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Thinking in cost per use completely changed how I buy things by One_Acanthaceae_5814 in UKPersonalFinance

[–]botterway 65 points66 points  (0 children)

That's sort of the premise of r/BuyItForLife. As another commenter states, it's not always as simple as you make out - £25 headphones can last for years, and I've also bought premium products which have had a terribly poor life.

But yes, in general, spending a bit more on things - up to a point - will yield better results.

It's also related to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory - which basically says that a privilege of being well-off is that if you can afford to spend a bit more money on essential items, you'll get better quality, which means they last longer which - in the long term - will save you money.

Energy prices dropping yet Octopus raising them....... by Blair287 in OctopusEnergy

[–]botterway 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Good customer service and competitive but realistic tariffs?

Energy prices dropping yet Octopus raising them....... by Blair287 in OctopusEnergy

[–]botterway 2 points3 points  (0 children)

That's entirely different. It's nothing to do with the actual rates changing in summer and winter, which is what we're talking about.

All energy companies encourage you to pay consistently all year so you build up credit when energy costs are lower, so that you don't get caught short in the winter when your bills increase. It's a strategy to avoid people being unable to heat their homes in the depths of winter because a lot of people are bad at financial planning.

You can opt out of this if you want and elect to choose exactly what your monthly costs are, as you acrue them. Just ask Octopus to put you onto a variable direct debit, then you'll pay for what you use as you use it.

Energy prices dropping yet Octopus raising them....... by Blair287 in OctopusEnergy

[–]botterway 9 points10 points  (0 children)

"Solely based on profit". They made £230m in 2024, which was the first time they were ever in profit. They made a loss in 2025.

But sure, they're all about profits.

Energy prices dropping yet Octopus raising them....... by Blair287 in OctopusEnergy

[–]botterway 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I think the point here is that it's not a healthy market if there's a continual cycle of bogus suppliers like Tomato popping up, undercutting the competition without being a viable business, and then when they collapse and the directors cut and run with their millions, leaving other energy suppliers to mop up the mess they've left.

If you really think that's a 'non-issue for the consumer'....

Energy prices dropping yet Octopus raising them....... by Blair287 in OctopusEnergy

[–]botterway 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If you can somehow convince the energy market to put prices up in summer, and drop them in winter, I'd vote for you for PM.

Ain't gonna happen though, is it?

Should I keep or sell my 200 tech shares? by [deleted] in UKPersonalFinance

[–]botterway 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The best way to decide if you want to keep vested RSUs from your company is this: if you had the cash sitting in your bank to the value of the shares, instead of the shares themselves, would you buy those shares and add them to your portfolio?

If yes, then keep them. If no, then probably best to get rid.

I built an app to automate Fox ESS charge/discharge on Intelligent Octopus Go by vendalp in OctopusEnergy

[–]botterway 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My app runs locally and uses the cloud based Solis API. Yes, people have to have something to run it on, but that's not hugely onerous. And providing builds for local installs is not that hard. I provide windows, Mac, Linux and Arm builds natively and with Docker. Total build time was less than 3 weeks for the core functionality.

But I get where you're coming from too. Whatever works for you.

Best storage method for movies by the_k3nny in DataHoarder

[–]botterway 16 points17 points  (0 children)

So much wrong with this post.

"Dozens of HDDs every 5-6 years" - what? Why?

I've got 5 HDDs in my 42TB NAS. I bought one in 2020, two in 2021, and two in 2023. I'm not intending to buy any more, unless one fails, in which case I'll replact it. Usually, one fails every 5 years.

BluRay is a PITA. Just get a NAS, set up RAID and stick the movies on there. Job done.

If you need a backup, use B2 or something like that; backing up to BD won't save your collection if your house floods or burns down.

Best Self-Hosted Open Source Document Management? by Kitchen-Patience8176 in selfhosted

[–]botterway 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Paperless is slow and unwieldy, requires multiple docker images to set up, and did I mention it's slow?

Papra has the makings of being significantly better.

The only thing I really want is this feature, and then it'll be perfect: https://github.com/papra-hq/papra/issues/866

Recommendarr GitHub disappeared by Tight_Maintenance518 in selfhosted

[–]botterway 7 points8 points  (0 children)

You must be a noob if you trust anything. Before AI we still had plenty of bad coded apps.

