antonyh

As facebookexternalhit is listed in the robots.txt, it does look like it's optimistically rechecking in the hope it's no longer disallowed. That rate of request is obscene though, and falls firmly into the category of Bad Bot.

I got no such email, was this for VPS or dedicated servers?

On one hand this is not good but predictable. I'm on longer-term commitments with OVH, so it will be interesting to see how they follow. I'm still keeping Hetzner on my shopping list, even with the increase the bare-metal offerings are within my budget, and now that prices have increases they should be stable for a while (also import for budget management).

Imgur self-blocking is nothing to do with propaganda, but it does make the internet worse for it with all many image now not showing. In any case, why should I go to bat for Imgur if they are mishandling the PII of children? The fact that so many images are centralised in a single (now unreliable) service is a prime example of the enshittification of the common web. Services should be hosting their own media files not relying on a third party.

Money is the smallest concern here. It could easily replace the content with state-approved versions and the majority would never know, or at the least redirect to other sites/pages as needed. After all, it's being described as a 'portal' not a simple service.

This is why I don't mix work and play and have a dedicated machine for games, but this only solves half the problem. It really needs it's own VLAN or to use 'guest' wifi to keep it isolated, but that only solves half the remaining problem. Two easy steps to get to 75% solved, but still leaves a high-powered machine connected to the internet that could be abused, can still listen on bluetooth and enumerate wifi (precise geolocation), and so on. At least this way it's only online for a few hours a day at most. It's the most I can do without investing serious time trying to block state-level intrusion in a battle I can never win.

I'm in the UK and can't access https://imgur.com/ - an American service that now refuses to serve content to Britain because "On September 30, 2025, Imgur blocked users from the United Kingdom in response to a potential fine from the Information Commissioner's Office regarding its handling of children's personal data". I presume that means OSA.

It does lend credibility to the blocks when it's US companies trying to dodge fines while mishandling PII. The suggestion of using a US freedom gov to dodge US-based self-censorship is as ironic as it is stupid when the real solution is pay the fine and handle the data properly.

As a Brit/European, would I notice or care if fbi.gov was blocked via consumer internet providers? I'd probably not notice if *.gov was blocked. I'm fairly sure government-level internet provisioning has a very different set of restrictions to the general population for those who need access to US Gov services, in the same way that I'm sure the Chinese state itself isn't subject to the rules of the Great Firewall.

It's not possible to login to the web-based banking without the app. It's a hard requirement to access the account.

I switched bank in the UK due to enforced app use, from Starling to Nationwide. They use a card reader to issue codes, so I can still use the web. I see this as a much of a must-have as physical bank branches with real cashier services.

I popped open a WD 'My Passport' drive, 4TB. It's exactly that - no SATA connection at all, only a USB on a custom board. I should have guessed this, it really is too short to have much in the way of other electronics. Thanks for confirming about the larger models, it's always good to know where we can source spares in an emergency. Top tip about NVMe - I would never have guessed this was an option.

The big ones with a separate power brick, I've not looked inside the smaller USB-powered ones. My interest was in the >8Gb desktop drives. I'd imagine they're the same deal, but hard to say from the outside. I did have a part of one at one point, a USB-to-SATA circuit board that was useful for adhoc connecting 2.5" drives, but I can't recall if that came from an prebuilt or an old BYOD enclosure.

I have a old WD small one that's kinda faulty (plugged it in then put it down heavily, it's not been right since), I should pop it open just to see what's inside, but it's older than the USBC models so could easily have changed. In any case, I don't think AI is eating the stock of slow laptop HDDs, so I'm not sure there's any need to buy these just for shucking.

Admittedly I've not been tracking price, only availability, and only in the size I might need.

I've shucked WD MyBook drives, just a plain SATA inside. I guess that it's cheaper to have a stock drive and a cheap SATA-USB adaptor in a shell than do custom electronics. I've not heard of any that are otherwise, but I've only done a few. I suppose it's possible that they could solder them in or have custom electronics but I would have thought that rare. It's frequently discussed on Reddit too, so there's plenty of folk doing this.

Maybe shucking USB HDDs is the short-term answer.

I read it as both, but UK suppliers have stock of various SATA HDDs available in large and small sizes. It's hard to say if prices will rocket or availability decline, or both. I don't normally advocate panic-buying, but if it's needed now is the time. I have one NAS spare on hand, I don't want or need a drawer full of them, but it'll be a royal pain if I do and can't get parts.

Competent is not the same as good. I can do the very basic things I need in Sheets, but the moment it needs more than =A1+B2 then it's uphill all the way. I also don't know how performant it is with larger datasets. I use Libre Office instead and despite the horrible UI it's been speedy and accurate. Desktop Excel is still king of the spreadsheets.

