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Simon Hewison

@zymurgic@mastodon.online

mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06

Cycling, climbing, making, fixing, walking, instilling commuters. Standard nerd

111 Followers

195 Following

35 Posts

Joined November 02, 2022

www:

http://www.zymurgy.org/~simon/

Simon Hewison @zymurgic@mastodon.online

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@medwds@infosec.exchange @khleedril@cyberplace.social @andypiper@macaw.social It's both. HMRC should vet conferencing suppliers they use to make sure they abide by government accessibility standards, and GoTo really shouldn't build anything that is vendor-specific if they're intending the general public to use their systems.

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Simon Hewison @zymurgic@mastodon.online

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@Francehelder@mastodon.social That's a blatant rip-off of my own apps. Naughty Claude!

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Simon Hewison @zymurgic@mastodon.online

· 5mo ago

21km on the bikes yesterday, 11km on foot today. Good for our souls, as Cunk would say. #silentsunday

mastodon.online

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Simon Hewison @zymurgic@mastodon.online

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@aparrish@friend.camp I'd argue wanting autonomy from the state, and to be free from outside interference in your life and knowing how stuff works is also your typical redneck right wing or moderate right wing mentality. I think we need a new political spectrum. This one's faulty.

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Simon Hewison @zymurgic@mastodon.online

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@jonty@chaos.social can you do a Google "Assistant" one as well?

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Simon Hewison @zymurgic@mastodon.online

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@jonty@chaos.social @emf@social.emfcamp.org we have here an exquisite example of handmade jewellery with just a hint of radioactive isotopes. DROP AND RUN. Call now! Stocks are limited

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Simon Hewison @zymurgic@mastodon.online

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@Edent@mastodon.social Barcelona: If you happen to be a Spanish national, download an app (only valid on Catalan public transport), set up an a pre-pay account, but you must provide your Spanish national ID. Everyone else: Buy paper tickets where vending machines exist, paper travelcards available online for collection at ticket vending machines at major stations.

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Simon Hewison @zymurgic@mastodon.online

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@sheddi@mstdn.party @revk@toot.me.uk @Walrus@toot.wales @Edent@mastodon.social isn't that why the DNOs are currently suggesting to lower the official supply voltage in the UK to a lower voltage, to closer to the official 230v from the traditional 240v ish, to create more headroom?

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Simon Hewison @zymurgic@mastodon.online

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@CodeWithSushil@mastodon.social it should offer asynchronous processing out of the box, no extensions needed. Doesn't mean programmers are forced to use threads etc. I wouldn't go so far as defaulting things like foreach as spawning threads, because concurrency and locking can catch the unwary programmer out, but it is mad to have a CPU with 64 cores if a long-running process uses just one.

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Simon Hewison @zymurgic@mastodon.online

· 5mo ago

Found an old Liverpool City Council tree preservation order poster. Shades of #WelcomeToScarfolk @Richard_Littler@mastodon.social

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Simon Hewison @zymurgic@mastodon.online

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@bloor I'm hoping that at some point all the foodstuffs in the UK won't have 'NOT FOR EU' on the packaging any more. Perhaps the politicians will see the folly of unnecessarily diverging from perfectly reasonable food production standards.

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Simon Hewison @zymurgic@mastodon.online

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@k3ym0 I did long ago work out that DNS is jolly good at distributing fairly static hierarchical datasets, because it inherently caches. For instance, they were once used to route faxes to appropriate gateways on the old tpc.int email to fax service. I also worked out a postcode to address and postcode geocoding schema.

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Simon Hewison @zymurgic@mastodon.online

· 8mo ago

Replying to on mastodon.social

@taylorlorenz@mastodon.social imagine picking and choosing what to read rather than having if rammed down your throat with 'suggested content ' that you can't avoid, where you are the algorithm.

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Simon Hewison @zymurgic@mastodon.online

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@neil 'We have the right to refuse or remove any User-Generated Content that, in our sole discretion, violates any laws or any of our terms or policies.' So, if someone's calendar entries refer to something that /may/ be illegal or questionable in another legal jurisdiction, they might just delete that entry without warning? I can think of certain medical appointments.

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Simon Hewison @zymurgic@mastodon.online

· 5mo ago

Sound of swarming bees today, but it wasn't from any of my hives, they were travelling across the village to find their new home. Just happened to fly overhead #beekeeping

mastodon.online

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Simon Hewison @zymurgic@mastodon.online

· 5mo ago

First real swarm of the season caught. Nice and easy, low branch on a street tree. #beekeeping

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Simon Hewison @zymurgic@mastodon.online

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@penguin42 @bloor and the NI export problem is only there because of taxation divergence and food standards divergence.

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Simon Hewison @zymurgic@mastodon.online

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@0x47df It's not doing some age verification nonsense is it?

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Simon Hewison @zymurgic@mastodon.online

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@colin_mcmillen I have in the past resorted to a DB25 and a hacksaw when I couldn't source a DB23.

