GreatBlueHeron

My wife and I recently moved our phones to Virgin, because it's cheaper and uses the same carrier as the expensive service we were paying for. I live in a rural area and service sucks so I want to enable wifi calling so I can make and receive calls at home. I've been trying for a couple of days and it keeps failing with this error message. My wife decided to try, just in case it was some issue with my phone, and she rushed through and accepted everything, including the consent to collecting data for advertising that I had declined - hers worked straight away! Now I don't want to try consenting to find out if that's why mine won't work because I'm in the mood for a fight with them. I know I won't win, but I'm curious to see where it goes.

EDIT: I chatted with their agent for a few seconds - it was fairly easy to convince it to connect me to a human. The human was happy to manually enable WiFi calling for me in the back end. I still believe this is nasty behavior - they're trying to get people to go back and try again, and maybe consent to data collection next time around.

I'm reviving an old Yamaha XV535 Virago. It's running and passed roadworthy inspection yesterday, but it has one remaining issue before I take it for a real ride - its not charging enough. Battery voltage increases from ~12.5V to ~12.9V when I start it. Should be ~14V.

A lot of the electrical connections were very crusty - I've cleaned them as best I can with contact cleaner and mechanical scraping. The 4 pin connector from the pickup coils to the loom was particularly nasty and has been hot and I could not clean it enough so replaced it with a (knock-off) Deutsch DT connector and that's working well. The connector from the stator to the loom has also been hot. I've replaced the plastic shells and cleaned the connectors as best I can but I feel this connector may still be the source of my low charging voltage and I plan to replace it.

My options are 3 x generic bullet connectors or a single 3 (solid) pin Deutsch DT.

I know the DT connectors are not intended for "power" applications, but I can't find anything to say if the current on each of these wires from the stator would exceed the ~7.5A they are supposed to be rated for.

Thoughts?

I just typed up a post, including an image upload, and then when I tried to submit the post I found that the community was read only and I couldn't post. I did a copy and paste of all the text, including the image link, and posted it somewhere else.

I'm assuming there is some background task to prune orphaned images and am now wondering if the image I uploaded is in danger of disappearing because it is no longer referenced by the post it was uploaded in/for?

About 5 years ago I broke my frame. A whole bunch of life changes happened and there was no urgency to replace it. But I have been watching marketplace - I'm in a remote rural area so there's very little lugged steel frame activity.

Last week an old Colnago Sport came up for a very reasonable price and I bought it:

Saddle, stem, bars and rear wheel from my old bike, other bits came with the "new" one.

I'm nearly 60 and wasn't really expecting to ride it - it's more a nostalgia thing. But I went for a short test ride and it feels great. I may actually spend some time on it.

And don't worry - I'm not under any delusion that I have a great Italian icon - I know the "Sport" model is Colnago in brand only. But for my purposes, it's perfect.

I grew up on a farm, and in a small town service station, where I had access to MIG and oxy acetylene. My father taught me to use both. A bit later (in my mid 30s) I did a one day MIG course that basically reinforced what I'd been taught as a kid.

It's now nearly 30 years later and I'm wanting to weld some exhaust pipe on a bike I'm resurrecting so I bought the cheapest, nastiest, little flux core welder on sale - reduced from $249 to $149. It's not my father's Kemppi, but it melts stuff so I figure I should be able to get it done.

My big issue is - I can't see shit! As soon as it arcs the lens in my (cheap, nasty) hood goes dark and all I can see is a haze of smoke. My memory is really bad but I'm pretty sure I remember being able to see a pool of molten steel and moving the wire around in it as needed.

Did I buy the wrong lens or is flux core just like that?

I recently bought a '90 Yamaha XV535. I cleaned the carbs and was able to start it. I then decided to pull the tank and flush it out, replace the fuel filter etc. While the tank was out I took the opportunity to weld a little tab that holds one of the side covers back on with a little flux core welder. At the time of welding the battery was out and all the connectors around the fuel tank were disconnected. Now I've put it back together with a new battery and everything works - except spark!

I'm here kicking myself really hard for being so stupid - welding with the ignition module still connected. But then I did some reading and most stuff suggests that just disconnecting the battery is enough.

I'm going over it again today cleaning and reconnecting all the connectors but I'd welcome any input. Have I fried my ignition or is there a chance it's just a dirty connection?

