They are the 6th biggest contributor, and Spain has considered doing similar and they’re one of the big five. It might actually change something since money will matter the most, and enough countries are dropping out that they may not have enough contestants to run the semi-finals. There’s rumours that Italy, Germany, and Britain may withdraw if Israel is kicked out though. Maybe we just won’t have a contest next year, and after the bullshit of the past two years I’m completely fine with that.

I think a lot of non-techie people only know signal from the Trump admin using it illegally earlier in the year. In a lot of people’s minds because of that they think Signal = insecure because they don’t get the nuances of why using it in that specific context – on personal phones, using a third party app, with a random journalist in the mix – was bad, but that for most people it’s still one of the best options. WhatsApp on the other hand has a lot of marketing around it and if you didn’t know that Meta is Facebook I think some people wouldn’t even realise who the owners are.

Kyle’s own record hardly reassures sceptics. In June 2025 he reportedly referred one of his constituents to the police after she sent him emails protesting against arms sales to Israel. Within days, four officers raided her home at four in the morning, arrested her, and confiscated her devices. Journalists who examined her emails found them to be angry but not abusive, passionate but not unlawful. For civil-liberties campaigners, the case smacked of an MP unwilling to tolerate dissent on an issue where he is deeply invested.

I feel a bit one-note complaining about this one guy all the time but he really truly is the worst part of this government.

Here’s the guide they have. I had a couple pairs to do it for (myself + my partner’s switch) and I think the first one took about half an hour but it gets easier once you’ve done the first one. The comments that people have left as well are good if you’re stuck, there’s some techniques in there that work better than some of the stuff in the official guide.

For photos, immich is great if you’re willing to self-host. It’s pretty much a drop-in replacement for Google photos, and lets you tweak the machine learning and stuff like that if you want automated identification of your photos. A raspberry pi is enough to get going, maybe something fancier if you want the machine learning. Google Drive can be replaced with Nextcloud as well if you go down the self-hosting rabbit hole.

Ente is probably your best bet if you don’t want to host anything yourself. I used proton drive for photos before but thought it wasn’t particularly suitable as if you’re looking for a particular photo it takes ages for it to load from their servers.

Also an autistic vegan here! I’d wager that the % of autistic people in the vegan community is higher than in the general population. I didn’t do it for any health reasons, but going vegan was a nice way to find out I’m lactose intolerant and food isn’t supposed to hurt.

The Dark Hedges. Not our number one tourist destination, but probably the most overrated one. It’s some trees that appeared in Game of Thrones and the over-tourism + the increase in stormy weather thanks to climate change is killing them.

We’ve more popular places like the Giant’s Causeway and the Derry walls, but those places are worth visiting at least.

I graduated university a couple years ago and I felt in the same boat coming up to final exams. Like others have said, you almost certainly know more than you think. You’re at the start of the final year as well so you have a lot of time to get ready.

Most IT/programming jobs will train you on the job and I haven’t heard of anyone coming into a role who’s expected to know everything, so I wouldn’t worry about that too much. Getting the job will be the harder part, and the best thing I did was to consider my past experience and apply to jobs tightly related to that. I’ll not dox myself so these will be fake details but that meant if I’d done a work experience position doing tech support for an accountancy firm, I’d have focused my applications on those companies. If you have a final year project to complete for a dissertation, see if you can tailor that to what you think are your best chances of a job. E.g. you did work experience doing IT support for a law firm, and your final year project has to be related to improving human rights, so you could develop a CRUD application to connect defendants to good pro bono lawyers. If there are law firms near you hiring for IT, that sort of thing that will help you stand out in an interview with them. I think I did only two interviews before getting a job offer with that tactic and I know others with the same degree who graduated the same day as me that still haven’t found anything.

And outside of uni/college, is there anything in IT and computer science that interests you? I found that university killed my joy for it and I’ve only rediscovered it since graduating. Building a JavaScript web app for my final year project, led me to wanting to program some discord bots, from there onto using a raspberry pi to host them, and then into doing some self hosting and networking with the likes of Docker and WireGuard. Some of that has come in handy in work, especially when using linux servers, but it’s stuff I do cause I just enjoy it and it so happens to give me some experience. There are tons of open-source projects you can work on to get experience with different parts of IT, and you’re on a good website for it since most of us on here are Linux nerds.

I saw it mentioned in this Cory Doctorow article a week or two back about some of his issues with bluesky, but he mentions here that the cost has came down from tens of millions a year down to tens of dollars a month

Hadn’t heard of wafrn until seeing it on f-droid this morning but I might give it a try, a tumblr-like platform would be nice since tumblr seems to have given up on using ActivityPub.