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Simon Hewison @zymurgic@mastodon.online

· 7mo ago

Replying to

@ArneBab@rollenspiel.social @jwildeboer@social.wildeboer.net

Get your outbound IP address ranges from a reputable supplier, ie not lowest-common-denominator mass-market retail ISP. L2TP tunnel them to where your system is hosted from a reputable supplier if you have to.
Matching Forward/Reverse DNS.
DMARC, DKIM, SPF.
Never send anything unsolicited to anyone ever.
Only ever email existing customers about updates to their current services or their current orders.
Use a domain name that isn't new with good reputation.

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Simon Hewison @zymurgic@mastodon.online

· 7mo ago

Replying to on social.wildeboer.net

@jwildeboer@social.wildeboer.net very much depends how simple your system is and the external dependencies. I find that running my own email easier and less fiddling around than outsourcing that, self-hosting plain git is trivial, limiting use of AI to dedicated models in niche use cases rather than massive LLM means it's easier to host. But then, I've had decades of application hosting and ISP experience so know the pitfalls.

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Simon Hewison @zymurgic@mastodon.online

· 8mo ago

Replying to

@llamasoft_ox@toot.wales reminds me of a Black Mirror episode about ad-supported brain implants.

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Simon Hewison @zymurgic@mastodon.online

· 12mo ago

Replying to

@Em0nM4stodon@infosec.exchange or proxy or VPN your requests via an IP address associated with a free country? They will see fewer connections from oppressive regimes and more from the more obscure countries that don't demand everyone is tracked.

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Simon Hewison @zymurgic@mastodon.online

· 20mo ago

Replying to

@kravietz@agora.echelon.pl DNS zone now no longer serving SOA or NS records. Just an NXDOMAIN.

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Simon Hewison @zymurgic@mastodon.online

· 7mo ago

Replying to

@jwildeboer@social.wildeboer.net also, regarding keeping things simple. if your business model doesn't depend on third party ad placement on your pages or analytics then it makes GDPR a breeze, no cookie banners needed. That in itself is a huge sales conversion benefit if you don't need to interrupt the flow with unnecessary interruptions. #ux #gdpr

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Simon Hewison @zymurgic@mastodon.online

· 5mo ago

@ubuntu@ubuntu.social looks like releases.ubuntu.com is advertising IPv6 addresses in the DNS that have no routing.

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Simon Hewison @zymurgic@mastodon.online

· 10mo ago

Replying to

@AMS@infosec.exchange @hisold@toot.io @dentangle@chaos.social or unnecessarily changing your entire IPv6 prefix without warning just because they still have address space rarity and dialup on the brain.

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Simon Hewison @zymurgic@mastodon.online

· 7mo ago

Replying to

@stacksmashing@infosec.exchange if their host has more 3 active physical network interfaces, they clearly know what they're doing and know more than any dumb politician. If they only have IPv6 active then they know more than most ISPs.

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Simon Hewison @zymurgic@mastodon.online

· 7mo ago

Replying to

@TobiasFrech@ijug.social @jwildeboer@social.wildeboer.net @ArneBab@rollenspiel.social I use #Exim , which 30 years ago was fantastically easy to set up compared to #sendmail . There's other mail transports that are even easier these days to setup with all the modern tweaks. I've heard good reports about #mailcow but I've not tried it myself.

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Simon Hewison @zymurgic@mastodon.online

· 12mo ago

Replying to

@Doveux@meow.social I did try it once decades ago but it gave me quite an irritating headache.

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Simon Hewison @zymurgic@mastodon.online

· 5mo ago

@neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk an elephantine 64 kilobytes of RAM.

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Simon Hewison @zymurgic@mastodon.online

· 8mo ago

Replying to

@osm_tech I wonder if the culprit will ever come forward, apologise, and change their ways? Someone tasked these proxy scrapers with ridiculous requests. Have they been targeting the main OSM API, the website interface designed for humans, or Overpass?

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Simon Hewison @zymurgic@mastodon.online

· 7mo ago

Replying to

@diffrentcolours @mattgrayyes no there is not. When I first got my ebike in 2009, the charger was rather massive. That charger eventually failed and the official replacement was considerably smaller and gained an IEC input. That made it easier to carry around. A detachable battery pack helps too. It still charges just as slow as ever, but was great when I was commuting 1h20 each end of the day.

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Simon Hewison @zymurgic@mastodon.online

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@anon_opin@mastodon.social or someone sneezed when drawing a line on a title plan 50 years ago and they find that their neighbour across the street accidentally owns your front porch. Yes, if everything is known and agreed correct, it could technically be done the same day, but there's often more exceptions than normal process.

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Simon Hewison @zymurgic@mastodon.online

· 7mo ago

Replying to

@jbond @mattgrayyes not a bad idea, since most ebike batteries don't charge particularly fast. Ditto for power tools. There's no reason why my drill batteries don't have USB-C PD at least as an option. Only problem is most plug socket USB C supplies of the sort you find in cafes and trains only do +5V not the full PD spec.

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