Unfortunately I already read the headline, is there anywhere I can offload this now unnecessary excitement?

Python in Excel would be great, but nerfing it with some ridiculous cloud dependency is crazy. They could still paywall the feature if they really wanted while still running the Python interpretation locally.

I suppose we should be grateful they hadn’t also stuck ChatGPT on to it too so it could (badly) write the Python for you. Tech by buzzword will be the death of us I’m sure.

They both have security features to lock out unauthorised users. But there has been a cat and mouse game of hackers finding exploits to bypass the device locks, and platform developers patching them to secure the devices again. There have also been various schemes using rogue employees of phone companies to get illegitimate access to official tools that can unlock devices.

So sometimes the phones can be unlocked. But failing that, there is also a thriving black market for phone parts salvaged for stolen phones.

Nope, “Thread” and “Matter” are smart device protocols. “Threads” is a microblogging platform by “Meta”, the owner of Facebook and Instagram. Tech companies suck at naming things.

Neither are to confused with the delightfully grim 1984 movie “Threads” about a nuclear apocalypse, or maybe they should be considering the possibly doomed trajectory both may be headed for.

A company that builds tools for remote working, doesn’t believe in remote working? That doesn’t seem a great look.

With Google search results increasingly swamped with SEO-laden drivel, I’ve found the gap between Google and alternatives like Qwant and DDG has shrunk a lot recently. The little guys have improved a bit, but Google has also got worse.

Twitter is now X as the little blue bird disappears

I thought the the new logo was the X11 logo at first, they are bit similar.

Also a bit ironic seeing as Musk wants Twitter X to be an “everything app”, while X11’s cruft and bloated featureset have led to it being replaced by Wayland.

It’s not entirely untrue. Electric vehicles tend to be heavier than petrol or diesel vehicles, and heavier vehicles cause more wear to road surfaces than lighter ones.

That isn’t to say electric vehicles are bad idea because of that though.

The internet used to be more decentralised. There were lots of smaller websites, blogs, forums etc, which people discovered via word of mouth, search engines, and forgotten things like webrings. It’s only recently that big monolithic social media platforms took hold.

Tech is often cyclical, we could now be swinging back to a more decentralised web, but with the benefit of newer technologies. Right now it’s almost a new “wild west” as new platforms appear and new ideas like federation are experimented with. Some will rise, some will fall, some will go off in the corner and do their own thing. While all that happens it’s going to be a bit messy, much like it was in the 90s with the initial rise of the web.

PiVPN is a simple home VPN solution that’s worth exploring.

Is you are interested in smart home/home automation Home Assistant is an open source home automation platform and makes a great Pi project.

Wow, this is impressive. Already seems quite stable, I got it running straight away on a headless machine with an Intel i5-7400T running Ubuntu 22.04. I think I need to do some optimising, but I can already use it as a somewhat convoluted way to get proper adblocking on an iPad!

I noticed a small mistake in the docs - the docker run command in the quickstart is missing a backslash.

The PulseAudio container also doesn’t stop when the main wolf container stops - not sure if that’s expected behaviour or not.

I’m excited to see where this project goes, I can see a bunch of uses for this running graphical application remotely.

Yes, it’s a sad state of affairs that Apple’s restrictions on iOS and iPadOS browsers are the only thing stopping an effective Google monopoly over web browsers. Ideally Firefox would still keep things in balance, but Mozilla doesn’t seem to know what it’s doing these days in terms of building market share - and I say that as a long time Firefox user.

I still remember the IE 6 era, and I hope we never see a single browser dominate the web again. To those wishing Apple would be forced to open up, be careful what you wish for.

Blink has diverged enough from WebKit that they are separate engines now. KHTML has been sadly laid to rest.

It’s a miserable state of affairs that we are effectively down to just 3 browser engines now, Blink, WebKit and Gecko. But with the ever increasing scope and complexity of web standards I don’t see that changing, unless someone throws a lot of extra support at the Servo project.

Some older people in the UK still prefer Fahrenheit, Celsius is still the official/default unit however.

A politician here recently tried to promote returning the UK to Imperial units, it has gone nowhere so far.

I’m not sure I would accept Reddit paying me to go back, let alone me paying to use Reddit. The API debacle has laid bare the problem with centralised, proprietary social media - the users who create the value of the platform ultimately have no control over the platform. If it wasn’t APIs and third party apps it could by anything else.

Why invest time (and money) contributing to something that could be pulled out from our feet at any point, with no recourse?

As a Pokemon fan I understand your pain. It’s not like it’s an obscure series, or from a small company. Why is it so hard to stream such a popular anime? I’m surprised The Pokemon Company hasn’t rolled out their own streaming platform yet.

Before diving in to Plex I would highly recommend looking at Jellyfin first also. It’s offers much the same features as Plex but is fully free and open source.

For my own media server I use an old HP Microserer G8 purchased second hand, and upgraded with a Xeon e3-1260L, also sourced cheaply used. It’s small, easy to service and happily runs my Linux disro of choice. I know other people using various SFF PCs, or even repurposed old desktops. For best performance look for a CPU (or GPU) with hardware video encoding support. Otherwise, the rule of thumb for Plex used to be a CPU with at least 2000 Passmark score on cpubenchmark.net per concurrent 1080p stream.

The article says the Japanese government is still working on the exact regulations to be implemented. Perhaps the Japanese government will require the platforms to promote other options somehow - similar to the browser choice screen the EU mandated Microsoft add to Windows to increase web browser competition.

Google does not block 3rd party app stores, but most users do not use or even know of them, and 90%+ of all apps are still downloaded/purchased from the Play Store.

It’s still a bigger change for Apple though, who block any third party software from outside the App Store entirely. As the EU are also heading in the same direction, maybe Apple will eventually cave and allow third party software sources globally. There were rumours that they would do this for EU customers only at one point, but if more and more countries adopt similar laws it will cause a lot of fragmentation.