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Nelson was 5 foot 4. The statue in Trafalgar Square is 169 foot.

That’s Horatio of 31.7 to 1.

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Selfhosted reshared this.


Software for Homeserver router combo


!Selfhosted - I've just bought a #BananaPi R3. As an avid user of #Openwrt and #Yunohost I'm thinking that it would make sense to have the capabilities of both on that device since it has space for an #SSD - Does any one know of any projects that are bringing the features of both types of services together into one solution. i.e a lightweight home server and configurable router in one?

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in reply to abeorch Selfhosted reshared this.

Generally speaking I would avoid combining critical networking infrastructure with other services. Just from a reliability standpoint.

Let your router be just a router. Simple = reliable.

in reply to abeorch Selfhosted reshared this.

You can run a router VM but I run my opnsense on a thin client directly.

abeorch reshared this.


I want to do a:

What does this sign mean, wrong answers only

thread, but I have no idea what the sign actually does mean. I'd welcome both humorous answers and the correct one

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in reply to Kim Scheinberg

contrôle de vitesse des motards en espagne. j'y ai déjà été survolé par un hélicopère (c'était pas pour moi cependant!).
in reply to Thomas Barrio "The Rainbow Beast" Full Metal Archaeopteryx reshared this.

@homohortus
That's a pretty good explanation, considering it was sent to me by a friend who's currently biking in Spain

So you're saying there are speed limits for bikers, and they use drones and helicopters to issue tickets to violators, or to warn them to slow down?

That sounds really crazy when I type it


abeorch reshared this.


Giant battery: first stage of Ruakākā Energy Park switched on


New Zealand's first super-sized grid-connected battery - built at a cost of $186 million - will help improve Northland's energy resilience in future power outages, Meridian Energy says.

The company said its Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) would also help smooth out power peaks and troughs, by storing energy when electricity is cheap and releasing it at times of peak demand, such as early mornings and evenings.

The battery park consisted of 80 shipping-container-sized batteries spread over a two-hectare site at Marsden Point, next the former oil refinery south of Whangārei.

Project director Alan de Lima said at full capacity the giant battery could supply 100 megawatts (MW) of power, enough for 60,000 homes or about half Northland's population, for two hours.

It had been connected to the grid since the beginning of the year and would start operating as soon as final tests had been signed off.

It was also stage one of Meridian's planned Ruakākā Energy Park.

Stage two would involve building a $227m 130MW solar farm, with 250,000 panels spread over 172ha of land next to the battery.

Work was due to start in August with power expected to start flowing in early 2027.

in reply to Dave Aotearoa / New Zealand reshared this.

I somehow had no idea that was what they were doing there. Interesting! Climate change plus neglected infrastructure is going to = more power outages for sure.
in reply to liv Aotearoa / New Zealand reshared this.

Batteries will be a great way to cover peak shortfalls.

Pumped hydro might have been a better way, rather than all that battery manufacturing, but I haven't given up hope on the pumped hydro yet.

in reply to Dave Aotearoa / New Zealand reshared this.

I don't know much about pumped hydro but it sounds good!

This is really dumb of me but I just realized someone tried to describe this battery facility to me and I somehow thought they were talking about this fish farm.

in reply to liv Aotearoa / New Zealand reshared this.

Pumped hydro is basically pumping the water from a hydro dam back to the top of the dam to be used again. It's basically a form of battery, use energy on days when you have too much so that you have water in your hydro lakes for days when you don't have enough power.

The incoming government cancelled it pretty early on, I think this long term thinking was getting in the way of tax cuts.

This is really dumb of me but I just realized someone tried to describe this battery facility to me and I somehow thought they were talking about this fish farm.


Ah interesting!

in reply to Dave Aotearoa / New Zealand reshared this.

Pumped hydro sounds super useful! There's no hydro in Northland but if it had a better infrastructure there is room for geothermal and solar.
in reply to liv Aotearoa / New Zealand reshared this.

Is there an active geothermal area in Northland? I once saw a proposal to use forestry slash in combination with geothermal. Use the slash as fuel to get the geothermal heated water up to the next level for better power generation, then capture the CO2 and pump it underground. I think this is the article I read.

