A man who tried to launch a major campaign to save Bristol Zoo has received thousands of pounds in compensation from the Bristol Beacon - because the venue cancelled his booking for the launch event after the boss of the zoo privately intervened. Bosses at the Beacon, which is owned by the city council, later tried to silence campaigner Tom Jones by offering compensation, but only if he dropped his attempts to investigate the cancellation and sign a non-disclosure agreement.

Update: CMA moving in right direction? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/22/apple-google-face-enforced-changes-uk-mobile-phone-dominance-uk-competition-watchdog-stricter-oversight

Dan is a UK based full stack web developer who is working on Bookstack, a self-hostable wiki platform (MIT license).

On Google's recent announcement about developer verification he writes:

This is a massive leap in control, further centralising approval power to Google across the entire Android ecosystem while cementing themselves as the ultimate gatekeeper of what users can run on their own devices, all under the guise of security. This is a further step away from an open ecosystem, while being harmful to any platform competition & innovation.

...as a UK resident I feel my best bet to counter this is via the Competition & Markets Authority (CMA).

He includes his report as a basis for others to use perhaps.

Dan is a UK based full stack web developer who is working on Bookstack, a self-hostable wiki platform (MIT license).

On Google's recent announcement about developer verification he writes:

This is a massive leap in control, further centralising approval power to Google across the entire Android ecosystem while cementing themselves as the ultimate gatekeeper of what users can run on their own devices, all under the guise of security. This is a further step away from an open ecosystem, while being harmful to any platform competition & innovation.

...as a UK resident I feel my best bet to counter this is via the Competition & Markets Authority (CMA).

He includes his report as a basis for others to use perhaps.

Dan is a UK based full stack web developer who is working on Bookstack, a self-hostable wiki platform (MIT license).

On Google's recent announcement about developer verification he writes:

This is a massive leap in control, further centralising approval power to Google across the entire Android ecosystem while cementing themselves as the ultimate gatekeeper of what users can run on their own devices, all under the guise of security. This is a further step away from an open ecosystem, while being harmful to any platform competition & innovation.

...as a UK resident I feel my best bet to counter this is via the Competition & Markets Authority (CMA).

He includes his report as a basis for others to use perhaps.

I just read Mark Kermode's book about The Exorcist and really enjoyed it, finding new appreciation for the film. Any recommendations for books that have elevated a movie for you?

Edit: thanks for all your help and replies, this is a such a great community!

I would like to host a public service for some family, probably Peertube so we can share some videos. Invite only.

There's no way I'm going to get everyone onto a VPN, it's a non-starter though I would prefer it.

I am thinking to use a VPS with anubis and either crowdsec or fail2ban (or both?!) in front of Peertube. Will apply as much hardening as I can muster behind that: things in containers, systemd hardening, SELinux/Apparmor enabled/tuned, separate users for services, the usual. All ports shut except 80/443, firewall up.

Despite all this I expect it will get scanned and attacked as it will have to expose ports 80/443 to the world so for family it will just work.

Is there anything else I should consider for security? Is Peertube the weakest link in the chain? (a little concerned their min password length is 6 it seems and no 2fa). So long as I keep whole thing up-to-date is it as secure as anybody can manage these days (without resorting to VPN)?

Is it all too much hassle and I should look for a company that offers hosted Peertube so they can worry about it?

Thanks for any and all advice.

As title, available in UK a bonus!

A 'masterpiece'!

Bristol airport called out here.

Figured I'd ask here as thought self-hosters would care most about looking after their photos.

What do you do with friends' photos you'd like to keep hold of? Maybe there's a pic on a chat app or they've sent you a link to an album on google photos.

Would you just throw into your own pile of photos or do you carefully adjust metadata to indicate who took them? Just use dirs to separate them from your own? Interested in any and all thoughts.

I saw the smoke yesterday about 5pm. The 'We the Curious' fire of 3 years ago was also solar panels: https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/curious-fire-everything-know-major-6931554

I killed them all once and even dunked lava on the top yet still they spawn. Do you have to remove the entire structure to 'beat' them? Thx

From

https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/52069-combined-authority-mayoral-elections-2025-where-does-voting-intention-stand

In the code below we wait for a background process three times. In the first paragraph we get the expected 0 return code from the wait. In the second paragraph the only change is wrapping the wait in a command substitution which instead gives a 255 return code. In the third paragraph the only change is wrapping the wait in a subshell which gives a 127 return code. Why is this?

sleep 1 &
wait $!
echo $?                     # prints "0"

sleep 1 &
a=$(wait $!)                # <---- only difference is cmd substitution
echo $?                      # prints "255"

sleep 1 &
(wait $! &>/dev/null)       # <---- only difference is subshell
echo $?                     # prints "127"

Thanks in advance for your thoughts!

EDIT: updated to include the subshell final example also, which gives a clue

Some gusts of 45mph in Horfield and Fulton according to https://martynhicks.uk/weather/data.php so I think we escaped the worst in the city. A few things blew around but no damage near us.

Can anyone recommend a tool to manage photos at the cmdline? I just want to move photos into dirs based on their metadata (YYYY/DD), occasionally fix up metadata (adjust dates), rename photo filenames to match a template and/or query my photos for certain things. It doesn't need to be a gallery or image touch-up tool, I have other things for that.

I'm aware of exiftool and ImageMagick, perhaps they can do the job but they seem quite low level, really need to build scripts around them - I'd like something that operates at a slightly higher level so I don't have to do too much scripting.

A quick search turned up chee (GPLv3) which can:

• search photos using a simple query language
• manage named queries (called collections)
• copy/symlink images into a custom folder structure

...but it's not had an update in a few years (maybe it's feature complete tho!) Any other suggestions? Thanks.

Any child-friendly recommendations? I think most matches will be around midday hopefully.

(the image is an older shot from https://www.flickr.com/photos/37972999@N07/47986391577)