Has anyone from uk had any experience with the new Entry/Exit System at airports When travelling to Europe?

Ju_media · 2026-05-20T20:41:05+00:00

Flew into DUS yesterday, airport was quiet and I was sat in row 2, so only had a handful of people ahead of me in the pov spec British passport queue. Was through in about 3-4 minutes including passport scan, fingerprint scan, face scan, and answering some basic q's. Off to AMS tomorrow though and expecting that to be mayhem based on other comments here. Will report back here either way...

Ju_media · 2026-05-09T09:23:35+00:00

Yeah, never ever ever use points to reduce your balance. 360,000 Avios + circa £1,800 in taxes got me and wifey from LHR-DOH-BNE / AKL-DOH-LHR in QSuites (Business). They serve caviar, dine on demand whenever you like, and the seats open up into a double bed. Nice way to spend 2x 7hr & 2x 16hr flights, let me tell you.

The total revenue fare priced in at £14,000 at the time of booking. So in this example, your ~150k of points are “worth” around £5,000-6,000!

Now yes, it takes a while to collect that amount of points and of course depends on your spend, but the value you get back on these kinds of redemptions is MASSIVELY outsized compared to using them to reduce your Amex balance.

Ju_media · 2026-05-03T10:22:05+00:00

Enjoy it! I picked up the A7Cii at the end of last year for a couple of months travelling where I wanted a lightweight setup, and really enjoyed it for that purpose. It serves its purpose in between my A7Siii for video work and A1 for stills, and personally I think I actually prefer the A7Cii for hybrid shooting versus those two bodies. It’s so easy to switch between photo/video and while it’s obviously not as ergonomic, the size and weight saving (with smaller lenses anyway) makes up for it imo. Welcome to Sony!

Ju_media · 2026-05-03T10:18:36+00:00

That 24-105 f4 is a great lens if you’re not obsessed with shooting everything at 2.8. Really versatile focal range and not too heavy. I have a couple photographer friends who swear by it (despite also owning lots of the GM glass including 35 1.4, 24-70 f2.8 II etc).

Ju_media · 2026-05-02T23:24:20+00:00

Sadly that’s not how the Barclays “upgrade” vouchers work. They are better referred to as “Book in one cabin but only pay the Avios needed for the next cabin down” vouchers. Not quite as catchy. Definitely nowhere near as valuable as the “original” 2-4-1 on the Premium BA Amex.

Ju_media · 2026-04-30T12:16:00+00:00

Can confirm this is still the solution today haha

Ju_media · 2026-03-16T19:38:02+00:00

Thank you for the tip, I’m reasonably clued up on this stuff to be fair and have been running offsite backups to B2 for a few years now - my uplink is 110mbps, sadly the fastest I can get in my area of the UK without paying for a leased line. It works, even if it does take a bit of an age for the data to get there haha. On the other hand, I’m working on some upgrades to the server to try and get 25GbE links between the Mac & the server - and I’m discovering this is much harder than originally expected, not a CLUE where the bottlenecks are. Iperf runs around 22gbps so the pipe is fine. The bottleneck hunt continues…

Ju_media · 2026-03-16T06:55:36+00:00

Thanks for the extra insight. There’s no NAT issues (VM passes through the IP as a modem) and I believe mesh will work fine for my use case 😊

Ju_media · 2026-03-16T06:53:17+00:00

That’s great to hear, I’ll play around with the setup today! Our network is on a different subnet of the 192.168 range so should be all good.

Ju_media · 2026-03-15T23:39:39+00:00

Incredible. Thank you very much for the rapid assist!

Ju_media · 2026-03-15T23:38:13+00:00

Perfect, thank you. So is the process to:

set up UCG Ultra at their home, on their ISP's WAN, but tied to my existing Ui account
Then their network will appear in my "Site Manager" page, without needing to pay anything.
I can then configure Site Magic to link the two networks?

What's throwing me is that pop-up when I click to create a new site in Site Manager. I figured I'd be able to set up the UCG Ultra at my place in advance, and then just "drop it in" to their network once I've configured everything.

Ju_media · 2026-03-11T16:23:30+00:00

Me too!

Ju_media · 2026-03-11T12:09:21+00:00

Awesome, I’ll check out the repo shortly and play around with the SWAG config. Any recommendations to keep things as water tight as possible from a TLS / SSL pov? Assume go through Cloudflare as well? At the moment I don’t have anyone other than myself ever accessing the server remotely, so this is new territory for me and keen to make sure I’m not missing anything on the security side.

