A good read about British water companies dumping raw sewage into rivers:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/04/sewage-sleuths-river-pollution-slow-dirty-death-of-welsh-and-english-rivers

Audio: https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2022/aug/15/sewage-sleuths-slow-dirty-death-of-welsh-and-english-rivers-podcast

Summary:

The article “Sewage sleuths: the men who revealed the slow, dirty death of Welsh and English rivers” discusses the pollution of rivers in England and Wales due to sewage and agricultural waste. Water companies have been accused of releasing billions of litres of raw sewage into rivers, including the Thames. In response to these allegations, the Environment Agency (EA) and Ofwat announced an investigation into water companies in England and Wales on November 18, 2021 . However, the article also highlights that most of the pollution in rivers like the Wye comes from agriculture rather than sewage works, and there is no quick fix for this problem. Regulators have retreated from checking whether farmers are following the rules around pollution, just as they did for water companies, leading to similar consequences . The article emphasizes the lack of government action and enforcement of environmental protection laws, which has allowed river pollution to continue. It also raises concerns about the potential impacts of this pollution on public health, wildlife, and the environment .

No judgement on what you’re doing online. In your case, don’t download untrusted files, stream where you can. For all users, whether on the black seas or not, you should as a matter of habit use uBlock Origin in your browser, turn on the filterlists for security, ads, annoyances in particular.

A declining nation, still putting on a brave face of over-confidence about its place in the world, citing long-past glories (but don’t you dare get all woke saying that the empire was built on enslaving people to plunder their own resources.)

Looks interesting, bookmarking to try this out.

Is it fair to say Webmesh is your open source version of Nord VPN’s Meshnet? https://meshnet.nordvpn.com/

https://www.collaboraoffice.com/nextcloud/ sounds like what you’re looking for. I’ve not tried it myself as I actually like the Google docs/sheets etc offering.

In your cloud sync app, you should be able to ask it to sync your camera folder - I know the nextcloud app asks if you want this, and you can also point it to specific folders to keep in sync.

If your self host cloud doesn’t have an app, just use https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dk.tacit.android.foldersync.full to sync chosen folders.

Screenshots from Stormy Daniels’ phone.

Go Daddy. The name alone is just plain creepy.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Parsons#Controversies

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoDaddy#Controversies

Ahhh, just found this in the FAQ, sadly I think it’s not possible to backup app data using Shizuku.

https://swiftapps.org/faq#appparts

"The private app data in /data/data/ or /data/user/*/ that stores your app preferences, login info, databases, etc. This is the most important part to restore apps potentially with their state preserved.

Requirements: ⚠️ Root required for backup & restore ⚠️ Shizuku mode (ADB access) cannot read/write at these path"

Hold up… So are you saying that I could use Shizuku / Swiftbackup, and it would do backup and restore of app data, just like when I used to have root and Titanium Backup?! That would be a game changer, I never fully trusted Google backups or Samsung Smart Switch to do the full job.

Apple Mac: it juuuuuust works.

https://www.mylondon.news/news/south-london-news/still-pay-m25s-dartford-crossing-17268853

“Tolling was supposed to pay for the Dartford Bridge and then end, which would have been in 2003. However, it became a nice little earner which raises around £70 million a year.”

Bastards.

“Id like an email client with folders or categories.”

I tried a few other email clients to see if I could ditch the gmail one (years ago, admittedly), and where those clients fell short for me was they didn’t support labels, only folders. Multiple labels can apply to one email, but an email can only belong in one folder.

Does anyone know if things have changed, whether third party clients now support gmail labels?

Perplexity.ai has largely replaced Google and Bing for me. It searches the Internet (including reddit), asks for clarification if necessary, then summarises it all with sources cited. The free tier currently gives 5x gpt4 copilot searches per rolling 4 hours. Like most ai chat, it’s less of a search engine, and more an ‘answer’ engine.

As for q and a, reddit, though you’ll have to filter the funny / misleading comments out. Quora is just weird, I don’t like the vibe there.

The ability of my Google Home gadgets to correctly understand speech drops sharply whenever there’s a promo on them - I imagine the influx of new speech patterns from new users tanks the recognition/parsing systems at Google.

Yep, same problem here, my swipes aren’t perfectly straight because, well, I’ve got a thumb joint. Fisher-Price grid view takes up too much space. Mozilla need to account for the overall direction of the swipe.

My Samsung has the option to save as HEIF. When I want to share that photo, my phone shares the HEIF file which isn’t commonly supported.

An iPhone also saves as HEIF - however, it automatically converts to jpeg when you share. Much smarter, more seamless.

Is that a unique address at the same domain, or even the domains are unique?

Randomised user names

Password manager

Randomised words for any website that asks for memorable info (mother’s maiden name, first pet’s name, etc) for security. Always gets a laugh from customer services.

False birth date.

I imagine that there are far fewer people who use RSS now than there were 10 years ago. The rise of social media and shorter attention spans may have something to do with that. Personally, I’m in the RSS cult, using Tiny Tiny RSS.