Spyke

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canada

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Nova Scotia Power customers question power bills that have doubled, tripled

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  1. The previous liberal government in power for 8 years did absolutely nothing to solve the NSP issues despite promising many times to work on lowering power rates.
  2. The current progressive conservative government in power is actually about as left leaning as the provincial liberals, so this particular issue has nothing to do with conservative vs liberals.

The real issue is that the utility should never have been privatized (yes decades ago by a PC gov't).

world

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Company behind Jack Daniel's says Canadian boycott is 'significant' as sales drop 62%

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This is one of those talking points that if you took just a second to Google you'd see is just one of the many things Trump says that's bullshit.

Canada spends both in actual dollars and % GDP about the same as Australia (another commonwealth nation) more than Spain, the Netherlands, Mexico (yet they don't get these Trump talking points as the southern neighbor), Taiwan in actual dollars (a nation under threat) etc. Canada historically known as a peacekeeping nation and yet still spends 16th in the world in military spending.

The comparison is apples and oranges because the US significantly overspends and does so with the direct purpose of exerting power and pressure globally to serve their political and financial interests. NO ONE has "a leg to stand on" as a dollar for dollar comparison to the US because they're spending a trillion dollars annually. They account for nearly 40% of the entire world military spending to the point that adding up the next like 9 in spending still doesn't equal that. Now imagine if they cut that by 25% how much good that would do for the average American while still maintaining dominance in the military space globally.

Backwards country complaining almost no one else is backwards too.

news

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Four dead and more in hospital with methanol poisoning after drinking 'free shots' in Laos

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Few points:

  1. Depending what's being fermented the quantity of methanol can be quite low. Most "sugar wash" type home distillations are quite low in methanol. Certain fruits can yield higher but this isn't the cheap "moonshine" you'd find and even then it's unlikely to poison someone in the volume present.

  2. The distillation process doesn't add methanol, nor ethanol, just concentrates it by boiling it off and leaving behind the higher boiling water etc. Drinking any fermented natural alcohol still results in the consumption of some methanol. In fact if you look up your local regulations, every country has an acceptable amount of methanol they allow in commercial products. Drinking a distilled product concentrates what is already present, so binge drinking it can result in more consumption of methanol as a by product, but doesn't magically make some shots deadly.

  3. Most home distillers err* on the side of caution and throw away their foreshots and heads "just in case" and also often take the end of a distillation run (tails) and keep those out of their hooch as well.

It's not exactly "easy to fuck up" to the point you poison someone with methanol, though to be fair to you this is a pretty wide spread myth.

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What if the Internet Goes Down? - 15 Jan, 7PM CET

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It's pretty easy to jam as it's just radio waves. Increase the noise on the channel and the chirps of your msg don't get heard. That said there are some options to vary the channel as a group, and jamming a broad and robust mesh completely vs an area of nodes is a bit harder.

Trackable as in traceable? You mean finding your node location? By default not overly difficult but again, can be set up to make it hard to find you.

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What games have y'all been playing a lot on your deck recently?

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There are a few ways but here's my preferred method

  1. Desktop mode
  2. Install Lutris
  3. Search for battle.net in Lutris and install
  4. Launch battle.net
  5. Install Diablo 4 through battle.net

There are a few guides around with more detail but it's very straight forward. Also a few guides out there on how to maximize battery life. I get 2.5hrs or so, closer to 3 if I avoid towns.

piracy

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My 2tb jellyfin server with a disney collection go brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

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You're not wrong but there are still drawbacks to Kodi where Jellyfin ends up being better. In my use case, with 5 tvs in the house, 2 are hooked up to Nvidia shield tvs but the other 3 are Chromecast w/ Google TV which have very limited storage unless I want to spend a fortune in hubs for each one to add a USB drive or micro SD.

With kodi installed I would regularly hit the storage limit of the device and have all kinds of weird bugs. Just as an example I had my daughter set up with a kids only account, but account switching would cause Kodi to become unresponsive for anywhere from 30 seconds to having to do a hard reset of the device. Jellyfin gives me the same access to my library with a lighter, more streamlined, persistent interface across devices and with easy and fast profiles. It still allows me to keep a pi as the host so the whole setup is low power (important for me as we're on solar, every watt helps!)

I don't really need the Kodi plugins I used to have if the main purpose of streaming my local content isn't smooth and simple for the family. This is coming from a long time XBMC user, I've been running it since my original modded Xbox in the early 2000s.