I think Northland has a lot of forestry, so if you have geothermal you could do this idea!

in reply to Dave Aotearoa / New Zealand reshared this.

Fascinating out of the box idea. It does have geothermal at Ngawha which is relatively near a forestry and could be expanded significantly.

While looking for that website I just stumbled on a tiny, rickety old hydro station
so turns out I was wrong about that!

This entry was edited (3 weeks ago)
in reply to liv Aotearoa / New Zealand reshared this.

It does have geothermal at Ngawha which is relatively near a forestry and could be expanded significantly.


Opened in 2020! Your link also says "The Ngāwhā geothermal field is the only high temperature geothermal resource in New Zealand, outside the Taupo Volcanic Zone." so I think I'm allowed to be surprised 😅

While looking for that website I just stumbled on a tiny, rickety old hydro station so turns out I was wrong about that!


It can be fascinating reading the list of power stations in NZ.

I noticed one that's believed to be one of the oldest continually operating hydroelectric plants in the world. Mokopeka, since 1891. Some photos here.

in reply to Dave Aotearoa / New Zealand reshared this.

That's so cool! I love old "modern" tech like old subways etc.

That list really is fascinating. Thank you Dave you always give me something to dive into! I get the sense that we are way under-utilizing solar.

in reply to liv Aotearoa / New Zealand reshared this.

Solar has got a lot cheaper recently, and big projects take time. But they are happening now!

That list of power stations has 8 operational solar fars and another 18 proposed/in development!

This entry was edited (3 weeks ago)
in reply to Dave Aotearoa / New Zealand reshared this.

Its horses for courses. Pumped hydro is great in areas with suitable terrain and for longer term storage. In other areas / applications batteries make sense. NZ is of course capital constrained. It would be great to do everything altogether all at once but its a journey right and you have to bring people along with you.

There is also a weird effect with new tech where delaying actually makes economic sense if costs are going down so you get the most bang for your buck by holding off for a bit.


abeorch reshared this.


I started a new job as a security guard last night. Before he left my boss told me I had to make sure I watched the office all night.

I am on season 2 already but I don't know what it has to do with security.

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abeorch reshared this.


City considers warning system for 'shark bridge'
enidnews.com/news/city-conside…

The city of Enid is looking at a system to take a bite out of the number of truckers falling victim to the East Maine "shark bridge."

The article is blocked by a paywall. If you were ever wondering why I don't often share links from local newspapers, this is why. Still, this famous truck-eating bridge is worth mentioning. Ha!

Support local news if you can.

#Oklahoma #Enid (paywall)



abeorch reshared this.


Well It's 1 for the Money, 2 For the Show, 3 To Get Ready..... 4 for Sales 5 for Customer Services, or 6 to hear these options again.

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The venerable Voyager 1 spacecraft underwent another surgery in March.

The team had to revive a thruster used for roll control whose heaters had failed in 2004. The tubes of the backup thrusters currently in use are getting clogged and may fail this year.

The delicate operation required turning on the failed thruster and flipping a switch to enable its heater and 🤞

All very tricky and risky operations, performed from 23 light-hours away on 1970’s era hardware.

👏
jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-voyage…
1/n

This entry was edited (1 month ago)

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abeorch reshared this.


If you’re in the EU and you opted out of Meta training generative AI on your Facebook, Threads and Instagram posts and pictures, Meta are requiring you to opt out *again* or they will continue training on your data.

Users have until May 27 2025 to opt out again or forever lose the right. arstechnica.com/tech-policy/20…

This is the random ass opt out URL, which isn’t advertised in their apps: facebook.com/help/contact/6359…

Instagram opt out: help.instagram.com/contact/233…

This entry was edited (1 month ago)

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abeorch reshared this.


"Instead of using actual spray cans, some artists are just cleaning dirt off of certain areas to make their masterpieces and they are calling it reverse graffiti"

(This one is by Paul 'Moose' Curtis of the Reverse Graffiti Project )

#StreetArt

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abeorch reshared this.


I'm thinking about networking, and there is one thing* that is a mystery to me. Can someone please explain it in a very, very ELI5 way?

Let's say I have IP cameras, and adhering to good practices, they are on a separate VLAN, let's say 192.168.10.X.

