Ease of access to internet porn, ruined my enjoyment of porn.

Let’s give this classic poem a tweak shall we…

First they came for the Communists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trans community (The UK is currently here) And I did not speak out Because I was not trans

Then they came for all people of colour (The USA is now here) And I did not speak out Because I was not a person of colour

Then they came for me And there was no one left To speak out for me

Not caring because it doesn’t directly affect you is how you end up on this road to fascism to begin with. It’s why there have been thousands of arrests of innocent people in the UK for simply protesting about a ban on a group of people who threw paint on some RAF planes and vandalised some genocide supporting israeli weapons manufacturer… because some people do care about others, because they have compassion and a conscience.

If the UK goes ahead with plans to ban protests entirely as they saying… those numbers will increase because it won’t stop the people and the numbers continue to grow and if you try to stamp it out, there will only be one way it ends… with state authorised violence and death against people protesting the killing of innocent civilians.

That’s the road you are on with that attitude, and then you’ll be screaming that last line and playing the victim.

No, it’s because imgur has refused to conduct the simple ‘are you over the age of XX’ when people create accounts, which is required by law… there’s no verification of anything involved. Just a tick the box exercise… they couldn’t even be bothered to do that and that’s why they’re being investigated and are facing massive fines for years of refusal to do what every other site has done for probably 2 decades now… It’s got nothing to do with the draconian online safety act that was recently brought in… it’s imgur throwing their toys out of the pram and screaming ‘LALALALALALALA’ we can’t hear you now. it will have zero effect on the investigation and fines for their previous failings to follow the law… it’s literally cutting of their nose to spite their face.

You’ve failed to understand the problem entirely… the entire internet asks users to confirm they are above a certain age when creating accounts… and that happened because the USA demanded it. There’s nothing authoritarian about it… it’s a simple ‘Are you over 13yrs of age’ and you tick yes… that was it.

Can you just browse other peoples uploads on there looking for funny pics and memes?

You’re not being asked to, the UK govt hasn’t done anything to them… they did this to themselves by failing to do anything about age verification long before the online safety act came in recently. This is about their failings over the prior years to do basic age checks that have been common on the internet for decades now… going dark in the UK doesn’t affect the ongoing investigations or the fines that will be imposed… they’re basically throwing their toys out of the pram and shouting LALALALALALALALA we can’t hear you anymore.

Imgur had gone to dogshit anyway, it’s no real loss and the new owners keep making it worse and after the last round of protests from users, went on a mass banning and censorship campaign to further alienate and anger the users they desperately need to shove an ever increasing amount of ads too.

Blame the right people… the greedy, ignorant techbros who want to extract every ounce of ad revenue they can to line their own pockets at the expense of killing the product they bought.

It’s been dying for a long time, the vpn blocking started ages ago and the UK block entirely was recent as they’re facing massive fines in the UK… nothing to do with the online safety act that recently came into effect… but due to an ongoing investigation over imgurs failure to do basic age checks at all… and blocking the UK is tantamount to them throwing their toys out of the pram and going LALALALALALALA we can’t hear you now. It won’t affect the investigations and fines over the years of failings prior to that.

After the last wave of protests over the shitty new owners and their repeated firings of staff and the degredation of the service… they went on a mass banning and censorship spree and further alienated the users. I can’t imagine there are that many left there now.

Not worth the effort trying to get around it… there are alternatives that are actually better.

For people thinking about taking up this offer, make sure you have a large enough garden, and know that your insurance will increase your premiums if you have a tree within 5 meters of the property… because tree roots can damage the foundations and potentially void your insurance if you fail to inform them.

I think the jist of my reasoning is quite simple… people need to be willing to put up with a fraction more inconvenience, perhaps get used to waiting a few extra days for a delivery. I cancelled my prime almost 2yrs ago, get a lot more stuff locally, sometimes being prepared to pay a little extra because I know I’ll get better quality products. I have a thing with my feet called supination (both feet roll outwards slightly) that caused me pain and injuries. After a gait analysis, I was recommended a specific type of ‘rocker’ style footware (good running shoes are perfect) and orthotics to go in them. it’s transformed my ability to walk and reduced my pain. But those shoes aren’t cheap, nor are the orthotics. I got the first pair from amazon a few years ago. I decided to get a waterproof pair for winter and extra orthotics as I should replace those every 4-6 months at least.

