robotmay

I bought an Elegoo Centauri Carbon late last year and that's been very good so far. Had a minor issue of a sensor disconnecting after a month, but took 10 minutes to fix it (cable had come loose, probably in transit).

It was absurdly cheap for its spec (£260 is what I paid, delivered) and can be run entirely without internet access with no issues. People were a bit miffed when they announced a v2 with multi-filament support, but they just announced an addon to upgrade the first version to a similar spec and it's again really cheap - £55 delivered here in the UK.

If I was printing more professionally I'd probably go for a Prusa, but the cost/benefit isn't there for someone new to it, unless you have plenty of dosh - in which case go for it. As someone getting into it, the price of the Centauri Carbon is so reasonable that it's hard to argue against it.

I bought one a few months back when it was weirdly cheap (£260 delivered!) and it's been really very solid. I've only had a couple of issues:

1. One of the bed temperature sensors reported a fault, this was a loose connection and took about 10 minutes to open and reseat, which was nice

2. I sometimes get an error in Chinese that blocks a print and requires pressing a continue button on the touchscreen. I've tried translating this and I have no idea what it's on about, so if anyone does know what it is then lemme know. Doesn't cause me much trouble though

Overall I'm really pleased with it - it's pretty much a bargain. Mine has never been connected to the internet and very rarely has print failures (and they're nearly all my fault when I have had them). I've ordered the multi-filament addon which they've just announced, and I was pleased to see them offer that as an upgrade for purchasers of the first model.

Yeah it was a pretty awesome place to work up until the IPO, my first year was probably the most enjoyable I've ever had at a job.

Er, so? They developed and are producing a vaccine that will save millions of lives. That's a damn sight more deserving of billions in profit than any other number of industries or corporations.

I mean, I pay nothing for mine. I already pay tax to fund our health service, which purchases many drugs from many vendors for many diseases. This is just one more, and by all accounts it's comparatively cheap for the overall cost-savings when it keeps the vast majority of people out of the hospitals.

Yeah cool I'll pass that along to the 3 people I personally know who died from it.

1 in 100 odds isn't super great, and that's ignoring the unknown impact of long-COVID. The risk of bad vaccine side-effects is lower than the chance of death.

This’ll likely make me sound like a lunatic, but when I go abroad from the UK, hedgerows are one of the top 3 things I miss (the other two being beer and tea). They’re just so ubiquitous when travelling here, and they make the world feel a bit smaller.

As a wildlife photographer I probably take 75% of my photos of birds in hedges. I don’t have to camp out for hours - I just walk along the hedgerows aimlessly.

Also, if other countries don’t have hedges, what happens to the grotty pornography magazines that dwell natively in the hedgerows? Are they in some sort of meta-state of quasi-existence? A theoretical hedgerow porn mag?

I've had a lot of success with z-wave devices in my home, hooked into Home Assistant. They seem more resilient than zigbee (and much more reliable than any of the bespoke wifi stuff) and are largely all interoperable. I've got a bunch of z-wave devices like plugs and thermostats, but it comes at a high cost.

For lights I do use zigbee ones just because they're cheaper, but my Hue and IKEA mix do have communication issues sometimes (I have them both on a Deconz stick attached to my server).

But all of this relies on Home Assistant. I honestly can't imagine trying to use smart home devices as a "normal" consumer, relying on the software of specific companies. They're all largely terrible walled gardens, and I'm constantly surprised by how bad they actually are.

It'd be interesting to see. At the moment Europe is largely dominated by the US tech industry (bar a few notable exceptions, like Spotify). One of them leaving would open a nice big gap for new/existing EU alternatives to compete in.

This website doesn't even run smoothly on my overpowered gaming desktop. Back in 2000 I'd have never thought we'd be at the point where I can run games in 4K happily but not scroll through a website without it lagging up.

Sounds like the plot for Face/Off sequel where Nicolas Cage swaps his face with himself, Nicolas Cage.

I have two Topre keyboards. I love my RealForce whole-heartedly, but my HHKB is nowhere near the same typing quality. The HHKB is still nice, but I only use it as a portable alternative (I have a bluetooth model). The RealForce feels easy, fluid, and solid, somehow.