And then I have another VLAN, 192.168.20.X for my laptop and my homelab server.

The server is running Frigate for the cameras.

So the cameras somehow would need to reach my server in another VLAN.

What is the correct, industry standard way to do it? Create routing to punch through VLANs? Connect my server to two VLANs (with two NICs?)

  • there are a lot of things in networking that are a mystery to me, but let's tackle them one thing at a time :)
in reply to stfn

Both options are good. And you have a third option: you can make your server communicating on the VLAN trunk level. So you can just declare, that this physical NIC in your server now are two virtual NICs, each in one VLAN.

I know, this is not ELI5. I will sit at the computer in a few minutes, and I'll write more.

in reply to Agnieszka R. Turczyńska

Computer networking 101. Long. Even looong.

Sensitive content


abeorch reshared this.


@RaccoonForFriendica This weekend I took some time to investigate how much work would be needed to build an iOS version of the app, and it turned out that at least building and running a basic version of the app is doable with some minor changes (see here).

What do you think about it? Would you like to see a Raccoon on iOS too?

#friendica #friendicadev #androidapp #androiddev #fediverseapp #raccoonforfriendica #kotlin #multiplatform #kmp #compose #cmp #opensource #foss #procyonproject

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in reply to Matthias RaccoonForFriendica reshared this.

@feb It only lists open source projects but it's been around longer (for community contributions) and is pretty comprehensive. The list of platforms is good, too.

codeberg.org/fediverse/delight…



abeorch reshared this.


Fediverse Report – #115

PeerTube has a new update for their mobile app, the Mastodon team is growing, and more.

The News


  • PeerTube has officially launched their apps as a v1, some four months after the apps became available in beta. Some new features include the ability to log in with an existing PeerTube account (up until now you’d log in with a local account that only existed in the app itself), commenting from the app, and playlist and channel management options.
  • Mastodon announced some updates on how their team is evolving. The organisation is currently in the process of setting up a Foundation in Europe. Mastodon is also growing their team, and the organisation now consists of 15 employees. Mastodon’s news update is a followup on their announcement from January 2025, in which Mastodon said that current CEO Eugen Rochko would step down. A new CEO has not been announced yet by Mastodon. In the previous update, Mastodon also said that they would need a €5 million annual operating budget. There are some new team members related to fundraising, but Mastodon has not made a clear statement yet on how exactly they will raise the money needed for this budget.
  • Evan Prodromou of the Social Web Foundation has published a first version of places.pub. It is a service that “makes OpenStreetMap geographical data available as ActivityPub objects.” The goal is for other fediverse software to integrate with places.pub to have a standardised way to refer to geospatial objects via ActivityPub.


The Links


That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe to my newsletter to get all my weekly updates via email, which gets you some interesting extra analysis as a bonus, that is not posted here on the website. You can subscribe below:

#fediverse

fediversereport.com/fediverse-…


places.pub


I’m making an initial version of places.pub available today. places.pub is a collection of Place objects suitable for use in geosocial applications on the ActivityPub network.

Part of my work in the Social Web Community Group at the W3C has been participation in the GeoSocial Task Force. This is a sub-group of the SocialCG that focuses on implementing user stories in ActivityPub related to the intersection of geographical systems and social networking, for example, tagging an image with the place it represents, or checking in to a location.

One important need for geosocial software is that all objects in ActivityPub, including Place objects, need to have a permanent URL as their id property, which shares the description of that object in Activity Streams 2.0 format. However, there isn’t a good dataset of geographical objects — countries, states or provinces or regions, cities, buildings, businesses, parks, streets — available in AS2 on the Web right now. That is slowing down experimentation in the Geosocial Task Force.

Using the service


So, I worked on making places.pub for geosocial hackers to experiment with. It’s a service that exposes places from the amazing OpenStreetMap collection of data as AS2 objects on the Web. So, given an OpenStreetMap object like the Rogers Centre Ottawa, it provides an AS2 version suitable for use in geosocial activities in ActivityPub. It also has a rudimentary search mechanism, although I think most users will want to use the Nominatim service for searching the OpenStreetMap database, and then map the IDs onto places.pub.