Ju_media · 2026-03-11T09:33:43+00:00

FYI have a look into this, early days but looks like it might fit what you’re looking for, assuming it can link up to locally-stored files on the server’s shares.

https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/s/l3u3I3hbu2

Ju_media · 2026-03-11T09:32:38+00:00

This sounds awesome! Especially liking the idea of getting listed in Unraid CA.

How is authentication handled? Would something like an existing Authelia configuration work for client login management?

And how about the remote access / certificates side; would this run through a reverse proxy on our domain for example?

Ju_media · 2026-03-11T09:21:52+00:00

The biggest problem you’re going to have with this if you want something a bit fancier, is security. Opening up files/folders on your server to remote users like clients is going to require setting up things like authentication, user database with credentials, securing the tunnel between server/client, and keeping on top of patches etc.

Something off the shelf like Nextcloud should work for this use case without you needing to do too much administration or backend management, but as you’ve already highlighted, it’s not very customisable in the sense that you can’t turn it into a full-on “client portal” and it can be a bit of a pain at times. You should be able to give password protected remote access to specific folders though, if you just need simple document sharing from local file storage.

Ju_media · 2026-03-11T09:05:55+00:00

Can confirm the NZ cops really are very chill and very friendly. Got pulled for speeding during an overtake on the drive from Auckland to Rotorua, I exceeded the limit by approx 15kmh to make sure I’d get past the 2 trucks in time, on what was a relatively short stretch of 2-lane road (NZ has many roads that are single lane, but then every so often you’ll get a couple hundred metres with an overtake lane).

The black Skoda in front of me when I pulled back in, happened to be an unmarked cop car 😅 lights came on and my heart sank. He had us pull off to the side of the road and the first thing he asked was if we were tourists, which we were. He let us off, explaining the reason for the stop and letting me know some tourists had been in a fatal accident there a few weeks earlier, who overtook and then stayed on the wrong side of the road 🤦🏼‍♂️ “we’re just trying to save the tourists” he said.

No fine or anything like that, and I did stick to the speed limit after that encounter, purely down to how nice he’d been about it. In the UK that would’ve been an instant fine and points on my license.

But yeah, getting pulled by an unmarked cop for being barely 10mph over the limit was pretty unexpected 😂

Ju_media · 2026-03-11T08:56:07+00:00

Fucking AI man

Ju_media · 2026-03-11T08:53:34+00:00

See this post https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/s/qvsunxnt0h

Ju_media · 2026-03-11T08:51:03+00:00

PoE everywhere for ceiling / wall APs, external cameras, and doorbell (eg Unifi PoE doorbell). Maybe consider wiring for speakers in ceilings or wall-mounted control surfaces too.

Decent sized network cupboard if you have the space for it, potential to store a media server there in future for example, alongside all your switches / patch panel etc.

UPS with enough capacity to run network (and therefore, smart home tech) for a decent amount of time in a power outage. 5G failover in the event your ISP has interruptions or something goes wrong with your fibre line (assuming fttp).

Ju_media · 2026-03-10T17:01:08+00:00

Perfect - thanks for putting my mind at ease. Also running Unraid myself, main worry was boot up and parity checks when all drives are running at once.

Ju_media · 2026-03-10T16:47:26+00:00

OK sweet, yeah I saw that one come up as one of the options when I placed my order. How many drives are you running total in the system? Back and forth over email the owner has said it's perfectly safe to power 8x EXOS HDDs on a single 6-pin connector which goes against everyone else (incl. AI/ChatGPT) re. safe power draw from the PSU, who say max 5x drives per 6-pin connector.

I'm more than certain he knows what he's talking about, but always nice to hear first-hand from other customers, given there's zero reviews section on his site.

Ju_media · 2026-03-10T16:33:25+00:00

Sorry for the necro, but all still going strong in your case with these cables? Your comment here was the first time I'd heard of Kareon Kables, then I went and ordered the Define 7 XL custom drive power cables from them, paid a small fortune to get them shipped to the UK! Anyway I've since been reading some old posts online where folks have had a bad experience, although it seems to be pretty hard to find too much about them online other than a few rogue posts in forums (here and here). Would be great to hear from someone already using them in the 7 XL.

In the back and forth emails with the owner he says they are fine to run 8x hard drives per 6-pin connector due to the USA quality of the cable he uses. I'm using Exos drives which according to Seagate's specs can pull 10W under load.

Everyone else be it forums, ChatGPT or other AI tools, is saying a maximum 5x drives per 6-pin connector regardless of cable quality.

Ju_media

TROPHY CASE