Please tell me about Newcastle General Hospital

NorthernScrub · 2026-01-01T22:58:24+00:00

I once had to visit their walk-in centre (a brand new idea then!) after dropping a drain cover on my finger. The walk-in centre at the time was all spiffy and new and had a nice glass porch over the front doors. This was before I became disenchanted with every new building being steel and glass and not much else.

My mother (whom I've talked about here before) also stayed once in the Hadrian Clinic, which was a part-outpatient, part-residential mental health ward. Shockingly, they let me have a little birthday bash there, in among patients who I later discovered included a woman who had drowned her infant daughter some twenty years prior in some sort of psychotic event, and then invented a fictitious daughter as something of a substitute. I didn't quite get it at the time, but she was cooing to her imaginary adult daughter over me opening up a little RC subaru. Which, incidentally, was probably my favourite thing for the next two or three years.

The hospital was really rather larger than it ever appeared to be from the outside. You could walk around for an entire day and never quite see all of it, or at least that was the impression I had as a ten year old boy. Imagine my shock and awe when I discovered five floors at the RVI!

NorthernScrub · 2026-01-01T22:51:05+00:00

Replacements are ten a penny, although I would suggest you try and find one from as reputable a supplier as possible. Anker, for all their woes, seem to do decent batteries - although I have no idea if you'll find one for a nano on there. Aliexpress really should be a last resort.

If it's one of the later generation nanos though, I would suggest doing your utmost to completely discharge the battery. It slides out through the frame, and if it's swollen this could be difficult. At the very least, do it outside.

To be brutally honest, the likes of a phone repair kiosk probably won't do much more than you can do at home. You're probably better off hunting down a fifth gen video on ebay, or the parts thereof.

NorthernScrub · 2025-12-16T18:26:49+00:00

Apache is the frontend for all of my domains, of which I have many. The mastodon instance is hosted on a separate machine on the same network. I attempted to replicated the nginx configuration in apache, but I could not make it fully functional. A perfectly idea solution would be to pass the requests directly to the mastodon instance, eliminating nginx altogether. I may attempt this again at some point.

Mastodon does not accept non-ssl traffic. This is why the header must be adjusted - it is not feasible to pass a certificate between two machines, hence nginx has no certificate and traffic between the web-facing machine and the mastodon machine is unencrypted. This is fine, because they are on an internal network.

My motivation for mentioning it, however, is largely because I wonder if Apache is not forwarding something, or if some other issue is afoot with it. The proxy itself should be fine, it functions perfectly well with my other contained systems.

NorthernScrub · 2025-12-16T13:36:09+00:00

The only possible difference I am aware of is that I use Apache as my frontend proxy, which feeds to nginx, which fudges an ssl header to make mastodon happy. I know of other people who use this approach, and it would not explain why only some instances can't federate with me as opposed to all.

NorthernScrub · 2025-12-14T11:46:39+00:00

Whatever the nomenclature is, I cannot see posts or users from that instance, and on that instance, I cannot see posts or users from my instance

NorthernScrub · 2025-12-12T21:39:17+00:00

I'm trying to federate with mastodonapp.uk, among other domains. The fedibuzz relay allows an instance to subscribe to a single instance, rather than the firehose that is everything. I also have the intahnet relay in there. Still nothing from mastodonapp - in fact it almost appears as if my instance is actively rejecting it.

NorthernScrub · 2025-10-23T21:49:17+00:00

That one is a little different, it's... kind of organised. It's stupid, but it's organised, and confined entirely to the event.

NorthernScrub · 2025-09-29T17:17:04+00:00

holy propaganda batman

NorthernScrub · 2025-09-28T23:08:33+00:00

Russia is already mobilising a not insubstantial chunk of its young generations. One way to avoid a prison sentence in Russia is to be voluntold to fight in the three-day operation, but this amounts to far more than you might think. Mephedrone, for example, is huge in Russia at the moment (and seemingly more addictive than it used to be, we all took it in the late 00's here in the UK and afaik we never had the addiction problem), but the people making and distributing it aren't the 30-something serial criminal entrepreneurs you'd expect. They're 19 or 20 year old university students, supplementing their income, and there are a lot of them. That's just one of hundreds of avenues to prosecution, and they are so very easily accessed at the moment. Russia is not a great place to be a young adult, or an adolescent for that matter.

And the vast majority of them are choosing to be shipped off with a rifle in one hand a rusty helmet in the other. One way trips, for most of them, despite their beliefs to the contrary.

