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  • Arr! Make it walk the plank…

    So I have been trying to set up our Subsonic server so that I can actually listen to podcasts (and – I suspect – with a bit of cunning BBC radio 6 music, which would be amazing) while I’m in the car (via my phone). This, one might imagine, would not be difficult.

    Open the relevant port on the router (which I always forget to do) – and lo, it registers the service on subsonic.org and you can connect. Only not.

    Because it turns out that the Xfinity Arris router is, shall we say, “well known” as a point of failure in anything which needs port forwarding. There have followed several days of trying to work out what I was doing wrong – I’d opened the port, and when I tested it at home it showed as open – but I couldn’t connect when I left the house. I discovered today that it just randomly re-closes the port. It’ll be fine and open for a while and then will suddenly close. It still says that the port is open. It still reports that the port is open. But it isn’t.

    If you tell it to close it and reopen it then it will reopen it, for a bit. For an unidentified random period of time.

    So that’s a quality piece of hardware.

    Having checked the Xfinity forums, the answer is “buy another router, these don’t work”. Which reminds me muchly of my experience with a BT router. The funny thing is that if you are using the port (so if it’s open when I leave the house and I hit play on Subsonic as I’m leaving) then it works until I pause playback. Then at some point after that it’ll get bored and close the port.

    Which leads me to think that perhaps I’ll have to add a router to the list of stuff to buy, which is irritating, because frankly, this is a pretty basic router feature and it really, really ought to work.

  • And that’s some quality homesickness

    So for work we’re having a potluck. And I am bringing in clotted cream – assuming I successfully make it – and I was hit by this blinding desire to be sat in a rain drenched cafe in the Lake District, damp kagoul on the back of the chair, watching the rain streak down the windows… Hot steaming cup of tea and a scone with clotted cream and jam in front of me.

    Sometimes being so far away is remarkably hard.

  • Untitled post 17296

    caladri:

    Fear your meat-body.

  • tinierpurplefishes:

    I keep thinking the heat isn’t actually so bad today, and then i move to somewhere that isn’t directly in front of a fan and I’m just like “Oh. Yeah. Right. Melting.”

  • Inside the “sweatshop” terminally ill Britons must call to get benefits

    Inside the “sweatshop” terminally ill Britons must call to get benefits

    Oh Britain, what has become of you.

  • scandinavianindian:

    fifty-shadesofgay:

    giwatafiya:

    dominawritesthings:

    thewellofastarael:

    mexica-boricua:

    skywritingg:

    myvaginaisanuclearreactor:

    howmanymoredays:

    kropotkitten:

    Fun History Fact: The overwhelming majority of cowboys in the U.S. were Indigenous, Black, and/or Mexican persons. The omnipresent white cowboy is a Hollywood studio concoction meant to uphold the mythology of white masculinity.

    Thank you.

    I will always re-blog this

    I think it was high school when i overheard some white girl put on her best semi-disgusted and confused voice and go “why do so many Mexicans dress up like cowboys?” and I had to be the person to tell her.

    Why do you think the whites say buckero? Cause they couldn’t say vaquero.

    I dunno if I reblogged this before but fuck it, y’all gon learn today.

    Teach the children.

    also, cowboy culture was hella gay. like, write-poems-about-your-cowboy-partner gay.

    IF people acknowledge it, they play the necessity card– there weren’t any women out on the range, so they had to “resort to men.” this claim completely erases 1) the romantic (not just sexual) writings of actual cowboys, 2) the acknowledgement of cowboys’ potential homosexual activity by writers at the time, and 3) the possibility that some men would deliberately become cowboys with the intent to seek out homosexual encounters.

    no one wants to admit it, but cowboy culture was just. so inherently gay.

    Im here for the gay POC cowboys

  • So next week (house updates start here, we hope)

    So when we got our septic design done, we failed to communicate sufficiently well that the giant, old, big leaf maple tree was one of the trees that we were absolutely committed to saving. Since then we’ve moved house and got new jobs, and furnished our new apartment and so on. This has meant our house has been on hold. Given that we can’t put it up this year, that’d taken the pressure off anyway…

    But now? Now we want to get moving again which is always tricky. Getting momentum going for something as big as a house project is challenging.

    With that in mind, next week we are hopefully* going out to cut a little pathway so that we can move the septic. The first step in getting our house built. We also really need to go out and fill back in the original perc holes.

    The original plan** called for the septic to essentially lie into the roots of the maple tree:

    original_layout

    The new plan:

    modified_layout

    See the beautiful modifications. Actually, this was done as a very quick sketch to explain to our septic guy what we want to do. He is, shall we say, ‘reluctant’ to be drawn on whether there will be any problems doing this, although we’re unsure why there would be, or why the soil 50 ft to the east of the current perc holes would be dramatically worse than the soil in the place they dug the first lot. And we both are of the opinion that there’s a lot of land we’re currently planning to leave ‘as is’ and just maintain, all of which we could consider for septic sites…

    Anyhow, this time we’re going to be there in person so we can say ‘yes’ or ‘no’. We’ve also marked out roughly the route of the drive (which we’ve kinda-sorta-sketched on the map). We’re also hoping to put the septic near the drive so it can be emptied, when that time comes.

    Once the septic and well are in… we can actually start moving forward. Septic, well, power, foundations… then we get to design the building. The yay.

    * While our groundworks guy gave us the suggested day, he’s not yet confirmed that we’re booked in with him for the time we said.
    ** We’re actually building a 2 bed house, but putting in a 3 bed septic

  • Untitled post 17221

    mysharona1987:

    Is it just me or should you perhaps get more than 90 days in jail for planning an actual, proper terrorist attack?

  • Untitled post 17224

    palestinianliberator:

    An French Imam shared this photo on Facebook in order to encourage dialogue about the French ban of the burkini on beaches, asking why these nuns can freely wear what they please [which is very similar to the burkini in the first place] while Muslim women are fined, forced to undress, and forced off the beach?

    As a result? His Facebook was banned.

    As if it wasn’t already clear enough, this new law is specifically meant to target, demonize, and punish Muslims and Muslims alone. It has nothing to do with “French values” [although I mean, colonialism, massacre, and ethno-supremacy have always been core French values so this shouldn’t be surprising~*], and is simply another manifestation on the government level of the rapidly rising hatred/fear of Muslims and Islam.