As for Slides, it's pure junk compared to the Keynote, but iCloud has it's own problems so I use this offline-only.

With the web version of Word 365 or whatever it's called, we've had so many problems syncing with OneDrive and sharing and whether it's showing the right version of the document that I'd be happy to never see it again, but their foothold in education means I'm forced to deal with it and provide technical support.

I don't think the world needs another protocol, we need to leverage the ones we have. This space (text-based real-time messaging with media attachments) is feature complete, there's nothing left to add. The remaining value-adds are exactly that; optional extensions for productivities suites and integrating SaaS tools. Pricing and Privacy are another two concerns, and personally for the latter I'd like human chat to be as far away from AI as possible.

I use Google Chat, only because my clients use it. Network effects matter. Personally I think it's terrible, but I wasn't a fan of Slack either but I'm not entirely sure why as it's pretty much just sending text. Maybe the opportunity to innovate in this space is UI/UX, and performance/reliability (Signal has been slow/flaky recently for us).

This is fantastic. As an absolute beginner in the language I've added to my list of learning resources for Gaeilge. I've tried to find a better scan of the book online, but it's not anywhere - there's some Máiréad Ní Ghráda on archive.org but this one is missing.

It also looks like the PDF in the repo is just the first 20 pages, it would be worthwhile scanning the whole thing cleanly and uploading to preserve this important work.

Only in a system where the buyer sets the price.

I use Sonatype Nexus OSS, it works fine.

Then they are fools. I left a one-star review and uninstalled it.

Apple News+ is so bad, it's literally unusable. Unfortunately I can't unsubscribe without paying MORE. I use all the other services on a family subscription except this one, but if I remove it the total cost goes up. I hate that I'm supporting something that is this bad, and the quantity of ads is the main factor - not only am I a paying customer, it's still filled with the worst kind of promoted 'content'.

Sounds really clean and simple, combined with classic developer diligence and hard effort to get it built right. Thanks for sharing.

Trust it to proxy artifacts from the web? Yes I think so.

Trust it not to leak credentials? No, that's something that is never taken for granted.

Trust it to hold a full history of uploaded binaries? That depends on the value of the releases. For incubator work, or web projects, or even Appstore apps where it's released to those stores to manage, maybe there should be enough trust. I just wouldn't use it for code where I want access to many stable versions, and I wouldn't put it publicly on the web either - not that I would do so with Sonatype Nexus without vendor support and many safeguards. I think it'll earn trust over time, once folk are convinced to use it for real workloads.

There's a lot of forms of trust.

I've not done enough Rust to truly know, but it looks reasonable from looking at the tests, a few models, some implementation code.

It doesn't use the 'unsafe' keyword anywhere, but that's not necessarily an indicator. Uses unsafe-libyaml which is like what it sounds (a hacky port of libyaml) but is no longer maintained (archived on GH in March 2024), and may have better choices. An SBOM would highlight these dependencies better than me doing random searches through the code.

I'm not sure I'd have put a default in the OIDC callback to localhost, that's about the only thing I've seen in a quick 5-minute skim through. I do like the comments and the lack of emojis :-)

I too would like to know the process, if OP is willing to share.

I appreciate the honesty about using Claude and the time it took to build this, and it shows how things can look when guided by someone who knows what they are doing.

On the other hand, it also shows that it took three weeks, so why should I use this instead of building a custom toolchain myself that is optimised for what I need and actually use? Trimming away the 45+ formats to the 5 or so that matter to my project. It raises the question - is 'enterprise' software doomed in favour of a proliferation of custom built services where everybody has something unique, or is the real value in the 'support' packages and SLAs? Will devs adopt this and put 'Artifact Keeper' on their CV, or will they put 'built an artifact toolchain with Claude'?

But then again, kudos to you for building something that can (and probably should) eat the lunch of the enterprise-grade tools that are simply unaffordable to small business, individual contractors, and underfunded teams. Truth be told, I'm not going to build my own, so this is certainly something I want to put in a sandbox and try out, and also this is inspirational and may finally convince me that I should give Claude a fair go if it's capable of being guided to create high quality output.

I tried Boox (Note Air 3 Colour) but it wouldn't run the one 'android' app I needed - O'Reilly bookshelf. Returned it and got an iPad instead. Seemed ok but only half supports apps. I didn't have it long enough to suffer pen accuracy or general performance, but the colours were muddy.

Obsidian has a paid subscription sync service and is free but not open source software.

Joplin has a paid subscription sync service and is free and open source software.

It's a different business model, but it's possible.

I've heard of Hurd, but never felt tempted to try it. That could be an interesting option.