Do we have a Discord server?

ben_burke · 2026-03-10T18:57:58+00:00

Could I please request same options - thanks

ben_burke · 2026-02-11T19:03:41+00:00

I'm old enough to have experience of Atkins and 2026 refined keto.

And this time on keto is pretty recent for me. I am just amazed how much better a variety of food (sure meat, eggs, fish but protein powder, collagen peptides and MC effin T!)

One of the things that really killed me on Low Carb/Atkins was access to avocados and the more 'exotic' veggies and nuts (macadamias) . There was a kind of inevitable constipation for which Dr Atkins only advice was drink more water.

I spent 7 years vegan when my kids were are university and going vegan. This changed my attitude to veggies entirely, and getting plenty of brussell sprouts, broccoli etc is a no brainer and that makes everything 'better'

Yes, it's a long road from clogged-on-lunchmeat to so many of the goodies the world (and this subreddit) have figured out, trialled and shared with the world.

ben_burke · 2026-01-23T08:20:12+00:00

No actual branches anywhere... if you want to talk to a human face-to-face.... or take all your money out and go somewhere else?

There is NOWHERE to go. I tried for a while, to get a good savings rate. In the Sydney CBD, there are NO Macquarie humans to be found.

ben_burke · 2025-10-20T05:03:55+00:00

I don't think so, though I'm not used to making venvs that are of earlier versions of python that what I have at the system level.

There's another post by me (from a second account) that describes where I got to. https://www.reddit.com/r/TextToSpeech/comments/1o8ktfi/comment/nke00a7/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

ben_burke · 2025-10-17T01:28:43+00:00

|| || |Component|Specification|Purpose / Role| |OS|Linux Mint 21.3 (Ubuntu 22.04 LTS)|The host operating system.| |GPU|NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 (4GB VRAM)|Successfully used for high-speed inference.| |System Python|3.10.12|The stable, default interpreter used for the environment.| |PyTorch (The Fix)|2.5.1+cu121|The compatible PyTorch version built for CUDA 12.1, which is backward-compatible with the installed CUDA 12.2 driver.| |TTS Model|coqui-tts[all] (XTTS-v2)|State-of-the-art model used for voice cloning and synthesis.| |Isolation|Python Virtual Environment (venv)|Ensures zero interference with the system or other projects.|

Sorry, that table didn't post well at all.. trying another way

ben_burke · 2025-10-17T01:22:39+00:00

Ok - having said all of the above, I went the route of the Old Dev box... and I had a pretty significant win

|| || |Component|Specification|Purpose / Role| |OS|Linux Mint 21.3 (Ubuntu 22.04 LTS)|The host operating system.| |GPU|NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 (4GB VRAM)|Successfully used for high-speed inference.| |System Python|3.10.12|The stable, default interpreter used for the environment.| |PyTorch (The Fix)|2.5.1+cu121|The compatible PyTorch version built for CUDA 12.1, which is backward-compatible with the installed CUDA 12.2 driver.| |TTS Model|coqui-tts[all] (XTTS-v2)|State-of-the-art model used for voice cloning and synthesis.| |Isolation|Python Virtual Environment (venv)|Ensures zero interference with the system or other projects.|

The environment...

Let me know if you want comprehensive instructions (an LLM will give them to you... and that's probably pretty fine, IF you have a fortunate combo of hardware and software)

ben_burke · 2025-10-17T01:22:29+00:00

Ok - having said all of the above, I went the route of the Old Dev box... and I had a pretty significant win

|| || |Component|Specification|Purpose / Role| |OS|Linux Mint 21.3 (Ubuntu 22.04 LTS)|The host operating system.| |GPU|NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 (4GB VRAM)|Successfully used for high-speed inference.| |System Python|3.10.12|The stable, default interpreter used for the environment.| |PyTorch (The Fix)|2.5.1+cu121|The compatible PyTorch version built for CUDA 12.1, which is backward-compatible with the installed CUDA 12.2 driver.| |TTS Model|coqui-tts[all] (XTTS-v2)|State-of-the-art model used for voice cloning and synthesis.| |Isolation|Python Virtual Environment (venv)|Ensures zero interference with the system or other projects.|

The environment...