I found buying the running shoes direct from the maker, was no different than amazon, and found specialist online sellers of the orthotics that were 10% cheaper. I buy 2 pairs of orthotics a year and replace one pair of trainers each year… so summer ones one year, winter ones the next… and each pair does me at least 18 months… and I now subscribe to the Samuel Vimes theory of socioeconimic unfairness.

The old saying, “you can have things cheap, quality or quick, but can only pick two”. is how I’ve adjusted my life now and you know what… it’s improved it a huge amount.

The only way to win, is not to play. Cancel your prime, shop elsewhere and you ‘WILL’ get better deals, for those of you in the UK and EU, ALWAYS use a credit card for online purchases, as that gives you even better protections.

Shop locally, support businesses in your community, because the money you spend there, gets spent there over and over again. When you spend it in chain stores and online, that money is sucked out of your community.

I get it though… some people only care about the convenience of the deal, and that’s the real cause of enshitification… the peoples failure to care about the effort they put into things… In effect it’s a form of laziness and conditioning, people value their convenience above and beyond anything else. We see it in everything, social media is amongst the very worst of it, with friends complaining that they can’t keep in touch because ‘you’re not on (insert SM name here)’… because the effort of stepping outside the bubble they’ve been sucked into is far too inconvenient for them, and you get to find out that these people are not really your friends… they never were, because they’re convenience was always more important than your existence to them.

As for amazon, brands have woken up… do a search for something and you’ll rarely find anything from those branded manufacturers… only 3rd party sellers and cheap crappy chinese knock-offs. Items that don;t even meant safety standards in the country they being sold in. Electrical goods that are a fire hazard and have caused loss of life… and amazon keeps getting away with it because ‘3rd party sellers’ not them.

The only way to win is not to play… cancel your subscriptions, stop using their services, stop buying digital goods that can be taken away from you. Return to physical media that actually ends up being cheaper in the long run. You are the consumer, you have the power… hell… try going without a few times, you don’t actually need that cheap piece of plastic crap you just ordered to save yourself a few minutes of ‘prep’ time in the kitchen that will break after a couple of weeks or be consigned the back of a cupboard after a few uses and forgotten about.

You have the power… use it better.

If you are in the UK and you tunnel into your home via VPN… you are still in the UK, you need to connect to a VPN service/server outside of the UK.

I lay in bed at night looking up at the stars and the only thing I’m thinking is ‘Where the fuck is my ceiling’

I pay for netflix… dumped prime a couple of years ago and got given disney+ for free for 12 months. I have my own server and am on version 3.2 of it after my first dedicated one I built in 2009. I’ve kinda had others before then, but it was an old PC I hooked up to my old CRT tv in about 2002 which struggled to play some mpeg2 content due to the weak single core CPU it had in it.

Now it’s running on an AM4 setup with a Ryzen 5 5600G, so I can use the PCIE socket that used to have a GPU in it for a SATA expansion card, so that I can triple the number of HDD’s it could hold. I’m slowly going through it once a year replacing the oldest 6TB drives (without about 80,000+hrs of uptime on them) with 14TB archive drives I rip out of seagate external drives. 4 more to go… to add to the 4 already done.

I think my first dedicated server had 3TB of storage (2x 1.5TB) and I still have one of those drives in an external drive that I use occasionally to fill with movies and shows when I go away and take one of my shield tv boxes with me… but mostly I take an external 500gb ssd as it doesn’t require a power supply and I rarely have enough time to watch 1TB of movies and shows whilst away.

Over the last 15yrs, it’s been rebuilt a few times and upgrade many… adding extra drives, swapping out CPU’s and so on. 3 ground up builds with the last one being built in 2020… Normally when I build a new system for myself, the mediaserver gets upgraded with my old parts… Hence the last one being on windows 7 and an AMD FX 8350 with DDR3 ram until mid 2020.

Currently about 70TB capacity.

My next one will have a dedicated raid setup with parity… it’s the one thing I’ve never been able to do with such a random collection of different size drives… hence normalizing them all to the same kind of 14TB ones.