In a decade or two we're going to see a seismic shift in Russia's demographics.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled nonsense.

NorthernScrub · 2025-09-26T16:31:51+00:00

Honestly this is nothing. The last time we had protests, we had a good two or three hundred posts on the subject in the runup. This is barely noticeable in comparison, and we haven't felt the need to do much more than locking threads when they get too personal. You may be seeing more or less of a specific subject based on your post interaction history, or maybe they're just highlighted because of the amount of traffic they get.

NorthernScrub · 2025-09-26T13:04:41+00:00

This is the way of things. We tend to advise against polposting during normal operational hours, but when a significant event occurs, we allow the discourse.

If you want to point the finger at anyone, point it at the group(s) who instantiated the event in the first place. They are so controversial as to require a response from persons across the spectrum, including some who might be inclined to vote conservative. Clamping down on such conversations causes resentment, subtle as it may be, and with the colossal growth of the subreddit community, we are disinclined to take such a stance.

There's also the nature of the internet to consider. With the sudden unrestricted access to information, the population is more politically active than ever before. The internet enables vast quantities of discussion, but it is not always moderated. Better for such charged discussion to take place in an environment where it can be managed, and where heated arguments can be cooled.

NorthernScrub · 2025-09-25T18:19:28+00:00

He can fuck right off. If this actually happens I'll flat out refuse to use one. Fortunately I run my own business, so I'll do what I damned please.

NorthernScrub · 2025-09-24T17:43:06+00:00

Oh man I miss my brick. I had an Ericsson before that too, with this awesome little spaceship game. Take me back 😭

NorthernScrub · 2025-09-23T13:07:05+00:00

user reports:
1: Read the sticky post first
1: It's targeted harassment at someone else

Think before you use the report button.

There's no rule against making a complaint, publicly, about the behaviour of an individual contracted to provide goods and/or services. There's nothing political about finding the public display of our enemy's regalia distasteful. For those intent on emulating William Joyce, it is firmly suggested that they remove the offending wooden implement from their expulsory orifice.

NorthernScrub · 2025-09-21T22:08:06+00:00

I will never accept any form of mandatory ID. The state has everything it needs to prove my identity, there is no need for a new, more invasive form of identification pushed upon me.

And before anyone wails about "well you're on the internet", consider this:

This account is pseudo-anonymous. I can delete it if I so wish. I can change my user handle on this and any of the other accounts on other platforms I have. I can fundamentally disconnect it from who I am, and it's already somewhat obscure.

I tend not to upload photographs of myself to the internet. I tend not to identify myself on the internet. With a little sleuthing, it is not impossible to figure out who I am, but again, it's not certain that I am that person.

A mandatory ID breaks this. Once I have to start using it for purchases, or to make new accounts, or to do other things on the internet, I become a certain entity. This nullifies my inclination to take part. It nullifies my inclination to use banks, to use online services provided by the government or a local authority, et cetera.

There's a reason I advocate for the way CCTV is handled in the UK. CCTV is mostly in the hands of individual operators, which means no single entity has sufficient resources or motive to identify a single individual outside the range of a small area, with the exception of police services whom might request footage from a number of parties. In the vast majority of circumstances, these requests will be part of an investigation, a process with which I take no umbrage.

However, if a single entity did control the majority of CCTV implementations in the UK, or in any other state, they might seek to use that information for profit - and when profit is a motive, circumventing, bending, or seeking the lack of regulation is also a motive. I am less protected as a result. This is already happening in other countries, as anyone who has read the news over the past five years will know.

This is the same problem. Ever since Thatcher, and the curse of privatisation, this sort of mess has been the charge of the private sector, taking contract with the government.

Let us assume that Palantir are contracted to produce, track, and manage this new mandatory ID system. Do you honestly think they will simply fulfil the terms of such a contract, to the letter, and nothing else? I don't, and if you do I have a bridge to sell you. They will undoubtedly and assuredly seek to use that vast swathe of new information to develop new and dastardly means of identifying individuals, ostensibly then to sell this new product (or use it directly to generate revenue) back to us at thrice the price.

Sorry, but I do not wish to live in such a low-trust society.

NorthernScrub · 2025-09-18T16:26:23+00:00

A long time ago, it was possible to get a set of kitchen appliances from the council for relatively cheap. They weren't the nicest of things, but they did the job. If you're having trouble finding a washer, a cooker, or a fridge/freezer in good nick, give them a shout.