Once you know the places.pub ID for a place, you can use it for geotagging objects, people, activities, or using special geosocial activity types like check in, check out, and travel. There is a good list of examples on the places.pub home page, but obviously this is not an exhaustive list!

How it is built


This wasn’t my first time trying to build places.pub; I’d done two earlier versions with different architectures and the same interface. The first time out, about 7 years ago, I created a full NodeJS server that used a full mirror of the OpenStreetMap database, so I didn’t need to hit the OSM API to fetch data. It worked pretty well, but it was really expensive — hundreds of dollars per month to keep a database server of that size running and synched.

I tried a second version a few months ago, which did batch generation of AS2 Place objects from the OpenStreetMap exports, and then uploaded them to the S3 service at Amazon Web Services. This was a whole lot cheaper, but it took a long time to download, convert, and re-upload the data.

This third implementation, with source code available on GitHub, is a little bit easier than both. Instead of sloshing the huge OSM dataset back and forth, I used the version of the data stored in the Google Cloud Public Datasets system on BigQuery. This let me ignore the effort of moving data, and just focus on giving it a good ActivityPub-compatible interface using a Google Cloud Run function. It seems to work pretty nicely.

Next steps


I’d love to see some experimentation with using places.pub for geosocial activity in the social web. I’m going to work on some implementations in my own ActivityPub software. If you find problems with the software, please add an issue on GitHub or let me know on the Fediverse at @evanprodromou.


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abeorch reshared this.


Hey Fediverse friends 👋

We're happy to help make the web a little more connected and open.

With our ActivityPub plugin you can connect your Discourse community to Mastodon and the wider Fediverse

Check out all the details in our latest blog post:
blog.discourse.org/2025/04/dis…

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abeorch reshared this.


📢 abra v0.10.x is finally here 📢

TLDR; "abra upgrade" 👍

Upgrade docs:
docs.coopcloud.tech/abra/upgra…

Migration guide:
docs.coopcloud.tech/abra/upgra…

A huge thanks to everyone who helped get this release done ❤️‍🔥 Happy Hacking 🫂

-- d1

This entry was edited (2 months ago)

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in reply to Co-op Cloud

Quick patch release is out to fix some nasty bugs that got through the release candidate and test suites 🙈

"abra upgrade" once more 👍

Release notes v0.10.1:
git.coopcloud.tech/toolshed/ab…

Project:
git.coopcloud.tech/toolshed/-/…

-- d1

This entry was edited (1 month ago)

Selfhosted reshared this.


Is it useful to create your own Mastodon instance?


!Selfhosted

The following was asked on a #Mastodon forum on #Reddit - I replied and a sort of converation started. I felt that it wa better to have the discussion where others with valuable inside could chip in so I have- with the OP's permission posted the following:

For years I have the same question:

Is it useful to create your own Mastodon instance or any other fediverse instance?

Many admins say it is a lot of work and they put a lot of effort, money and energy in it. Some even close their instance after few years, because it is just too much.

After the new political development in the USA, the fediverse got a new wave of interested people from all over the world, but the question stays.

In my opinion it makes only sense if you already have a community, like, if you're an influencer or part of an NGO or similar projects with several people, who will support you creating and maintaining it with money and own time.

What do you think and do you own an instance or work on one?

in reply to abeorch Selfhosted reshared this.

IMO no.

Small instances can have issues with federation and now showing all replies/content.

There's also the aspect that you'll need to moderate content stored on your server, if someone posts something illegal and your server caches it, you're responsible for cleaning it up.

in reply to abeorch Selfhosted reshared this.

Just join some smaller instance not hosted in the US. That’s what I did, and it prevents centralization. I am super happy with my choice as the bigger instances may be getting defederated while the smaller ones kinda fly under the radar and the chances of getting caught in a collective responsibility for stuff that other users from your instance posted are smaller

abeorch reshared this.


Black holes swallow all information you feed into them. But information can't be destroyed, instead the information is slowly emitted as hawking radiation, impossible to reconstruct in practice but technically there.

This makes them just like Atlassian Confluence

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in reply to abeorch Open Source reshared this.

One of the reasons I posted this is I think that it would be great if more people got in and supported the project
in reply to abeorch Open Source reshared this.

they are using zoom? eww

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