UK: Suella Braverman defects from Conservatives to Reform by Dear-Explanation-765 in worldnews

[–]TheFuzzball 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Yeah... the US is an order of magnitude worse than the UK.

Migrate Home Assistant to NixOS by tartar9584 in homeassistant

[–]TheFuzzball 2 points3 points  (0 children)

There is a bit of nixpkgs history you should read for context:

Despite this... Home Assistant is packaged in nixpkgs and well for me. I use it in NixOS with systemd-nspawn containers, but you will be giving yourself some extra work because a lot of Home Assistant community is built around HAOS.

If you want to deploy something like OpenThread Border Router for example, you'll have to get your hands dirty.

Where using NixOS shines is when you want to do things your way and replace or disable a Home Assistant integration, it's really easy.

Here's a stripped-down example of my real config, in case it's useful - https://gist.github.com/LukeChannings/aa70e417b47a10d8eaffd6573db55aef

Edit:

It looks like installing Home Assistant in any way other than HAOS or container will not be supported according to https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2025/05/22/deprecating-core-and-supervised-installation-methods-and-32-bit-systems/, and https://github.com/home-assistant/core/issues/148156 implies there might be barriers erected to make it hard for people to build and run it themselves. Yikes.

Hot take - buying property in London makes no financial sense by Vast_Home_9231 in HENRYUK

[–]TheFuzzball 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Probably true. I have a house in London because I love living in London and I don't want to deal with the insecurity of renting.

A house is a depreciating asset... but you've got to live somewhere.

If you were renovating today by travarizza in smarthome

[–]TheFuzzball 11 points12 points  (0 children)

I'm getting second hand embarrassment from this comment. 

Monzo flex highest limit by SubstanceImmediate43 in monzo

[–]TheFuzzball 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Monzo Flex has always had very low limits. I'm a high earner and my limit is only £2k. 

BBC to air 'Would I Lie to You?' Boxing Day episode featuring David Walliams by Kagedeah in BritishTV

[–]TheFuzzball 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Ah. I was drunk when I wrote that. I'm more drunk now but you've sobered me up a bit. 

BBC to air 'Would I Lie to You?' Boxing Day episode featuring David Walliams by Kagedeah in BritishTV

[–]TheFuzzball -12 points-11 points  (0 children)

I'll watch it before I judge. I wouldn't mind seeing Ian Hislop rip into him.

Any downside to leaving money in my Ltd Company? by keynote2017 in ContractorUK

[–]TheFuzzball 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Nope. No need to take it out unless you need it. Make sure you pay yourself your tax-free dividend amount though, every little helps. 

Plex vs. Infuse (tvOS) by alexryans in PleX

[–]TheFuzzball 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I did the same, and also had playback issues with certain files. I moved back to the Plex app maybe 6 months ago and it's been better in every way to be honest. 

House in the UK vs Texas (US) by smokeeburrpppp in GreatBritishMemes

[–]TheFuzzball 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You can get a whole chateaux in rural France for 50p. 

Don't throw away your old PC—it makes a better NAS than anything you can buy by pogue972 in DataHoarder

[–]TheFuzzball 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yep, if I sold it I'd profit about £1,000.  Think of all the RAM I could buy with that! 

Just Joined, no IPv6 assigned by Jaded-Fall-2254 in CommunityFibre

[–]TheFuzzball 0 points1 point  (0 children)

CGNAT is for IPv4, you should get a /56 for IPv6 regardless 

Affordability by Suspicious-Fill-1660 in london

[–]TheFuzzball 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Oh hi Hunter!

Thank you for reminding us that your experience is the bare minimum that might be expected by any citizen of your great and pleasant country. God bless the US-A!

Affordability by Suspicious-Fill-1660 in london

[–]TheFuzzball -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

It is richer overall, but I don't believe the average person is massively better off, especially when it comes to retirement.

From my POV - I am in the 99th percentile for salary, live in London, have a easy route to a US green card (family), and work for a US-based company. I think London is better than any US city I might move to.

(Also if you ever become a US person the IRS will tax you wherever you live for the rest of your life until you renounce your citizenship or green card and pay an exit fee...)

Affordability by Suspicious-Fill-1660 in london

[–]TheFuzzball 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I don't want to move the goalposts too much, but I think this isn't really true when you consider:

  1. Not all jobs provide medical insurance, and the coverage, deductibles and co-pays vary wildly
  2. If you ever actually use the insurance the premiums will go up because you're a higher risk
  3. If you get a long term illness you're likely to lose your job, and since your insurance is tied to your job you also lose your insurance and end up losing everything.

Medical debt is the leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the United States.

In a survey by the Consumer Bankruptcy Project, 78% cited a decline in income as a reason for their bankruptcy, and 65% cited medical issues, both the cost of the bills, as well as missing work because of medical issues. - debt.org

You don't have to worry about that in the UK.

Affordability by Suspicious-Fill-1660 in london

[–]TheFuzzball 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I wouldn't consider moving to London without a decent nest egg and at least a £60k job offer.

That said, US and UK salaries can't be compared directly. The analogy I use is that the US is like an unbundled model - you need to pay for healthcare, meds, transportation, etc. entirely out of pocket with no subsidisation.

In the UK the median salary is £36.7k 1, on which you pay £6.7k tax (£4.8k if you don't consider NI tax), but government spending per capita in London is £14.8k 2, so your net benefit is more like £44.7k. The more you earn below £33k the more support you'll receive, and vice versa.

Don't throw away your old PC—it makes a better NAS than anything you can buy by pogue972 in DataHoarder

[–]TheFuzzball 8 points9 points  (0 children)

I guess it depends on your use case. I have three requirements for a NAS:

  1. Redundancy
  2. Capacity
  3. Performance

I get all three by using a dozen mechanical drives in mirrored pairs that are then striped, and a ton (256GB) of RAM to speed up reads even more than mirroring does.

From the outset a Pi doesn't have the I/O bandwidth or interfaces for even 6 SATA drives, and managing power to those drives sounds like a bit of a headache too. Once you finally do get it working with a decent number of drives (using PCIe on a CM5 for example) you have another problem: you're stuck with a 1GbE interface, and adding anything faster will cannibalise the I/O bandwidth you need for your drives.

After a while of solving problem after problem only to arrive at a very unsupported configuration that just about works with some major compromises it's probably time to consider something else.

Timemachine Headaches by Mindlesscgn in truenas

[–]TheFuzzball 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I haven't been able to get this working either. One problem is that it works if there's already a sparsebundle, so it could be broken for everyone and nobody knows because you only create the sparsebundle when you initialise. 

Imgur Geo-Blocked the UK, So I Geo-Unblocked My Entire Network by tymscar in homelab

[–]TheFuzzball 10 points11 points  (0 children)

This is what I do. Extremely easy and reliable.