The Dark Hedges. Not our number one tourist destination, but probably the most overrated one. It’s some trees that appeared in Game of Thrones and the over-tourism + the increase in stormy weather thanks to climate change is killing them.
We’ve more popular places like the Giant’s Causeway and the Derry walls, but those places are worth visiting at least.
I graduated university a couple years ago and I felt in the same boat coming up to final exams. Like others have said, you almost certainly know more than you think. You’re at the start of the final year as well so you have a lot of time to get ready.
Most IT/programming jobs will train you on the job and I haven’t heard of anyone coming into a role who’s expected to know everything, so I wouldn’t worry about that too much. Getting the job will be the harder part, and the best thing I did was to consider my past experience and apply to jobs tightly related to that. I’ll not dox myself so these will be fake details but that meant if I’d done a work experience position doing tech support for an accountancy firm, I’d have focused my applications on those companies. If you have a final year project to complete for a dissertation, see if you can tailor that to what you think are your best chances of a job. E.g. you did work experience doing IT support for a law firm, and your final year project has to be related to improving human rights, so you could develop a CRUD application to connect defendants to good pro bono lawyers. If there are law firms near you hiring for IT, that sort of thing that will help you stand out in an interview with them. I think I did only two interviews before getting a job offer with that tactic and I know others with the same degree who graduated the same day as me that still haven’t found anything.
And outside of uni/college, is there anything in IT and computer science that interests you? I found that university killed my joy for it and I’ve only rediscovered it since graduating. Building a JavaScript web app for my final year project, led me to wanting to program some discord bots, from there onto using a raspberry pi to host them, and then into doing some self hosting and networking with the likes of Docker and WireGuard. Some of that has come in handy in work, especially when using linux servers, but it’s stuff I do cause I just enjoy it and it so happens to give me some experience. There are tons of open-source projects you can work on to get experience with different parts of IT, and you’re on a good website for it since most of us on here are Linux nerds.
That’s a fair point. I suppose like any movement there’s a wide spectrum of people and one end of the spectrum would be those who are as strict as that. I don’t think it’s very productive to be that strict though, certainly where I live and with the health conditions I have it would be impossible to live life so strictly compared to someone in top health living in a major city.
There is a surprising amount of debate over that in vegan circles. Beyond Meat taste test their burgers against cow burgers to compare the flavour and some vegans will say you can’t consider those burgers vegan while others would say it’s a very small amount of animal consumption to allow for a vegan burger that might help convert more people and so the benefit outweights the harm massively. I’m vegan and I don’t really know what side to lean towards, but there’s debate over everything from honey to almonds, and debate on whether it’s acceptable to order vegan food from non-vegan restaurants, just as examples.
Shizuku + Canta on f-droid are great for accomplishing this as well, you just start wireless debugging and tick the apps you want to uninstall.
I deleted mine in January, after all the tech CEOs went to kiss the ring at the US inauguration. I don’t trust them at all to delete anything but at least they aren’t getting more data from me.
I’ve had my account since 2012 when I got a Nexus 4 so a lot of my life was tied up in it. It’s not something you can just up and decide to do one day and I’d been working my way to deletion since last summer and just went faster with the process in January. If you self-host things it makes it easier because there’s a lot of good replacements for their services e.g. nextcloud if you need an office suite, immich to replace Google photos. So I’ve got thirteen years of my life backed up to a raspberry pi sitting under my TV instead of being mined on a google server to train an LLM.
The only issue I’ve had is my phone keeps complaining that I’m not signed in with a google account, and there’s a few email addresses I hadn’t updated from gmail to my new accounts. But it’s been surprisingly plain sailing without having an account, and at least one of those issues will be sorted by moving to a phone with custom ROM support.
+1 for Navidrome. As simple as pasting the album into the directory and it sorts the rest. I use subtune on my phone to access it and it works great.
Two kids smeered their shit on the bathroom walls then climbed on the roof. There was some much more serious stuff but that was the funnier one I guess.
It was in the countryside as well, so we’d get a farm animal wandering about the grounds about once a year which was always exciting.
I don’t remember much innuendo on the sites I played as a child (club penguin, bin weevils) although I’ve got vague memories that the censoring was so severe you could learn swear words based off seemingly innocent words being blocked out of the chat. The bigger issue at that age was how exploitative some of those sites were with microtransactions and I can only imagine it’s gotten worse with the current MMO’s for kids.