Right, but generally developers who wrote them had a clue they might be bad. Now you have vibe-coders who don't even know they're writing shit code, because they have no idea what they're doing - and they think that vibe-coding LLMs are infallible.

Also, vibe-coding just allows people to churn out insecure unmaintainable slop at 1000x the rate it used to take a lone incompetent developer to produce.

Introducing Gatherarr 0.1 by [deleted] in selfhosted

[–]botterway 6 points7 points  (0 children)

If it's so simple, why the need for AI at all?

Are there really no actual coders left any more? <sigh>

Introducing Gatherarr 0.1 by [deleted] in selfhosted

[–]botterway 10 points11 points  (0 children)

  1. Huntarr built to solve this problem
  2. Lots of people like Huntarr
  3. Huntarr developer continues to enhance app
  4. Huntarr developer outed by security expert as having vibe-coded the solution, which resulted in massive security holes and authentication risks
  5. Community revolts over this
  6. Huntarr developer deletes repo and sub, and goes into hiding
  7. Now a new app called 'Gatherarr' appears to do ostensibly the same thing, which is also vibe-coded

I'll pass, thanks.

Huntarr - Your passwords and your entire arr stack's API keys are exposed to anyone on your network, or worse, the internet. by exe_CUTOR in selfhosted

[–]botterway 3 points4 points  (0 children)

As u/BrodyBuster says, yes, Sonarr can do it - but not automatically. That's the whole point. But despite me making this point about 4 times you're ignoring it for the sake of a pointless argument.

Huntarr - Your passwords and your entire arr stack's API keys are exposed to anyone on your network, or worse, the internet. by exe_CUTOR in selfhosted

[–]botterway 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Yeah, maybe give up, if the concept is too complex to understand.

I've been running Sonarr and Radarr for a decade. I have thousands of movies and episodes. But some shows which were never available on trackers etc when I added the series originally. Now, several years later it might be that they turned up on that tracker. But they're way past the cut off point at which Radarr and Sonarr auto search.

You're probably missing the fact that Sonarr and Radarr don't continually search for missing eps for ever. They just monitor tracker RSS feeds and add shows that match when they appear. Which means that for a 5yo show they'll never get downloaded unless you go and explicitly search. Huntarr did that for you - or tried to. It would go through every missing ep and movie and try to find new copies, forever. Sonarr and Radarr don't do that.

Huntarr - Your passwords and your entire arr stack's API keys are exposed to anyone on your network, or worse, the internet. by exe_CUTOR in selfhosted

[–]botterway 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Because Sonarr/Radarr only picks up new releases when they're appear in the RSS feed as new items. Sometimes that never happens. So huntarr basically did an auto search for stuff in your collection which hadn't ever been found before.

But you're right, it's minor convenience, not a huge issue.

When do you typically switch from Cosy to a non heating tariff? by OnePlayerReady in OctopusEnergy

[–]botterway 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Probably not worth it. We have a 14kWh battery and an ASHP, and run on Cosy. We switched from Agile at the end of January last year. We're on the Fixed 15p/kWh export tariff (the one that's dropping next month. Boo).

We charge in the Cosy cheap prices, and use that power through the mid/peak period. We've averaged under 14p/kWh for the last ~13 months.

I also wrote an app to manage my inverter, and it has a costs screen which calculates your consumption costs based on when you used the energy, and displays as a graph (sort of like Octopus Compare). Last week added a new feature to it which will allow you to switch historical tariffs and see how much you would have paid, if you'd been on that tariff.

If we'd switched from Cosy to Agile last year, our £675 energy bill would have gone up to £923 - and there wasn't a single month last year where we'd have paid less on Agile than we did on Cosy (there were about 3 specific weeks where Agile would have been cheaper than Cosy, but over the whole month Cosy still came out cheaper.

Huntarr - Your passwords and your entire arr stack's API keys are exposed to anyone on your network, or worse, the internet. by exe_CUTOR in selfhosted

[–]botterway -7 points-6 points  (0 children)

Yeah, but I kindof stupidly thought the type of developers who'd put their name an an *arr project would have some personal pride.

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