I have the RealForce R2 with variably-weighted switches and it is such a pleasant experience to type on that I don't even bother looking at other keyboards any more - there's nothing else I want from a board.

I've had this idea knocking about for a while so it's really nice to see that I wasn't the only one who thought it might work. This looks like a nice implementation - I'm excited to give it a go!

Oh I totally forgot about that - I think I played around with it a few years back. I should check in and see what has changed, it was rather cool.

I've always thought it a bit of a shame that Ruby isn't more popular for Raspberry Pi projects. I mean, I use it, but the standard is still Python. And Python is great, don't get me wrong, but Ruby is just so much fun for hobby projects.

I used to try to write things in the most popular language for those things, like writing Prometheus exporters in Go. But I eventually realised I just didn't care that much, and now I write them in Ruby, and everything is sunshine and happiness again.

Ooh thanks! Yeah Frigate is fantastic and has saved me so much hassle. The Coral device is pretty much a requirement for performance but it does work really well :D

I’ll definitely be writing up a few more things soon! I tend to go through bursts of sorting my Home Assistant stuff out.

Probably not, but I don’t have a need for that - I’m really just after the video and notifications. I imagine it could be possible with some hacking but I haven’t got it yet.

I've just ordered an Amcrest AD410. It has RTSP support! I handle my video footage through https://frigate.video hooked into Home Assistant, and the Amcrest cameras are pretty open and compatible with this setup, apparently. They have a (somewhat hidden) API, with some open source solutions like https://github.com/dchesterton/amcrest2mqtt about which expose it to more common standards, and Home Assistant has an official integration for them too.

I've been really happy with my Frigate setup and previously wrote a few words about the switch: https://senryu.pub/afternoonrobot/articles/replacing-unifi-v.... It has taken me ages to find a viable doorbell, however, which is why I've only just ordered the AD410. I'm pretty hopeful for it, and a colleague already has one and really likes it.

Hadn't heard of Eternal Terminal before, but I use mosh quite regularly - for portability I remote into my home network via Wireguard on an iPad Pro, using mosh inside Blink shell (https://blink.sh) to connect to my machines. Over 5G and 4G it works very smoothly, but does lag a bit if I drop down to 3G speeds. I very much do not regret getting the 5G version of the iPad as it's super useful, and I prefer this setup to carrying around a hefty workstation laptop. With the magic keyboard attached I basically have a tiny but comfortable laptop, albeit quite top-heavy.

Having to use tmux isn't a hassle for me as I would be using it anyway, and it has the added benefit of being able to connect to my active sessions on another machine and pick up where I left off.

Is that possible to do using CSS with our existing markup? Currently we prepend the � using ::before. I imagine we could probably hide the existing character and shuffle the � over where it should be, but it might need some testing across different text sizes I imagine. I'll make a note of it for our next revision :)

Thanks for the feedback! Our primary use-case when deciding on it was to flag these up in a code-review situation, to prevent malicious content being submitted in merge requests to unsuspecting projects. We found this made it stand out enough to the reviewer when performing code reviews. I also try to not be too quick to add new alerts or sections to the GUI as we sometimes get criticised for having too much clutter D:

GitHub by comparison went down the alert banner route, from what I can see. I'm not opposed to adding something to that effect as well though - especially for inexperienced reviewers, it would be nice to include some more information about the potential exploit. That could be something we revisit when we add the homoglyph highlighting.

So far we're just detecting individual bidi characters, but looking at characters in their greater context could be quite interesting. This would seem like quite a good use-case for machine-learning too, if you wanted to get super into it.

Ah yes you're right - looks like that can be handled with CSS: https://www.w3.org/International/articles/vertical-text/. Although from what I've seen most Japanese websites tend to be left-to-right instead anyway.

Hebrew would be a more valid second example I think. I'd be curious to know how many languages maintain their RTL preference online.

