That's not quite true, water charges are part of your council tax. You get a discount if you have a septic tank because then dealing with the waste water is your responsibility.
But you pay a flat rate based on your property's estimated value in 1991.
I know it doesn't help you at the moment, but at some point between June last year and last week they've updated the kickstand to include an extra little crossbar up at the top of the metal u shaped piece of metal that makes up the stand so that you need to lose both pins for it to fall off now. (I ordered one last year and ordered a replacement kit for a 2nd steam deck that I've gifted to my wife) And I'm liking the look of the new design.
I'll see if I can take a photo later on and share it to explain as I suspect my words aren't doing a great job.
Edit: here's a quick photo I've taken to try to show the new crossbar thing in action.
I considered trying that then read about some kernel versions not being compatible with certain versions of the dkms package so decided to give up, go to bed and deal with the issue later. (This was Saturday night and sadly time hasn't permitted me to start investigating again yet)
I have the same issue on my desktop. I'd assumed it was something I'd done (it usually is) but I had to admit defeat and resort to switching to booting into a backup OS so that I could get on with all the tasks I need to get done but I'm assuming it was a problem with the Nvidia-dkms package that'll be resolved in time as people have reported similar issues in the past.
I'm more interested in matrix having worked with meta to actually bridge from a matrix home server to WhatsApp. Thanks to the EU's DMA WhatsApp were required to do something.
Element has been working with Meta since the end of last year to help test their DMA interoperability (given we’re probably the world leader in interoperable end-to-end-encrypted communication) - and Matrix announced last month at FOSDEM that Element has successfully integrated 1:1 chats between Matrix and WhatsApp via the DMA APIs, while maintaining end-to-end encryption (having implemented full Signal compatibility in vodozemac). We’ve also formally requested interoperability with WhatsApp, as of yesterday. https://element.io/blog/the-eu-digital-markets-act-is-here/ (That full post is quite a long read and some of the technical bits went way over my head as I'm more focussed on dev-ops than the inner workings of the protocol)
As for how it will look, further down that same post there is the following:
The biggest concern right now is around “reachability”: whether DMA interoperability will default to off or on for EU citizens - and so whether users on Element would even be able to contact users on WhatsApp without the WhatsApp user having to explicitly opt in in advance. According to the public information available at WhatsApp Chats Will Soon Work With Other Encrypted Messaging Apps | WIRED on Feb 6th: “WhatsApp users who opt in will see messages from other apps in a separate section at the top of their inbox.”. We all know the power of defaults, especially when applied to competition law, and we’re interested to see what the final user experience is.
So sadly it looks as though you may be able to contact people if they've opted in for cross platform messaging, but they'll need to look somewhere else for your messages.
I currently use matrix and have bridges for discord, WhatsApp, RCS, Google messages and possibly a couple of others running so that I can just chat to whoever I want from one place and not care which platform they're using.
I vaguely remembered a quote about him saying he was impressed with Saddam Hussein's indefatigably.
After going to look it up just there to confirm it was him that said it I saw more of the context around it:
Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability, and I want you to know that we are with you, hatta al-nasr, hatta al-nasr, hatta al-Quds until victory, until victory, until Jerusalem. (https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_Galloway)
So whilst I agree that he's out for himself and not someone that I particularly care for, he does seem to have had an interest in that part of the world for the last 30 years or so. This isn't quite the out of the blue political opportunism that some people seem to be suggesting it is.
I believe ofcom almost agree too...
“No politician may be used as a newsreader, interviewer or reporter in any news programmes unless, exceptionally, it is editorially justified. In that case, the political allegiance of that person must be made clear to the audience.” (Source: https://www.ofcom.org.uk/news-centre/2023/ofcoms-rules-on-politicians-on-tv-and-radio) But what we see here is these programmes being billed not as news, but as talk shows or current events programmes which allows them to sidestep this. An example of an article which lists a series of complaints being investigated by ofcom as of September 2023: https://www.thenational.scot/news/23799032.full-list-gb-news-shows-investigation-ofcom/ Note:This is from The National, an outlet which is very anti-Tory and I'm sure subject to a few impartiality complaints itself!
That's the one. The 30p Lee that presents on GB News.
I'm going to choose not to answer that for two reasons...
But yes I'm in a position where I was more willing to pay for the power than I was to buy additional storage space as I'm hitting the top of what I can do without significant expense.
Ah, fair point. I don't use torrents, my media comes from usenet, so that doesn't need to factor into my thinking.
My (overly?) Complex setup does allow me to resort to torrents as a last resort, but that happens on another machine outside my home network and gets synchronised into my home via a one-way syncthing share, so even on the rare occasion I have to resort to torrents I can leave it on that server seeding for a few weeks or months.
I've just recently started using tdarr to convert all of my media to x265on 14/02 and so far I've saved 4.02 TB of what was 28.12TB media collection. (The number isn't a true reflection though because new episodes and shows have been added to that library since I started)
I'm letting tdarr manage the conversion process and once up and running meant that my NAS, desktop, my NUC and a mini pc are all plodding through and converting when I'm not using them for other things.
If you are worried about the disk space being taken and have some CPU time you can devote to the conversion process then I'd suggest it's worth looking into tdarr.
And also remember to look up the list of accepted photo ids and get yourself set up with at least one that you can take with you to the polling station. https://www.gov.uk/how-to-vote/photo-id-youll-need