I don’t like musicals but this film is amazing, truly one of a kind. Absolutely worth watching!

That’s a strong wrist. Too much self-pleasure!

Circumference, not width

What’s sobe?

Yep, we have the same system in the UK. In fact, the envelope looks almost exactly the same so they might even be printed by the same company.

You get two envelopes (one big, one small), a postal voting statement, and a ballot paper.

The actual ballot paper just has a list of options for you to put your X against; there’s no personally identifiable information on it. Once you’ve filled it out you seal it in the small envelope.

You then fill in the voting statement (it has your name and address on it so they can cross your name off as voted, and you sign it so they can check your signature matches the one on file) and both that and the sealed ballot go in the big envelope. That way your vote is still private because they check the vote is valid in one step and then add your ballot to a pile to be counted with the others in a second step, at which point it’s anonymous.

https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/voting-and-elections/ways-vote/how-vote-post

A… slab? Of wine?

Is that a whole pallet or something?

People are mostly talking about what a bunch of idiots they are though.

This lot look like they were cast by the daily mail, they couldn’t be more of a caricature. It is absolutely not effective communication.

I get your point but hydrogen isn’t just sea water, you’ve got an awful lot more energy to put in after the “tank is full so wrap up the hose and drive off” stage to separate the hydrogen from oxygen to get the fuel. The difficult bit comes after “get water”.

On the one hand, this is embarrassing for Russia, but on the other hand the UK’s Trident nuclear deterrent failed a couple of times in a row over the last few years, so I’m not going to get too excited about it.

Are those things in the middle at the back soft pretzels? They look like conkers (horse chestnuts), confused the hell out of me!

Is this global news?

The irony of the autistic person using a metaphor, and someone else taking it too literally. You have to laugh!

Checking in

I’m not from the US so sorry if this is a dumb question, but why would this push the court leftwards for 30+ years? Wouldn’t the republicans just pack the court at the next opportunity to swing it back in their favour?

I started in 2012, and it wasn’t that difficult. I’d say I do about 30mins of maintenance every other month. It took me a while to work out the config originally, but I wrote a guide afterwards which was really popular for other people doing the same thing (it’s quite out of date now but the principles are the same).

Started out using a raspberry pi (which was also hosting a website at the time) but when I moved house to somewhere with a worse internet connection I migrated to a VPS, so there is a cost but it’s not enormous, maybe £20/month.

Don’t even bother if you can’t use a static IP, because all your email will be bounced if your PTR record for the IP (reverse DNS record) doesn’t match your domain name.

It got a bit more complicated when people started adding extra layers of spam protection like SPF, DKIM and DMARC, but those are mostly set and forget.

Overall, I’d say it’s worth it but only because I find it quite interesting/fun.

Google is unavoidable but I do my best to mitigate the worst parts of their privacy intrusions.

I have a pixel phone running grapheneOS with Google Services Framework installed but without Google Play or Gboard or any of that stuff. For me that’s a balance that works.

I host my own email server so no Gmail.

I also host my own Matrix server and avoid WhatsApp where possible (not Google but just as bad if not worse).

I use YouTube but via Newpipe or using Ublock origin on Firefox (not logged in obviously).

Chrome is genuinely worse than Firefox now that Google have made adblocking more difficult with manifest v3.

You just have to decide what the best tradeoff is between privacy and convenience.

Redreader uses the official API, they have an exception from paying (for now) because they have accessibility features that most apps including the official one lack.

You’d think they would be cool with kissing, seeing as they are all wearing Lycra already…

Well it does seem that more people would vote for trump against her as well as more people vote for her. So maybe it’s legit?

Doesn’t Biden have a broken foot that hasn’t healed very well and makes him shuffle around a bit?