motrm

This was an interesting read for me, particularly around the phantosmia.

For the past few decades - since puberty or thereabouts - I started to smell something unpleasant and it wouldn't go away no matter where I was, or how recently I'd had a wash, leading me to assume it must be me and that I simply smell.

After suffering for a while I finally reached out to family and bosses at work and of course their response was that I don't smell, which was news to me. I had assumed I stank and everyone was awfully politely putting up with it.

Spoken therapy and CBT helped a bit, but being the NHS it trailed off in an unsatisfactoy fashion and so I dealt with it myself over the years by becoming a hermit.

Later in life I paid for further spoken therapy and was prescribed an SSRI anti-depressant and that finally put me on the path to not smelling bad smells more often than not. SSRIs of course have side effects which aren't fantastic, but it's better than the godawful feeling that you stink!

I feel for the author who dealt with this on top of tinnitus.

It's not often that I get to talk about this, if anyone has any similar experiences I'd love to hear about them :)

As some comments have mentioned the pricing will increase for domain names too, not very explicit in their email on Tuesday evening "Gandi.net - Update":

  Domains

  We remain committed to offering you the largest portfolio of TLDs,
  customized TLD suggestions and best-in-class anycast-level primary
  DNS servers. In addition, we will step-up our effort to unburden you
  by introducing new managed features: 

    Advanced and easy to use account security
    Proactive notifications on changes and important events
    Better rights management
    Easier domain transfers with continuity of service
    Best-in-class anycast-level secondary DNS servers

  You can find the associated new pricing for your domains here[0].

Renewing a .com at these new prices is now £24 per year inclusive of tax and .uk domains £12.

Annoyingly my previous registrar raised prices last year and I thought that, hey, I'll pay a few quid extra and support Gandi as they generally have a decent reputation. Now with this move I'm the fool!

Like others in this thread I've moved to Porkbun, the .com renewals are now about £8.50 and .uk about £5.50 which is much more reasonable and much closer to their cost price.

I'd like my registrar to make a reasonable amount of profit to make staying in business worthwhile but that doesn't make sense when the registrar wants to double or triple the pricing for their bottom line.

Shame, but there we go.

[0] https://www.gandi.net/static/documents/2023-march-gbp-renew-...

For many use cases there's really very little need for the latest and greatest.

Understandable if you're a gamer, working in VR or heavy graphics, perhaps something with a decent GPU and a not-too-old CPU will be helpful.

Most of my work is web dev, plenty of webpack, browser tabs, PHPStorm & IDEA Ultimate doing their thing on a T-class 4th generation Intel CPU. It could be faster, sure, but I'm more often waiting for my brain than the machine. SSD & plenty of RAM helps a ton more than a fast CPU for this use case.

I do find it useful to dogfood on older devices: if what I'm working on is slow for me, it may well be slow for a reasonable proportion of its users, too.

This may not always be the case, fortunately! I recall the Broadcom Wi-Fi 7 chipset announcement[0] in April mentioned a dedicated scan core which may well offload the network searches to a separate part of the chip, freeing the AP connectivity core(s) from having to do other tasks for a second or two each minute.

Here's hoping it works as I understand it and other chipsets start doing similar things!

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31060452

I hoard data - maybe a hundred floppy disks, thousands of old burned CDs/DVDs, and 4 or 5TB of hard disks.

I stopped burning DVDs in ~2009 because it was more cost-effective to store data on hard disks of ever-growing size and didn't take 15 minutes to burn data in 4GB chunks.

For me, holding on to data is more of a "but I might need it one day" sort of thing, and it works out cheaper to store it (and back it up) than to put in the cognitive effort to work out "will I really use this in the future?" before throwing bits of it away.

In recent years I've learned to be less concerned about deleting some types of data, partly out of apathy and partly because, if I'm honest with myself, much of the data is going to go completely unused...

...but one day I might need it!

I moved to Point early this year after a power outage took my non-redundant and self-hosted DNS down - it was the first time it'd happened for several years but I wanted to avoid a repeat.

In May, Point received a DDoS that took all (or many?) of their nameservers down and they didn't communicate what was happening very well.

I moved back to self-hosting although, like others in this thread, I'd prefer to settle on using a few major players (Route53, Google, Cloudflare) to reduce the reliance on any one of them.