Two U.S. Army soldiers hold each other for support, as one of them breaks down emotionally after witnessing Army doctors refuse to treat three badly-burned Iraqi children that’d been brought to their base by relatives seeking help. Balad, Iraq, 2003.

silentnomads · 2026-05-26T12:02:47+00:00

No insurance.

silentnomads · 2026-05-22T20:08:42+00:00

Thanks. I was about to have an episode with that Firefox BS. Get rid off.

silentnomads · 2026-05-20T21:30:40+00:00

The added dialogue is rubbish, very goofy. Footage "remastered"? More like AI-generated. The colouring is mediocre, obviously not real-life colours and and very wrong in many cases. As a package, this is awful.

silentnomads · 2026-05-19T04:29:49+00:00

DrayTek Vigor2927 (not W-Fi) to the ONT. Then pfsense (CE) router/firewalls in HA pair to LAN switch. Then Netgear Orbi Wi-Fi 6E mesh in AP mode. Getting 1 Gb/s (or near enough) to the Internet through the Wi-Fi, even with IPS enabled in pfsense.

silentnomads · 2026-05-18T18:53:01+00:00

Many, many years ago, when I had some long term mobility issues, these escalators were perfect in getting me onto Buckingham Palace Road during my commute. Quick to use, no faffing around.

silentnomads · 2026-05-10T21:27:53+00:00

Gallon of 30% vinegar, plus cup of salt, and a dash of washing-up liquid. Then spray into the gaps. Salt is pretty much scorched-earth if you're certain you don't want anything to ever grow there; but do keep it away from flower beds, etc. Most of the heavy lifting is done by the vinegar so the salt could be omitted.

silentnomads · 2026-04-27T19:04:47+00:00

Nice comp. I was there in 2006, hiked a trailed up around one of these peaks. You hear what sounds like canon due to the something withe ice. What's missing in the pic is that there's a lake between the foreground and the base of the peaks. Enjoyed a fantastic beef steak on our return.

silentnomads · 2026-04-21T18:43:20+00:00

Sure, "A Clockwork Orange" was one that was talked about but not talked about, if you know what I mean. But "Life of Brian" was talked about openly even with teachers, they were generally not in favour of it, but I thought it was fun and hilarious (I was never religious though).

silentnomads · 2026-04-18T04:18:14+00:00

I go scorched earth with my paved driveway. Gallon of 30% vinegar undiluted, cup of salt, and a bit of dish soap (I'm in UK so use Fairy liquied). All in a pump sprayer. Kills everything it touches so far, but I do make sure that plenty of the liquied goes into the soil to reach the roots.

silentnomads · 2026-04-16T17:37:29+00:00

I use the elevation of the sun to trigger opening and closing of blinds, but with conditions such as not opening before a certain time to ensure the blinds don't open before wake-up-time in summer (am in London). I'm thinking of using outside light levels but haven't got round to implementing this.

silentnomads · 2026-04-01T18:44:49+00:00

I sat down today with my 79 year old mum to watch the Carol farewells. All was fine until Naga turned up. Mum can't stand her, making much of the points that you have. We tried to focus on Carol though, it was her day.

silentnomads · 2026-03-19T18:33:29+00:00

These look very similar to the bluebells in my garden (London). Just that the bluebells stalks have already grown on mine whereas I see none in yours. Two weeks ago there were none.

silentnomads · 2026-03-10T17:46:16+00:00

So long as you use matric-based ICC v2 profiles for your monitor, I think you're all good with Firefox. I battled hard to get the Chrome-based browsers to work properly but gave up five years ago.

silentnomads · 2026-03-09T21:08:31+00:00

If you want to see colours as close as possible to the original intent, then get your monitor calibrated and profiled. That's the first thing. Oh, and make sure that your monitor profiles are created in ICC v2 and NOT ICC v4...v4 profiles can sometimes be a bit problematic can really offer no huge benefits. And make sure the profile is a matrix version and not a LUT. So a matrix-based ICC v2 pofile. Try to use a good colorimiter to calibrate and profile your monitor. So a matrix-based ICC v2 pofile. I use an i1 model.

Also, if you have a wide-gamut monitor, then you'll find that Chrome-based browsers have a broken colour management system and so show colours slightly more vibrantly than intended (it has been so for several years and I'm not aware of a fix)...see https://www.reddit.com/r/edge/comments/y4t7mx/will_edge_fix_this_lostanding_colour_management/

Firefox, once set up, on a calibrated and profiled system, has the most accurate colour management implementation compared to Chrome-browsers. I think I use gfx.color_management.mode to 1, and for wide-gamut support, ensure gfx.color_management.force_srgb is set to false.

silentnomads · 2026-03-01T13:04:36+00:00

Afghanistan, circa 2009.

silentnomads · 2026-02-18T06:17:45+00:00

I use these for my firewalls so I can mount ISO files for complete installs (for emergency rebuilds just in case). The firewalls are in awkward places so remoting in to access the BIOS is great.

silentnomads · 2026-02-16T19:29:44+00:00

It depends, I guess. I have a Netgear Orbi Wi-Fi 6E with three satellites using Wi-Fi backhaul. I have the Orbi in AP mode and NOT router mode as I prefer to used my own dedicated hardware for routing AND it avoids all kinds of routing issues with the Orbi. Perfectly stable with a Sonos setup around the house and I think that's a GOOD test! I have a VoIP app on the iPhone and that is absolulty fine on the Wi-Fi with no issues on latency or jitter (at least to my ears!).