I'm in Atlantic Canada and apparently this shouldn't be here today! Merlin would not ID it but Google image search suggests Sandhill Crane.

I've tried NextCloud before and didn't really love it and I'm now happy with a combination of syncthing and LibreOffice. But my wife wants the full google drive, with sheets, docs etc. without the google, and I think NextCloud is my best option for that.

I'm and experienced *nix admin and already have a Linux server running with both VMs and docker containers and also have a working OpenVPN setup for remote access. But I found the NextCloud setup frustrating. We had a discussion about it (here I think) and determined that this was because NextCloud would rather sell their hosted service, so they don't go out of their way to make the self hosted option easy. I get that and don't hold it against them at all.

But, now that I'm wanting to try it again, I'm looking for pointers to guides for setting up self hosted NextCloud. I've searched, but nothing I found seemed like "the one".

I've just bought a Yamaha YP-D6 turntable. It's had a hard life, but seems to work ok. I'll replace the stylus before playing any of my collection. Problem is that it has a Shure RXT-4 cartridge which takes a N97HE stylus. A quick bit of research suggests I'll be paying well over $200 for even a cheap N97HE clone. This seems a bit risky when I don't even know if the cartridge is functionally "good".

I'm not looking for the best possible performance from a turntable - it's just to be able to play my collection for nostalgia etc.

I think I'm better off replacing the cartridge with something like and audio technica AT-VM95E.

Interested to hear any thoughts, including suggestions for other budget friendly cartridges.

Edit for anyone that finds this later: my problem was that I was missing a route in the VMs to send traffic for the OpenVPN subnet to the main host bridge interface. So, it was using "default", which sent it to my internet router.

Maybe better to ask this in a Linux group, but trying here first.

I'm running a Linux server with Home Assistant in a VM, and a whole bunch of other stuff.

I recently moved my OpenVPN server onto the same physical box as Home Assistant. OpenVPN runs native on the host OS in tunnel mode.

OpenVPN works fine - clients can get to the host running OpenVPN, to applications running in docker containers on the same host and to other hosts on my network (once I update their routing to send traffic for my VPN network back to the OpenVPN host).

OpenVPN clients cannot get to my Home Assistant VM.

If I use tcpdump to watch the VM network interface (vnet0), from the host, and ping the VM from a VPN client I see the echo request go in and the reply come out. If I do the same, but watch the OpenVPN interface (tun0) I only see the request go in, but no reply. It's like the kernel doesn't know what to do with packets from the VM addressed to the VPN.

There is no firewall running on the host. This is not specific to my Home Assistant VM - I bought up a vanilla Alpine Linux VM and had exactly the same issue.

I've used a home espresso machine, with built-in grinder, daily for at least 10 years. I'm generally happy with the results - there's some variability but most everything I make is acceptable, and I fairly regularly get something I feel is good. Recently I've been getting a lot of "acceptable" and it's been a long time (many months) since I've made one that I'd call "good". They're missing that bit of oily lustre that I feel really makes it perfect.

• I drink a single shot over a small amount of hot water
• I get my beans from a local (same province) roaster that say they roast to order
• I like dark roast beans - the roaster calls it their Italian roast
• my house water comes from a well and is naturally a bit hard, but we have a whole house softener
• I've never de-scaled the machine because of the water softener - there's no build up or crusting at any orifices
• I don't make any attempt to get perfect extraction quantity - I grind, tamp and trim with the tool supplied with the machine. When I first got this particular machine (about 4 years ago) I programmed the extraction time, but a can't remember the "recipe" I used
• I've tried beans from one other local roaster (via a grocery store) with the same results

My experience says it's stale beans, but I'm buying roast to order, so I'm confused.

I run a small home lab - number of servers varies from time to time. Currently five, all Linux.

When I heard about log consolidation I imagined that I would get a nice dashboard type view where I could see a consolidated, real time, view of all my server logs go by. Victoria Logs does that for me. I also imagined that there would be a way to flag particular log entries as "normal, and expected" so they would be excluded in the future - the goal being to get this dashboard to a state where if anything appears, it's probably bad. I can't see a way to do that in Victoria Logs. Do I need to try harder? If Victoria Logs won't do it - is there anything that will?