Everyone hosting a Plex server on Hetzner infrastructure received an email from Plex over the weekend telling them "due to the large-scale violations occurring from that hosting provider, we will be taking action soon to block access and activity from Plex Media Servers hosted by that provider" - even if the content hosted on that Plex server is entirely legitimate. Sure, there's a shitload of pay for access Plex servers on Hetzner full of pirate material and I get why Plex doesn't want anything to do with that, but it's disturbing Plex is monitoring where your server is hosted. Good time to look at Jellyfin for your media hosting needs.
Following Victoria's lead, NSW has decided to ditch all incentives for buying an electric car and will introduce a road usage fee. The $3,000 rebate for EVs under $68,750 and the stamp duty exemption for EVs under $78,000 will end on Jan 1st, 2024. Instead of these incentives, the NSW government will spend $260m on charging infrastructure. The road usage fee was always planned to be a thing by 2027, but it'll be interesting to see if it's actually legal. There's a High Court case that's due for a decision in the next few weeks that might decide the road usage fee is an excise (not a fee or a tax), which only the Commonwealth has the right to impose as per section 90 of the Constitution.
Home Assistant is a wonderful platform for smart house stuff that doesn't lock you in to a single vendor and now they've got a new little box that makes running a Home Assistant server a little easier. The Home Assistant Green is an RK3566 SoC based computer that pre-loaded with Home Assistant's server software that runs on your local network and communicates with all the smart devices in your home regardless of vendor or platform. It costs US$99 + delivery and if you want to communicate with Zigbee/Thread/Matter devices, you'll need a US$30 dongle that slots in to the Green's USB port. If you wanna keep your smart house stuff but stop sending data back to Apple/Google/random Chinese vendor check Home Assistant out.
Max Read has dived into the fake text messages used in Apple's product marketing since the release of iMessage 12 years ago and found a disturbing "Apple Dimension" where people are either on holiday or planning a holiday, sending perfect photos to each other and punctuation and grammar are perfect. According to a post on Hacker News, someone at Apple tried to sneak in Easter Eggs and references to previous characters/people in the Apple Dimension, but had the joy sucked out of them by "multiple rounds of approvals by many different teams".
Surface Duo 2 Components scaled (Microsoft)
📻 Horse Pills - The Dandy Warhols
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