There was one I briefly played as a child where one of the starting missions was growing something in a garden but if you were a free playing customer you had to plant in the public garden and wait 24 hours, so I’d come back the next day and find someone had stolen the stuff I’d grown and couldn’t progress. It was a weird way to learn about wealth inequality and the privileges wealthier kids got at the age of seven.
There was another site advertised on one of the kids TV channels here when I was younger that encouraged kids to sign up and mark off the chores they’d completed and each chore you completed netted you a prize like a trip to Disneyland. What the ad didn’t tell us at that young age was that your parents would have to pay for the prizes through the sites affiliate link. I think I was at least mature enough by that stage to understand we’d been had and it wasn’t my parents fault but it’s crazy that nearly twenty years later the internet’s somehow gotten worse for exploiting kids for micro transactions.
I’ve tried tailscale and cloudflare tunnels in the past and ended up just using PiVPN to set up a WireGuard VPN on my Pi5. Tailscale for some reason was very slow for me, and cloudflare tunnels have a 100mb limit iirc which isn’t ideal for streaming. PiVPN is quite straightforward, it sets everything up for you and all you have to do is forward a UDP port. That was the bit I was most worried about, but, unless I’ve misunderstood something, because a UDP port will just ignore invalid requests to the outside world it will appear closed so it’s not very risky. It then generates a key for each device which you can scan from a QR code onto your VPN client. I have my phone set to auto-connect to the tunnel when I disconnect from my home wifi network and the tunnel is fast enough that I’ve accidentally turned off my phone’s wifi connection before and streamed a TV show through the tunnel over mobile data and not noticed any difference in speed.
They seem pretty good for not trapping too much heat, but we have quite cool summers here so what I would consider an unbearably hot day is probably different to most people. I could comfortably sleep in it under 24°C, anything above that and I can’t sleep no matter what type of blanket I have anyway. There are cooling ones made of cotton that might work if you’re in a hotter climate but they cost a fair bit more.
I love mine. Being able to play Baldur’s Gate 3 on a handheld feels insane, never mind playing it multiplayer with a bunch of mods and it still running fairly smoothly. They’ve really improved the rendering for BG3 since the final patch came out. Emudeck has been great for reliving some childhood nostalgia as well.
Saying that, 90% of the time I’m using it as a balatro machine.
No. Even in the summer during a heatwave I was sleeping with a 15 tog duvet because I need the weight, until I got a weighted blanket which is much more comfortable. I can fall asleep on the couch without a blanket though which is weird, just not in bed.
Not just the time theft but they have become unreasonably privacy invading. When I still used Reddit last year, despite having targeted ads disabled & Android apps supposedly being sandboxed, I got ads related to my workplace after accepting a job offer, car ads after installing a used car sales app, and ads for snake oil related to a chronic health condition I have that I’d been researching. Now that I’m off corporate social media and have pi-hole running & uBlock origin in my browser, I haven’t seen a single targeted ad all year. When I deleted my Meta accounts I requested my data first and I could see the companies I had bought from that then told Meta I’d been shopping there which was really eye-opening as to how bad it is.
That’s good to hear! I’ve ADBed almost all of the Google & Samsung stuff off my phone already so I’m well used to fighting with Aurora to download certain apps by now. Nearly all my apps are from F-droid as well so that will make the transition a lot easier, and I do a lot of self hosting so I’m not relying on any proprietary services that are going to demand play services be installed. Balatro on my steam deck already steals enough of my time, so honestly if my phone won’t let me install it that’s probably for the best.
Going from One UI 6 to One UI 7 on a Samsung has made me very excited to go get a used pixel or fairphone and install a custom ROM instead. Absolutely abysmal update.
I have an S24, Gemini can be safely removed using Canta but is sometimes reinstalled when Samsung push out updates which is annoying. You can disable the play store without causing a boot loop but as far as I can tell there’s no way around play services since it can’t be disabled. I’m just making do with this phone for now and plan to get something I can install a custom ROM on later but it really sucks.
I’ve correctly predicted the result of every US & UK election (plus the brexit referendum) since 2016, based mostly on vibes
It looks like the British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, which would make sense because Wikipedia are in a court battle with the UK government at the minute over age verification rules to protect the privacy of their users. They might end up geoblocking the whole country rather than remove anonymity from the site
Also an autistic vegan here! I’d wager that the % of autistic people in the vegan community is higher than in the general population. I didn’t do it for any health reasons, but going vegan was a nice way to find out I’m lactose intolerant and food isn’t supposed to hurt.