Yeah I'm not opposed to adding highlighting to them, and we are investigating how to do it, but it was less clear-cut than the bidi characters (which are totally invisible when rendered). I think we'll want to make it a bit more configurable and probably a separate option to the one which highlights the bidi characters.

This was a pretty interesting thing to mitigate - we added some support around it to GitLab after it was reported to us, which shipped in the latest security release: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/commit/3fb44197195b57... (you can actually see it in effect on that commit's examples, which is quite meta). These characters have valid use-cases in right-to-left languages like Arabic, Japanese etc, so it had to be configurable for project-owners if they have legitimate use-cases for it. Our focus was on making sure that repository maintainers could see these characters in code reviews.

The homoglyph attack is interesting but it really should be noticed as part of a code review process, as it requires adding the imitation function calls at some point too. It'd also likely be pretty frustrating to end users if we were to highlight every single unicode character that looks like the latin alphabet.

It's certainly a good lesson in not copy/pasting random snippets from the internet and pasting them into a root shell, however :D (we do always highlight the bidi characters on GitLab snippets, though)

Aside: this was a royal pain in the arse to figure out if I had live examples in the specs, because vim also just rendered them "correctly". I ended up checking the files in Windows Notepad on another machine to sanity check them.

Thanks to the authors for responsible disclosure.

I've been wanting to delete Facebook for years but my partner convinced me to keep it - but now I haven't even logged in in a year and nobody noticed, so I feel like I can get away with it now!

Reddit and Twitter I already nuked last year. Trying to think of other things I can go and delete now, as it's quite cathartic.

In the UK at least, as long as you meet the requirements for road safety (which are remarkably little, for custom cars), you can register custom vehicles on the road. We have a wonderful history of insane people building cars in their sheds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DGtf7asP8I

It's tempting fate to say it, but I've not fallen for a scam, or a phishing attempt, and I've been subjected to many. Natural distrust and cynicism perhaps. I don't answer the phone to unknown numbers, I don't click links in emails, I don't do business at the door or over the phone, and I don't believe anything other people tell me (can report that my girlfriend hates this aspect of my personality).

The head of accounts in my previous company fell for a bank transfer scam (urgent payment request forwarded "from the CEO"), so I have seen it happen to young people, but I wouldn't say that person was "tech savvy". Being able to use a computer doesn't make you tech savvy, and I would say the number of tech savvy people is probably close to identical between younger and older age groups. Being intelligent in one aspect doesn't make you smart at everything else (which is why I avoid doing plumbing). What is missing is critical thinking and cynicism. I highly doubt most people check the full email source of anything they receive that looks important, but they should. People rely too heavily on technology to tell them when something is wrong, and they shouldn't.

The scam example you describe is easily avoided: don't enter your details in the fake package website in the first place. Don't answer the phone to the unknown number. Don't believe them when they say they're from the bank. Don't do anything anyone tells you to. And if they try to rush you, that should make you stop and think why.

I don't doubt the scams are getting pretty clever, but that doesn't mean the victims can't also be a bit stupid. Yes it's sad that they have fallen for it, but to shift all the blame elsewhere is unfair - we are ultimately responsible for our own actions.

I think the British and Americans have a lot in common which likely makes us equally susceptible, but perhaps some of the reasons are slightly different. To overly generalise two entire countries:

British: tend to defer to authority, tend to be overly polite.

Americans: tend to question authority, tend to have strong self-belief.

As a theoretical scammer I'd likely be looking at different approaches in the two countries, but with probably the same underlying scam. I imagine this is true for most countries, and I'd be curious to see how much of the approach has to change for different places.

Edit: I should add, I think the American fear of the IRS and the UK fear of HMRC are effectively equal. Everyone's scared of the tax man :D

Yeah NatWest are majorly guilty of this. They used to phone me with a script that was like:

NW: "Hello, am I speaking to <robotmay>?"

Me: "Who's asking?"

NW: "I'm calling from the NatWest fraud team, we'd like to verify your transactions. First we need to ask some security questions: what is your account number?"

Me: :|

Online-only banks like Monzo/Starling are better at this aspect - they never seem to phone anyone, which at this point I'd consider a security feature.