@foone I built one 😄
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/09/a-floppy-disk-mp3-player-using-a-raspberry-pi/
It was impressively awful.
Ha! I knew it wouldn't beat me. After much frustration, I now have a mastodon!
Emma has been complaining that the rules for shipping to the EU are about to get more annoying.
I am now banned from saying it's because her parents voted for it.
I thought this was gonna be about American hospitals/doctors. It’s not. It’s about the #UK and it’s #NHS. I love the NHS. I raised my 3 sons in the UK for 10 years with NHS healthcare. Because the NHS is a government department, its funding and performance are affected by politics.
For 14 years the Tory government cut funding for everything. Doctors, nurses, and yes, technology. They dabbled in cutting edge surveillance capitalism with licensing NHS health data, but otherwise severely cut services. It’s pretty irresponsible to write an article about how bad the tech is without asking “who is responsible for providing the tech?” And asking “was it always this way?” And “how did it get this way?”
The other thing about writing on the NHS is that healthcare went from a human right to a political issue. You can’t talk about healthcare in the UK for long without getting into politics.
There’s a super simple solution: tax the crap out of UK billionaires, use the proceeds to fund the NHS. But the low-calorie, Tory-lite Labour government are keeping many Tory policies in place.
#ukpol #healthcare
https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/16/doctors-complain-of-it-in-the-stone-age/
I refuse to be defeated by this.
Basically the Mastodon install instructions miss out a very vital step when configuring Postgress.
Something to do with the default template not supporting UTF-8.
Well that was most of a morning wasted trying to install Mastodon.
I followed the instructions to the letter on a fresh install of Debian.
All I can conclude from this is:
a) I have done something wrong or...
b) Mastodon is an affront to systems architecture
Looks like the install for Mastodon failed again:
```
PG::InvalidParameterValue: ERROR: new encoding (UTF8) is incompatible with the encoding of the template database (SQL_ASCII)
HINT: Use the same encoding as in the template database, or use template0 as template.
Couldn't create 'mastodon_production' database. Please check your configuration.
bin/rails aborted!
```
FFS.
I might give this a miss for today and go and reconfigure DNS for my home network.
To install any software on linux these days appears to require many commands, often starting with curl or git.
When did we all move away from using apt?
Nothing gives me the chills more than a set of instructions gleefully announcing that you now need to install Ruby & make damn sure it's the right version.
Attempt 1 at self-hosting a mastodon server on Debian has failed.
Partly because at the point it said “type in your domain name... don't even think about changing it!” I typed in the wrong domain name.
And partly because it refused to create the database schema.
Time to nuke that VM and start again.
On the plus side, I now have a sendgrid account.
I am not looking forward to today's weather.
On the other hand, I am going to ta talk by Trent Parke later today.
Ghostbusters Frozen Empire has a BBC Micro in it!
“It’s an Acorn Disk Filing System! I know this!”
Everyone loves Magical Trevor
'Cause the tricks that he does are ever so clever
Has anyone invited a Mouse Holster yet?
I am forever dropping my wireless mouse when walking to meeting rooms or breakout areas at work.
A mouse holster on my belt would probably solve this problem.
Netflix and dill
I wish people would ask for my opinion on "AI" stuff more often, but when they do I've had the most satisfying reactions by saying "I strongly recommend you do not use these tools in any situation where you personally may be held legally accountable for the results".
I returned home to a complaint that I'd wrecked the salt lamp. It was running with a 21W oven lamp for hours every night and I swapped it for a 1.5W LED bulb.
The colour temperature isn't quite right, but apparently a salt lamp doesn't work if it's not heated up.
I live with scientists far more intelligent than me, so I'm surprised when the 'spiritual and mental benefits' are believed.
For a quiet life, I'm putting the highest wattage lamp in the house back in.
https://www.rangdaar.com/blog/9-spiritual-and-mental-benefits-of-pink-himalayan-salt-lamp/
The bin day integration for Home Assistant is already proving useful. It pulls bin data from Bristol City Council and then shows me what bins go out on which day.
Now if only Bristol Waste used this to plan their collections.
Can we go back to calling them programs rather than apps?
