Follow up question for voice/video servers in general.

If I want to host a server that allows video calls, do I need GPU hardware acceleration?

Github

Looks like they got caught out by this all too, they are asking for another month or so to get a refactor in.

I thought they did a complete rewrite of the voice/video stuff?

That’s the opposite of how I would understand it though. If you said a passive RCE I would understand that as it being run without me doing anything - in this case, just having notepad open making me vulnerable.

Seems to be under active development?

Probably worth adding a disclaimer with matrix, that if you self host, DON’T federate. Apparently their abuse management is awful and you get all kinds of shit sent to you which is hard to remove.

Can that be disabled?

It’s ZA! Good luck convincing the south Africans though 🤣

I once worked in a company doing business in both SA and ZA, lots of confusion.

• At least one payment card
• travel cards
• driving license/ID
• organ donation card (I stick mine on the back of my ID)
• at least one coin for supermarket trolleys
• some notes, just in case.
• work building access card

If I understand correctly, they recently rebuilt all of the voice/video stuff. Video should be coming soon, it’s more of a resourcing issue for their servers.

I looked at self hosting, but it’s a bit of a mess currently.

I’m in the UK though, so they imply they may (already or in teh future) need to verify my age anyway.

They don’t seem to have a great out of box experience currently, will require some more poking around.

I’m going to try self hosting https://stoat.chat/ not sure it has screen sharing yet, but apparently they just re-wrote all their voice/video stuff, so it should be available soon.

I played around for a while with Blazor (C# Web assembly) and wasn’t a massive fan.

The debugging experience was awful.

Lots of runtime gotchas, it’s limited to one thread, so anything that creates a thread will fail at runtime (but not ‘normal’ async stuff). What code creates a thread? No idea until it fails at runtime.

Yes, you can share a dto project between front end and backend, but anything else will eventually trip you up.

It’s still a cool idea though, will try it again at some point.

It’s an amazing castle, but it needs some work. None of the info boards were readable, and the website their QR codes pointed at was dead.

They also had a cafe/toilets that was marked on the maps, but looked like it had been closed for ages.

I thought the aluminium was fine conductivity wise, the problem is that it oxidises and becomes brittle.

Every time a BT man went into the box, it was russian roulette as to whose internet would get broken.

If they are twit-twoo owls, listen to where the sounds come from, it will be from a pair, with one going twit and the other going too.

For some detail:

Flagging this fund manager for actually green funds: https://www.edentreeim.com/ most “green energy” funds just had oil in them, these guys actually do it properly. (I just learnt they are related to the Church of England though, so for any “moral” investing, assume that to be the morals of the CoE)

Jupiter: https://www.jupiteram.com/uk/en/individual/ is a large UK asset manager that should have a decent range of funds if your broker has them. I have their strategic bond fund as well as some of their Asian funds.

Otherwise, look at picking up an array of non US index funds.

As always, it depends on where you are, what your risk appetite is and who your broker is. I advise moving a way from a US based broker if you are using one, they will have a heavy US focus.

Look for funds/indexes managed outside of the US. Look at what is in funds, most brokers/apps should give you at least the top 10 holdings, see if they line up with your expectations.

IMO, look at value stocks/funds currently rather than growth. Aim for dividends and stability until we know where global politics is heading.

Personally, I am slowly selling my world index holdings (mostly US tech by value) and most US shares. I’m putting it into renewable energy (check the fund isn’t just buying oil majors) and a strategic bond fund (I want to buy a house next year, so want stability)

There is also https://wandrer.earth/ (not federated) that is really cool. It gives you points for each unique mile you have been, encourages you to explore new places.

This is the cheapest I could find that wasn’t dodgy in some way.

Previously I was pay as you go at 1p/mb on a different supplier, but that got discontinued.