dan
@dan@upvote.au
Aussie living in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Coding since 1998.
Developer at Meta.
.NET Foundation member. C# fan
d.sb
Mastodon: @dan@d.sb
- Comment on Bungee jumping 4 days ago:
Ah, the ol’ switcheroo.
- Comment on Student Parking 4 days ago:
The way a lot of students solve this in Australia, at least in Melbourne where I’m from, is by taking the train (or a tram) to university. The university I went to was adjacent to a train station.
Students from low-income families and that are independent get money from the government which can be used for anything, including public transport passes.
- Comment on Anyone have a favorite NAS (for normies)? 6 days ago:
Ohh… I forgot about this. If they’re still doing that then I wouldn’t recommend them.
For less tech-savvy users, I usually recommend some off-the-shelf hardware, so they have someone else to go to in case of issues with either the hardware or the standard built-in software.
Synology used to be the best for that, but maybe not any more. A lot of brands have gotten into NAS hardware over the last year or two so I’m not sure what’s the best now!
- Comment on Micron to boost DRAM output with $1.8bn chip fab buy 6 days ago:
PSMC sounds like a bootleg TSMC lol
- Comment on Anyone have a favorite NAS (for normies)? 6 days ago:
I’d probably just get a Synology and install Immich on it.
- Comment on ChatGPT to start showing ads in the US 1 week ago:
I think you’re right - people using the paid ones want to get their money’s worth. Even on the expensive plans like Claude Code’s $100/month subscription, people often end up using the equivalent of thousands of dollars worth of API usage, which doesn’t even cover the full cost of providing the service.
- Comment on ChatGPT to start showing ads in the US 1 week ago:
As far as I know, this is only for the free version of ChatGPT. It costs a lot of money to run, and they’re still not profitable, so it makes sense that they want to monetize the free version. The other option is to completely shut down the free version and only have the paid one.
- Comment on ChatGPT to start showing ads in the US 1 week ago:
They’re unaffected as they pay for the OpenAI API (they don’t have a free API). This change only affects free users of ChatGPT.
- Comment on Need advice for buying first hardware 2 weeks ago:
Do you mean 12600K, or do you really mean 2600K? These days, I wouldn’t use anything older than 9th gen.
See if there’s any e-waste recyclers in your area. A lot of companies are throwing out systems that don’t officially run Windows 11, so you can sometimes find systems with 8th and 9th gen Intel Core processors for very cheap.
- Comment on New Year's broadcasts behind paywalls 3 weeks ago:
I didn’t realise they have unprotected streams 👀
- Comment on New Year's broadcasts behind paywalls 3 weeks ago:
If you’re not getting 100% full strength signal, it is literally unwatchable.
It depends… Sometimes it’s terrible, while other times even low signal strength is fine. I only get around 65% signal strength and 75% signal quality for one channel (ABC, I think?), and it still works fine with no stuttering.
I use a HDHomeRun TV tuner, so I can place the antenna where I get the best signal, and the HDHomeRun transmits it over my LAN.
- Comment on New Year's broadcasts behind paywalls 3 weeks ago:
At least NBC is a broadcast station, so you can watch it for free using an antenna. I have an indoor antenna in my garage, connected to a HDHomeRun.
- Comment on Pizza styles 3 weeks ago:
THE CHEESE IS UNDER THE SAUCE
- Comment on Self-hosting with an old laptop 4 weeks ago:
You’ll need to use a VPN that supports port forwarding. You could use a cheap VPS instead.
- Comment on Self-hosting with an old laptop 4 weeks ago:
Where I live in California, electricity can be over US$0.60/kWh during peak summer time. Thankfully I have solar panels that offset most of the cost. I’m from Australia which also has high electricity prices.
- Comment on Self-hosting with an old laptop 4 weeks ago:
Should I run the server over a VPN
Do you mean for you to access it remotely, or do you mean to expose it publicly via the VPN (so that you can have publicly-exposed services while hiding your home IP)?
- Comment on This Flock Camera Leak is like Netflix For Stalkers 4 weeks ago:
you can also do the exact same thing with any other HikVision camera too
Most people that install security cameras don’t directly connect them to the internet like this. A company that’s installing them at scale should be aware of this.
Definitely seems like a configuration issue to not require any at all
Modern Hikvision and Dahua cameras don’t have a default password. They require you to set a strong password during initial setup.
In general, a lot of electronics have moved away from generic default passwords, as many jurisdictions ban them now. Any modern device should either require you to set the password during initial setup, or have a randomly-generated password printed on a sticker under the device.
- Comment on wtf facebook 5 weeks ago:
Click the three dots button and select the option to report it. Those reports are actually monitored.
- Comment on Word. 5 weeks ago:
I’ll try it out! I totally forgot it exists.
- Comment on Word. 5 weeks ago:
I was using LibreOffice Calc on my work PC with a Threadripper CPU, and somehow it still chugs at times. Scrolling was very laggy at times. I ended up using Google Sheets instead, which is way more responsive for me. If it was for personal use, I’d probably try IronCalc
- Comment on This whole community lately be like 1 month ago:
I’m out of the loop lol why is there so much corn in here today?
- Comment on Actual theft 1 month ago:
I think most of us are like that
Tech-savvy Lemmy users (and their friends) are a small portion of the population though. Plenty of people pay for cable TV, IPTV, or a similar service, as well as VOD platforms like Netflix.
- Comment on Actual theft 1 month ago:
Best Buy has been one of the best places to buy PC components like GPUs from (as long as they’re in stock), since they don’t mark up prices above the manufacturer’s pricing, and they price match with Microcenter in case Microcenter’s price is lower.
- Comment on It will be great, they said... 1 month ago:
I’m relaying through an MXRoute account but I’ve used SMTP2Go too and they have a decent free plan with 1000 emails per month.
- Comment on It will be great, they said... 1 month ago:
It doesn’t detect the settings
Autodiscovery needs DNS SRV entries to be added for each domain. The legacy Exchange- and Outlook-specific way was a file at
/autodiscover/autodiscover.xmlbut I don’t know if email clients still use that.I have to ignore the certificate warning
I’m not familiar with Stalwart but you should be able to use Let’s Encrypt certificates.
- Comment on How customer service jobs be 1 month ago:
This reminds me of a restaurant we have in Australia called “Lord of the Fries”.
So far I haven’t been able to find anything as good in the USA.
- Comment on It will be great, they said... 1 month ago:
I self-host my emails, but use an SMTP relay for sending. IMO, the interesting part of self hosting email is the storage
- Comment on When you eat too much oats and sleep 1 month ago:
How do you eat sleep?
- Comment on lemmy.world down... 1 month ago:
Yeah, a Black Friday sale.
They do have some deals always available, but the specs aren’t as good as the Black Friday ones: greencloudvps.com/billing/store/budget-kvm-sale
RackNerd also have some deals that are always available on their site. .
- Comment on lemmy.world down... 1 month ago:
I’m running mine on a ~$30/year VPS. It’s a small instance (just me) but it federates with all the major instances which means it still does a bunch of work (since it has to handle incoming posts and comments from federated servers).
For a medium-sized instance, I imagine you could get pretty far with a single <$100/month dedicated server from Hetzner or a similar provider.