced, followed by a shitload of sysadmins saying 'oh, sure, it's important *now*. Remember when we said it was? We told you so'"

​

#remoteworking #COVID19

@Anarkat At this point I'm fairly blasé about these things. If I want the shiny toys (which I do), then I have to choose my flavour of non-privacy-respecting device ;-)

It's probably just me, but the thought of a phone without any google apps is actually pretty appealing...
https://www.engadget.com/2020/03/10/huawei-to-unveil-p40-in-online-event/

After a big tick against the weekend project of finally sorting out my nextcloud crons and news updater, I thought I'd have a look at seeing if I could make the social app work.
The answer is that "it is still very alpha", so I might come back to it at a later date ;-)

@DC7IA I use the wee_slack.py plugin ( https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack ) for weechat, so I have my IRC, slack, and facebook messenger in the same terminal.

I had totally forgotten about #syncthing, so with thanks to @ryen and @felix for reminding me, and for linuxserver.io for having their ready-to-roll images, I just spent under ten minutes and now have my photos directory syncing from the synology to both HC2s.
Tomorrow = set up the remainder of my "need to sync" directories, wait for "some time", and then take the designated "off-site" HC2 to $secretDestination

@felix I've used that in the past, and had totally forgotten about it, so good shout, thanks for the reminder 🙂
I can even take the lazy install method of using linuxserver.io's docker build, because I'm lazy, and I'm already running a few of their containers.

@ryen Good shout, thank you - I had totally forgotten about syncthing, even though I have used it in the past. Looks like there's even a linuxserver.io docker build, which makes it super easy for putting on my NAS too

Currently looking for the easiest way to #sync certain directories from my NAS to a pair of odroid HC2s, because this is digital data, where two is one, and one is none.

I'm torn between setting up #nextcloud everywhere and federating directories, using resilio sync and spending probably forever fixing up file permissions, and compiling minio on the odroids, and using the native synology cloud sync and use the "custom destination S3" endpoint.

Who has two thumbs and just wasted two and a half hours of his Saturday morning failing to connect to his instance of #homeassistant but only in firefox, not in chrome or safari?
Yup, this guy, who has the unfortunate combination of uBlock Origin, EasyList blocklist, and duckdns for his dynamic DNS.
Once I worked out that EasyList is blocking websockets to duckdns, it was easy enough to add a whitelist for my own hostname, but urgh, very annoying.

I was trying to find out when it was changed (I suspect in the last 12 hours, as this was working last night), but github is showing me unicorns instead of git blame for that particular file, and as I've fixed it, I don't care enough to dig more ;-)