It’s become a bit frightening how much freedom of speech has been restricted in the UK this year. Seems like anything with a word that even vaguely sounds like Palestine in the same sentence as the word action gets you sent to jail.

In Northern Ireland, which is part of the UK, a community group tried to organise a peaceful vigil in support of Palestine and were intimidated into hiding it by an actual terrorist organisation. And of course no arrests were made here and their local MP suggested they abide by the threats of the local paramilitaries and hold it indoors.

Shizuku + Canta on f-droid are great for accomplishing this as well, you just start wireless debugging and tick the apps you want to uninstall.

I deleted mine in January, after all the tech CEOs went to kiss the ring at the US inauguration. I don’t trust them at all to delete anything but at least they aren’t getting more data from me.

I’ve had my account since 2012 when I got a Nexus 4 so a lot of my life was tied up in it. It’s not something you can just up and decide to do one day and I’d been working my way to deletion since last summer and just went faster with the process in January. If you self-host things it makes it easier because there’s a lot of good replacements for their services e.g. nextcloud if you need an office suite, immich to replace Google photos. So I’ve got thirteen years of my life backed up to a raspberry pi sitting under my TV instead of being mined on a google server to train an LLM.

The only issue I’ve had is my phone keeps complaining that I’m not signed in with a google account, and there’s a few email addresses I hadn’t updated from gmail to my new accounts. But it’s been surprisingly plain sailing without having an account, and at least one of those issues will be sorted by moving to a phone with custom ROM support.

+1 for Navidrome. As simple as pasting the album into the directory and it sorts the rest. I use subtune on my phone to access it and it works great.

Two kids smeered their shit on the bathroom walls then climbed on the roof. There was some much more serious stuff but that was the funnier one I guess.

It was in the countryside as well, so we’d get a farm animal wandering about the grounds about once a year which was always exciting.

The tech secretary is the biggest idiot in our government right now which is really saying something. He doesn’t have any professional experience with technology, gets his policy ideas from asking chatgpt, accused anyone who opposes the online safety act of being a paedophile, and when a constituent sent him emails about Palestine he had the police raid her home at 4am.

That’s true. I don’t know what the answer is there, but I still think regardless of what the solution is, politicians shouldn’t be promising one thing and doing another. Especially to a demographic already so cynical about politics.

The same man who pledged to abolish tuition fees, immediately abandoned that pledge to gain power, tripled them instead, and was then caught afterwards having already scrapped the plan to abolish them internally while still publicly campaigning on it?

However, leaked documents revealed that the Lib Dems had actually planned to abandon their tuition fee pledge before the election even took place.

A month before Clegg promised to get rid of the “dead weight of debt,” senior insiders said the party should “leave” the pledge before entering any negotiations to form a coalition government, saying: “Let us not cause ourselves more headaches.”

That article is an interesting read on how the big three keep lying through their teeth on tuition fees as well. And how the National Union of Students opposed tuition fees for over a decade until the now-health secretary Wes Streeting became their general secretary.

I’ve tried tailscale and cloudflare tunnels in the past and ended up just using PiVPN to set up a WireGuard VPN on my Pi5. Tailscale for some reason was very slow for me, and cloudflare tunnels have a 100mb limit iirc which isn’t ideal for streaming. PiVPN is quite straightforward, it sets everything up for you and all you have to do is forward a UDP port. That was the bit I was most worried about, but, unless I’ve misunderstood something, because a UDP port will just ignore invalid requests to the outside world it will appear closed so it’s not very risky. It then generates a key for each device which you can scan from a QR code onto your VPN client. I have my phone set to auto-connect to the tunnel when I disconnect from my home wifi network and the tunnel is fast enough that I’ve accidentally turned off my phone’s wifi connection before and streamed a TV show through the tunnel over mobile data and not noticed any difference in speed.

They seem pretty good for not trapping too much heat, but we have quite cool summers here so what I would consider an unbearably hot day is probably different to most people. I could comfortably sleep in it under 24°C, anything above that and I can’t sleep no matter what type of blanket I have anyway. There are cooling ones made of cotton that might work if you’re in a hotter climate but they cost a fair bit more.

No luck with the reinstall unfortunately, but I’ll leave it til the f-droid build. It may be something to do with Google play being disabled on my device, because if I install .12 from Aurora the app attempts to load posts and then gives an error saying “check that Google play is enabled on your device before opening the app.”

I was swiping from the right side of the screen to the left to go back with Android’s gesture navigation, but it’s conflicting with Blorp’s gestures so the accounts page comes up instead of going back to the all feed.