I’m not an electrician, but all ‘new’ electrical work here in the UK requires a certified electrician carries out and signs of on the work. They can inspect and test existing electrics, but only to say if it meets minimum standards or not and is safe to use.

On my current house, we converted a garage and utility room into a bedroom and ensuite for my mum. Even though there were some electrics (2 sockets and 3 lights), we effectively had it all redone from scratch, with the electrics for that entire job placed on it’s own ‘breaker’

I then had another bedroom and ensuite reworked, not really much in the way of new wiring… mostly just moving existing stuff around (sockets, switches and isolators for extractors), but still signed of and certified by an electrician.

Redoing existing electrics is fine, so you can replace switches and sockets, light fittings and so forth without any issues.

Manchester police had a higher body count than the attacker is not the kind of headline that makes them look good.

Sounds familiar… my previous house had old storage heaters at some point in the past. Before I bought it, central heating had been installed and the old storage heaters removed.

I found they had installed a secondary consumer unit for the storage heaters, and so had that disconnected fully. But they’d left all of the old boxes on the walls with old cabling in trunking when the house was rewired before proper standards banned running it all down the walls.

So when I did the bathroom, I had to remove one of these old disconnected boxes and patch some tiling. So I got the box off, went to cut the wires with my wire cutters… and thank fuck I was using insulated ones… Because… BANG!!! sparks and a very shocked (not literally) expression on my face.

For some reason… this box was still wired into the main consumer unit. I pulled the fuse to it completely as it was only for that and nothing else. And was having a new consumer unit fitted anyway as the house was going to be sold and I wanted it all sorted.

Then the electrician fitting the new consumer unit… found that the entire ground for the whole of the houses electrics… had been disconnected at some point in the past.

I’d lived there for over 12yrs and could have been killed at any point.

I still occasionally pick up CD’s, as I do for blurays… I’ll check out charity shops if I pass them, go to car boots… it’s why I keep an old BDrom in my server, so I can rip the files from them, convert and have them available to stream around the house.

I roast mine

About 12yrs ago, I picked up a Tassimo machine that made coffee from pods… over the next few years, I added a milk steamer, so that I could heat and froth my own milk as the pod milks were vile.

I was used to buying lattes at shitty coffee places like Costa and Starbucks in the UK… then some one made me an amazing latte at an independent coffee shop… and I realised how good coffee should taste.

I tried switching to my own ground coffee and buying some re-useable pods for the machine… they were garbage.

So a few years ago, I invested in a decent bean to cup machine with steamer by Delohngi, and started buying a variety of beans to try in them.

I’ve settled on Lavazza crema or intenso beans (8/10 & 9/10) as they’re quite strong and reasonably priced… Occasionally when I visit one of the food fairs in my area (about 5 or 6 a year) I’ll pick up a bag of extra special flavours for xmas and so forth. I’ve even tried a few of the supermarket varieties and found them disappointing.

With the price of coffee rising due to climate change and poor crops, I’m having to rethink my purchases… 4x 1kg bags of beans used to cost £60, and are now more like £100… So I’ve switched to a different lavazza now as they’vce changed packaging and these are labelled 11/13 and 10/13 for strength.

Whilst I was saving a lot of money each year by ditching pods… it was more about the waste than the expense for me… the cost of the machine meant I didn’t actually save any money for about 2yrs really due to the upfront cost, but the savings each year on beans vs pods is about £125-150… and the machine was £320.

But with prices of coffee beans rising, the cost of the pods is rising even more… so those avg savings could be more like £175-200 a year now.

All I know is that the coffee beans work out cheaper, give a far better drink and the grounds help keep the cats of the garden and the soil fresh and fertile.

I used to have a wileyfox phone using cyanogen OS, which was a fork of android with a lot of security and privacy features. That forked again into lineage OS at some point in the latter half of the 2010’s.

I mostly stuck with motorola phones after that, as close to a vanilla OS as possible without going google… but I stupidly bought a Pixel 6 Pro about 2.5yrs ago… the price was hard to ignore, but regretted it ever since.

I only replace phones when the become obsolete and security is an issue, or the phone actually fails… this one is going strong and I keep meaning to look if it can easily be jailbroken to install and alt OS… But it’s been a very long time since I did anything like that and I find myself falling behind on modern tech stuff as I get into middle age.