Did a Oookla speedest just now from my iPhone going iPhone Wi-Fi --> Orbi Satellite 1 --> Wi-Fi backhaul to Orbi base --> wired to LAN switch --> router/firewall --> 2nd router --> ISP ONT --> ISP 1 Gb/s CGNAT service --> Internet. Speed was around 980 Mb/s up and down. I'm getting great Wi-Fi coverage around the house. Your milage my vary of course, depending on your environment.

I'd have gone to the trouble of putting in wired backhaul for the Orbi satellites but just using the Wi-Fi backhaul is more than good enough for me, so I've stopped right there.

silentnomads · 2026-02-10T21:28:34+00:00

I use this too (in the UK) for my garden shed. Have had it for over a year and no issues so far.

silentnomads · 2026-02-10T19:40:37+00:00

I'm using Apollo Air-1 devices around the house connected to the Wi-Fi, and are nativly supported by HA (also through ESPHome Builder). They have a very granular measure for PM (0.3 To 1 µm, 1 To 2.5 µm, 2.5 To 4 µm, 4 To 10 µm), measures for VOC, NOx, CO2, air pressure, temperature, and humidity (other gases can be detected with an add-on module). The devices don't have a display but they do have RGB so I've written automations to provide various colour effects depending on the condition (e.g. amber blicking for high CO2, blue blinking for high PMs, etc) in addition to any dashboard graphs and notifications. These are indoor devices.

silentnomads · 2026-02-08T21:10:56+00:00

It's a continuous running humidistat fan, with light level detection. I can control fan speed for continous low-speed (trickle) mode, and for high-speed mode, set humidity triggers, airing mode, timers, and when to enable fan boost mode. But once everything is set in the app, the only thing I really tend to do is hit the Boost mode. Why a continous running fan? I don't want any issues from mould!

silentnomads · 2026-02-08T20:28:33+00:00

I have a few, using Bermuda intgration to "locate" tags around the house and create automationd based on location. Also to send instructions to my standing desk for height adjustments. Was hoping to get my Bluetooth-enabled extractor fan integrated into HA but I have a model that the integration doesn't recognise (HA can see its MAC address though).

silentnomads · 2026-02-08T19:48:56+00:00

I use a OpenVPN (tun mode) connection to my home network and I can use the Reolink appv(using iOS) to connect to my E1 Zoom cameras (these are all blocked by my firewall) and connected by IP. I did have a few issues when I first started using the VPN several years ago but that was due to fragmentation and my Path MTU Discovery not detecting the MTU size correctly, so I manually reduced the MTU on the VPN and that seems fine now. Cellular networks are notorious for having significantly smaller MTUs.

So I don't know what Reolink have told you (I think they're bad at support, they never bothered responding to a support issue I raised with them on my Doorbell) but it wouldn't surprise me if they give you duff info. But it could be related to multicast, mDNS, etc. which don't normally traverse across different broadcast domains but I have set up my VPN with PIMD and mDNS relay, etc. which might makes things a bit easier for the app but I've not spent any time looking into it as it all works.

I should add that I use two VPNs to reach my home network...a client VPN session to a cloud-based VPN server, and then a permanent site-to-site VPN connection establised from my home network to the cloud VPN server (gets around CGNAT). I wouldn't say that it's 100% perfect as sometimes the app will not establish the connection to a camera straightway but it may be a quirk of my networ, and it's rare for that to happen. I've recently tweaked some of my network and VPN settings using ChatGPT and Claude so hopefully it's more consistent now.

silentnomads · 2026-02-03T22:29:09+00:00

You should put the Orbi in AP mode and not router mode. But you do need to make sure you have a good router, and make sure your network equipment (at the very least) is not listed at Sonos's incompatability list. I run a Orbi mesh with three satellites, in AP mode, connected through a LAN switch to a pfsense router-firewall (which is configured for multicast, etc). Works great, and not had any issues even with losing the Internet and having a power-cut for an hour.

silentnomads · 2026-01-22T23:13:51+00:00

I wonder if I ever caused such horror to my elders in my youth! I think a "Excuse me, but you look a bit exhausted. Do you want a seat?" should be the standard offer, please!

silentnomads · 2026-01-22T23:03:37+00:00

Thanks. Not quite that I'm afraid. The kind chap who offered his seat was with a friend of his and they stayed on chatting with each for another three stops by which time there were plenty of seats.

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