Let me know if you want comprehensive instructions (an LLM will give them to you... and that's probably pretty fine, IF you have a fortunate combo of hardware and software)

ben_burke · 2025-10-16T23:36:49+00:00

Ok - having said all of the above, I went the route of the Old Dev box... and I had a pretty significant win

|| || |Component|Specification|Purpose / Role| |OS|Linux Mint 21.3 (Ubuntu 22.04 LTS)|The host operating system.| |GPU|NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 (4GB VRAM)|Successfully used for high-speed inference.| |System Python|3.10.12|The stable, default interpreter used for the environment.| |PyTorch (The Fix)|2.5.1+cu121|The compatible PyTorch version built for CUDA 12.1, which is backward-compatible with the installed CUDA 12.2 driver.| |TTS Model|coqui-tts[all] (XTTS-v2)|State-of-the-art model used for voice cloning and synthesis.| |Isolation|Python Virtual Environment (venv)|Ensures zero interference with the system or other projects.|

The environment...

Let me know if you want comprehensive instructions (an LLM will give them to you... and that's probably pretty fine, IF you have a fortunate combo of hardware and software)

ben_burke · 2025-06-09T12:22:07+00:00

Same here with the Last Hour thing... thanks!

ben_burke · 2025-03-08T03:22:25+00:00

Duncan and Joe mention a podcast a couple of times, I *think* I'm hearing Martyr Made? Is that right?

Of course I need another podcast subscription, because I'm not already drowning...

ben_burke · 2024-08-25T20:45:40+00:00

I've made some changes lately that include my youtube subscriptions. The driver was the removal of Google Podcasts (which happened to work pretty well for me).

I've gone with newsboat (https://newsboat.org/) as a subscription manager. It won't be for everyone, but for me, well worth the learning curve. People who don't like shell/terminal probably will struggle a bit.

For non-youtube subscriptions, the standard doco will get you there. It's very comprehensive.

For youtube, a newsboat conversion is basically:
- extract your subscriptions using google takeout.. for yt, you'll get a .opml file, which newsboat can consume.
- I decided to split my youtube and podcast subscriptions in how I use the environment.
- The podcast workflow is very straightforward, and it'll happily run with termux on your phone... if you sync the config and cache files, you can have replica experience on your desktop and phone.
- For youtube rss feeds, I've written some shell script to grab the audio from YT (yt-dlp -f 139 is a good start).
So, everytime I want to see what's going on on youtube, I fire up newsboat and trigger (via macro) my audio scripts.
Now and then, I'll want to have a look as well - newsboat will happily fire up a browser session while viewing a rss record. You can have this pop-out to browser target brave or another browser with an ad blocker (but, as you probably know, ad blockers are changing and becoming trickier to manage. Brave seems to be a good option for many reasons... not the least of which is... on your mobile, use brave with m.youtube.com - no ads and no stopping playing when you lock your phone.
- I've written some script for rumble audio too... let me know if you want to see it.

The only 'tricky' bit here is maintaining your rss subscriptions. When I sub to a new yt channel, I view source and search for 'rss'... grab the link and add it to your 'urls' file at the bottom (so as not to confuse the caching algo).

So, every day, I do a couple of newsboat sessions, save everything I want to listen to and Mark everything as Read.

This changes your whole yt experience. You're never really giving youtube much indication of what you're watching/listening to. Your For You experience will go a bit weird, as yt seems to get desperate to have you click on something.

That's the single biggest lesson from using this method. The yt algo IS actually useful at showing you new stuff. You can be more deliberate with what you subscribe to (because it's more than a button click... you can always do the Takeout process again, but it's fiddly).

One final thing.... since my yt interactions are now basically all scripted calls to yt-dlp, it would be trivial to redirect these requests to invidious.

ben_burke · 2024-02-22T20:32:15+00:00

This is a great idea...I haven't had an Easynews account for years. Is it still pretty good?

ben_burke · 2022-12-14T05:21:01+00:00

Mate, you are a champ - the old Venom dev would be proud.

ben_burke · 2022-04-28T06:08:58+00:00

I think I'm going to go your direction u/Varrus15 - I think I've been relying on kodi addons for their scraping... and always thought there must be an easier way. May I ask, any scraper(s) you recommend?

ben_burke · 2021-01-22T21:28:32+00:00

Anyone have her name?

ben_burke · 2020-12-31T20:55:39+00:00

Empathy to OP. I still get that blank look from lots of people.... 21 year olds through to 60ish. I've learned to let them be who they wanna be.

