Oh man, it’s a nightmare and I just happened to be lucky. I ended up buying one of those passively cooled router-esque N100 boxes out of China (AliExpress) and while it was a total punt it turned out to be a great experience, and their customer service was actually good too.

Kingdel was the make/vendor and it’s been rock solid.

I moved to an OPNsense router a couple of years ago and I’ve never looked back. Hell is shitty consumer routers.

Does this belong in technology?

I didn’t. Thanks for the shoutout, I’ll have a look.

You’re way outside my scope of knowledge - I know a bit about the decisions they took 10 years, and not very much on what is happening today. I would imagine some of these limits are configurable and dynamic. I really don’t know.

Skype made the call negotiation go through a central server (as does all systems nowadays). Skype was originally built on Kazaa technology to punch through firewalls without a central coordinator and that’s what Microsoft removed. They didn’t remove it to track the calling but to enable larger group calls on weaker devices which required video mixing on a central system rather than peer to peer call (where weaker peers couldn’t decode that many video streams). Calls up to 4 are still routed peer to peer if the backend can find routes through all firewalls.

Very very little of Skype was in the new Teams if anything. Teams was a rewrap of Communicator calling tech and was a response to Slack. The real time chatting had nothing to do with Skype either.

Skype lingered in Microsoft for a couple of reasons; Microsoft was crap at acquiring businesses back then, thinking that a hands off approach was best. It meant Skype never really became a proper Microsoft team - they still felt and acted like Skype employees and they didn’t manage to affect Redmond very well. Being acquired is super hard especially when almost all of the bigger business was in a different time zone and a different culture.

I was at a leadership development workshop with a tonne of Skype leaders about 10 years ago. They were still feeling incredibly frustrated and not understanding what was expected of them. It was a botched acquisition and the fault was on both sides.

Of all the meeting solutions, I’ve come to the conclusion that Google Meet is the least bad.

In mean aside from the fact that almost all of that story is completely wrong, it’s a good story.

Source: Used to work at Microsoft and worked a lot with people from the Skype team.

For anyone finding this later. Unfortunately I’ve had to come off Actual :-(

While the gocardless syncing works really well, Actuals code for merging transactions is just too flaky for the banks I use. I end up having multiple similar transactions, done on the same day for the same amount, collapse into one and while you’re meant to be able to just set a starting date and an account value, Actual kept on syncing transactions from before the starting date.

I appreciate it’s open source and given I’ve paid nothing I should expect nothing. All good. But there wasn’t any engagement in the discord support section nor any response to bugs filed. It’s clearly under active development but the QA side doesn’t get enough attention that I could get it to work for me.

While I understand they don’t want to accept bugs without repro steps, there’s not enough scaffolding for capturing data and submitting issues inside the app.

I know I could get on that and fix it. I’m not complaining. I’m glad Actual works for many. But the transaction syncing totally did not work for the banks I used and so I’ve had to stop using it.

Been on PhotoPrism+ for a few years (90000 photos, 9000 videos). I use PhotoSync and it’s rock solid (although I go through an FTPS server for sync) - I’ve never ever had an issue with it. Yes, it’s third party, but for me it has just WORKED. Can also highly recommend PhotoPrism although I don’t edit many tags.

The only thing we can hope for is that Musk is dumb enough to volunteer to be “apprehended” by ED209. He strikes me as having that much techno-optimism (also see: Steel ball against Cybertruck window).

Yeah, don’t for a second think this wasn’t part of the deal he made with Musk.

I’ve literally just switched to Actual (3 days in) after living out of a homemade Excel YNAB clone for years and years. Overall it’s great and the bank syncing really works (except with a weird issue around starting date and starting balance).

I love that it’s open source, E2E encrypted, self-hostable and the data lives in a SQLite database.

If I haven’t found any major snags, I’ll of course become a supporter in a couple of weeks.

True, but there is good and bad ways to use media (educational content done well vs cheap Chinese children’s TV) and we do have age ratings there.

You’re right that cigarettes are universally bad (smokers would argue not, of course, and probably highlight social moments, pauses to reflect etc) but much of my list has good and bad sides. I’m perfectly open to removing cigarettes from the list, but it doesn’t change the validity of the other areas where we regulate minors’ usage.

We ban gambling, cigarettes, alcohol, media for children, because of harms we understand that they inflict on children. Should these be parental discretions too?

Got two teenagers. I’d outlaw smart phones for anyone under 18 if it was up to me. Bring the flame!