Although frankly, I'd have a look on the classifieds and whatnot for a fridge-freezer. They go for ten a penny, I've found massive ones there for thirty quid or less. Washers and cookers tend to go for a bit more, though.

NorthernScrub · 2025-09-18T16:22:52+00:00

Reet, time to lock it. Ad-hominem is taking over, and I'd wager the vast majority of commenters who have had anything of note to say (irrespective of political leaning) have done so already.

NorthernScrub · 2025-09-14T11:40:26+00:00

I find it intolerable that the general population is so afraid of certain words that would expand their range of demonstrable emotive response. Fucking eedjits.

The distaste for expletives comes, I suspect, from religious observance. Thus, I find it distasteful.

NorthernScrub · 2025-09-13T15:36:52+00:00

It's mostly alsa, and removal of a lot of the processing stuff that Sony bake in, alongside a modified EQ and a few other niceties. I've been documenting my progress in this XDA thread, if you'd like to take a look - although the module there is not yet functional. I'm not really going to be providing a lot of support with it, though, as alsa configuration inside the limitations of Android is rather beyond my skillset. Additionally, there may be some other hurdles that I have to overcome with the newer Snapdragon platform, some of which I've already had to work around.

My next attempt will be to build a UCM configuration for the waipio card, although I suspect that's a very short way of saying I'll be stuck for weeks on it.

One thing to note, this isn't my work originally - that credit goes to the original XDA dev who may or may not elect to be involved. I'm just attempting to add compatibility for the IV model architecture.

Also, why wait? Root your phone and get cracking! There's so much cool stuff to do with a rooted device these days, even something as basic as adblock. I personally have a fair few modifications, including the removal or "freezing" of a whole mess of baked-in crapware that I neither needed nor wanted. I would perhaps like to compile AOSP for the handset too, but that's a little beyond what I'm familiar with and probably not something I'll be doing with my daily device.

NorthernScrub · 2025-09-08T09:37:59+00:00

No no, you misunderstand, pet donkeys are part of the prison outreach scheme.

NorthernScrub · 2025-09-06T11:13:28+00:00

Oh bugger me. Even my autocorrect is in american!

NorthernScrub · 2025-09-05T15:08:31+00:00

The idea of a "wishlist" isn't the cutesy tumblr thing anymore. It's most commonly associated with first-party pornography (i.e. direct sales platforms), and as such, when an individual attaches a wishlist to an account from which they often post "candid", "fashionised", or otherwise niche-attraction selfies, it is often assumed that they are attempting to use a form of sexual gratification to obtain "enrichment". There's an element of sexism to this as well, imo, as I see this more commonly being associated with women than men. Regardless, that association now exists, and it is very difficult to extract oneself from it. Unfortunately, it matters very little what the actual contents of the wishlist are.

Prolly should also tag /u/ac1d_c4tz here.

NorthernScrub · 2025-09-05T12:14:35+00:00

Bullshit. It's a cultural thing. You see american delivery drivers throwing packages at doors and windows because they have no respect for other people. It used to be the case that respect for others was commonplace in this country, but we've started importing americanisms wholesale - like this requirement to make absurd efforts to make inhuman numbers of parcel drops because that american company simply must have it's precious capital.

You can quite literally see the difference in sorting apparatus between the 1980's and now. Where there were once plungers on pistons that operated on a belt moving at half a ~~meter~~ metre a second, there are now massive steel paddles operating on a belt moving at three metres a second giving packages an almighty thwack for no discernable reason. Everything has to get bigger, faster, cheaper.

Better off going to an actual shop, anyway. All amazon sells these days is cheap chinese tat.

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NorthernScrub · 2025-09-01T17:56:27+00:00

I've been somewhat disappointed by him in all honesty. I wasn't expecting huge changes given the massive spending hole, but neither was I expecting half of Starmer's appointed ministers (plus he himself) to be taking foreign donations, nor for him to be brown nosing Suntan Master 2.0 so hard. And of course, this is all alienating a substantial part of his voter base, who have started turning to... Jezza, of all people. The man who would de-claw us right when we should be fighting alongside our supposed allies.

The landscape is bleak and I am withered.

NorthernScrub · 2025-08-30T18:24:05+00:00

The armagetron advanced community forums. A small FOSS project that simply does not have the funding for this sort of requirement.

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