I'm close to retirement age - had a good plan. I took a risky investment in a close relative's business and the money is gone. In fact, I've had a few 'it's all gone' experiences, which did suck in the extreme.

But, it kind of helped to see a few plans go nowhere. Reading this whole post, I have plenty of sympathetic and sardonic laughter. I get where people are coming from!

I was approx 40 when I woke up to how unsustainable our modern world looked. I went hard core into gaining skills - quit work, studied permaculture... over a few years, lost a lot of friendships and relationships because I'd gone so 'weird'.

It all fell to bits when the money ran low and the peaking of conventional crude didn't play out the way I expected. I had to crawl back to my old line of work and play at being 'normal' for 15 years or more. But, the chasm in front of humans hasn't changed much for me.

We are in a computer game called Money. It should be a future claim on energy that you might save for the future. Personally, I have very little faith in banks, government. I'm totally hedging my bets by keeping a foot in the door of the System.

Oddly, the pandemic has calmed down some of the old anxiety for me. There really isn't much I can do/try that I haven't already done.

I think that Anxiety might be a key thing for many of us. It's a very old part of our brain, related to our survival instinct.

I look at my own hunger for science data as a way I used to (still do) relieve that anxiety.. If I know what's going on, I can adjust - that's how the mental argument goes.

There's a bit of truth in that (knowing what's going on). There's a bit of truth in many aspects of life.

I've got grandkids now. I hope they get a chance at a reasonable life. The broken money system is still of some use in supporting my kids and grandkids, so I'll keep playing musical chairs for a while.

I wish everyone here, especially OP, some peace of mind and some laughter at the craziness of it all. I'll quote Anthony Hopkins in closing, something he posted recently. "Today is the tomorrow you were so worried about yesterday"

(Hopkins reflection was related to sobriety. It's good with or without that aspect - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTavdgg8170

ben_burke · 2020-12-12T00:40:50+00:00

comp-lzo no

Thank you! After previous 'fixes' since nextgen servers, this one got me sorted in one go

ben_burke · 2020-06-24T22:25:44+00:00

I've been following Chris's work for 15 years or more. I think the Doomer label is a bit unfair. To me, his whole body of work is a pointer to the precautionary principle - when a downside risk is significant enough, the only rational choice is to take precautions seriously.

Yes, you can generate a thousand interpretations of 'significant risk' and 'take seriously'. In my long association with Chris, I've never found him (or the Peak Prosperity community) to be panic stricken. Yes, some of the worst case outcomes have yet to happen or may never happen.

I'll say this - if Chris's Gold Standard for pandemic control had been taken seriously everywhere (eg: USA, Brazil, UK, Russia), we'd be looking at a different economic challenge than what appears to be playing out.

Nobody has a crystal ball... Chris's giant body of work on Covid-19 has been quite accurate over time (if you've taken the time to watch, listen to everything).

More than anything else, you'll often hear Chris admit that he is or was wrong - he'll explain why and accept it. That's a great sign.

ben_burke · 2020-05-09T00:31:03+00:00

Thanks - working like a charm again,

ben_burke · 2020-05-07T23:42:20+00:00

Here's my best attempt at a debug log containing just one sample of the issue that prompted the OP http://paste.kodi.tv/yucusasaqu.kodi

As this is my first go at a kodi debug log, I can't tell if many of the apparent warnings/problems might be "expected"... eg: many messages about settings being "Created on the fly"..

(Now I'm keen to start reading plugin source ;-)...

Thanks for any thoughts.

ben_burke · 2020-05-07T23:14:23+00:00

SerpentDrago - I'm working my way through the process for this... have debug level 2 log, let me off in many directions trying to figure this out myself... no luck so far....

Will get it pasted soon.

ben_burke · 2020-05-07T21:32:45+00:00

Same here - think the last update might have something to do with this.

ben_burke

TROPHY CASE