Last June, fans of Comedy Central – the long-running channel behind beloved programmes such as The Daily Show and South Park – received an unwelcome surprise. Paramount Global, Comedy Central’s parent company, unceremoniously purged the vast repository of video content on the channel’s website, which dated back to the late 1990s.

Has anyone got some experience/advice for choosing between the options? It seems like they are:

• Minio
• Garage
• SeaweedFS

My usecase is just to have a local single instance for testing apps against. I prefer to spin stuff up in Docker on the homelab.

*What rights do you have to the digital movies, TV shows and music you buy online? That question was on the minds of Telstra TV Box Office customers this month after the company announced it would shut down the service in June. Customers were told that unless they moved over to another service, Fetch, they would no longer be able to access the films and TV shows they had bought. *

I started on Elitedesk 800 G1s when Raspberry Pis got hard to find and expensive, and I now feel they are better in every respect if you don't need the GPIO pins.

Every time I open them up to upgrade something I'm impressed with the level of engineering. There are quality manufacturer manuals for them, the cooling is good and they look great

The P20iX is a tacticool type 21700 size light. It's very floody - perfect for inside buildings or close range outside where you need a big field of view, and bright enough at 4000 lumens .

The bumps on the front are something super tough for breaking car windows etc - so I guess aimed at first responder types. I quite like the double clicky tail switch. One is a really solid on/off click and the other cycles between light levels.

It has two modes, I use it in the everyday mode where it remembers the light brightness from when you turned it off. There also a hard core mode where it always turns on in max.

The hard plastic holster has a hole in the bottom, which I assume is to avoid melting it with the 4 x 4 x CREE XP-L2V6 leds, but I have occasionally just turned it on in the holster for general lighting if I needed both hands.

Since it's quite easy to pull it out of the holster, I do have a slight worry that it will come out by itself if I'm clambering around somewhere - but it never has yet. The holster is intended for clipping on those massive duty belts - it would swing around a bit otherwise. I have a vague recollection it came with some clips to use on narrower belts but perhaps I've thrown them away.

The 21700 battery it needs is a weird Nitecore one with positive and negative contacts each end. I wasn't wild about that, but in practice I never carry spare batteries, so they can be weird or built in and it's no particular problem. If you really hate this idea, there is an optional caddy for 2 x cr123s - but less brightness and lower run times.

The RovyVon A5x is my EDC at the moment, and I love it enough that I bought another one when I killed it in the washing machine (it's IP66 - but only with the charging plug in - long story at the end).

Like a few of these little lights, it has ancillary LED's on the side. I chose the white+UV side LEDs. The other option is white + red which would probably be more useful, except this is the glow-in-the-dark case, and the UV supercharges that in a couple of seconds.

The GITD is not amazing, but if you're camping away from city lights, it's still bright enough to find the next morning right up till the sun comes up.

The choices for the main LED are CREE XP-G3 or Nichia 219C. I went with the Nichia with a warmer CRI. The Nichia is 450 lumens vs the Cree 650.

The battery is rated 330mAh and is USB-C chargeable (I think my old one was mini USB?). The story with the charging plug on my old one was I washed it in the pocket of some pants, and it still worked, but I could see a drop of moisture inside. I pulled the charging port stopper right out since it kept half closing itself in the rice. Then I couldn't get it back in (probably could have with tweezers) so I thought I'd do that later, then washed it again the following weekend without the plug in. I went all out with the drying attempts, but it was properly soaked through, and never came back from that.

It doesn't really tailstand unless you've got the magnet on (I do) and something to stick it to. It's just a lovely little general use torch for your pocket.

I own, and often carry, a lot of lights. The i1R2 probably hasn't got the most hours on it, but in terms of the number of times it gets turned on, it's by far the winner.

I've been downloading SSL certificates from my domain provider, using cat to join them together to make the fullchain.pem, uploading them to the server, and myself adding a 90 day calendar reminder. Every time I did this I'd think I should find out about this Certbot thing.

Well, I finally got around to it, and it was one of those jobs which turns out to be so easy you wish you'd done it ages ago.

The install was simple (I'm using nginx/ubuntu).

It scans up your server conf files to see which sites are being served, asks you a couple of questions, obtains the Let's Encrypt certificate for them, installs it, updates your conf files to use it, and sets up a cron job to check if it's time to renew the certificate, which it will also do auto-magically.

I was so pleased with it I made a donation to the EFF for it, then I started to think about how amazingly useful Let's Encrypt is, and gave them one too. It's just a really good time to be in this hobby.

I highly recommend Certbot. If you've been putting this off, or only just hearing about it, make some time for it.

Nats says that the failure was triggered by a single piece of data in a flight plan that was wrongly input to its system by an unnamed airline.

It will be fascinating as the details of this emerge.

I have an ancient domain that for years has been hosted with a company that allowed wildcard email forwarding - so *@example.com was forwarded to my gmail. So over the years, I've just used a new email address for every signup of anything.

Sadly, the company is getting out of hosting, so I need to move the domain somewhere. The commercial email hosting I've seen seen around is all paid for per mailbox.

Is there a commercial email host that would allow a wildcard like that?

I have low desire to run my own email hosting, but perhaps if it's just a bunch of forwards that might be simpler?

Such a good feeling cancelling my paid tier on Dropbox this week. I've been 'playing' at self hosting for a few months, and now I'm confident in my infrastructure and processes so I can start turning off some of the cloud things I've been paying for.

Dropbox has gone in favor of Syncthing over Tailscale in a hub and spoke arrangement to a VM at home. The main compromise I've had to make is on the iOS experience.

The next subscriptions I'll be cancelling will be Evernote (I have so loved this over the years, but as they've added 'features' the app experience has degraded to the point where it's no longer reliable to add notes from my phone). I'm currently trying Obsidian for this , but thinking about a simpler web markdown editor for mobile.

After that, all my Wordpress blogs will be coming home to my VPS, I imagine with some sort of static site generator.