Exactly 4 years ago today I had what can only be described as an utterly brutal extraction of half an upper molar by a dental surgeon (the other half had been removed by my regular dentist 2 weeks prior).
My plan was to replace the tooth, which had died from an internal crack, just a freak accident from biting something hard, with an implant.
And then the world went into lockdown.
On Wednesday, 4 years and 2 days since the original was removed, I get my new tooth installed.
Here’s why the NHS were happy to vaccinate me with MMR the other day. From UK govt advice from 2019:
• individuals born between 1970 and 1979 may have been vaccinated against measles and many will have been exposed to mumps and rubella during childhood. However, this age group should be offered MMR wherever feasible, particularly if they are considered to be at high risk of exposure.
• individuals born before 1970 are likely to have had all three natural infections and are less likely to be susceptible. MMR vaccine should be offered to such individuals on request or if they are considered to be at high risk of exposure.
Tl;dr: younger GenX and older Millennials in the UK were likely given inadequate protection against measles and none against mumps and rubella: vaccinate on sight.
Older GenX and boomers: just give them the vaccine if they ask for it.
Yes. I caught measles in around 1960 and had the BCG shot at school in 1967/8 but I’ve never had any protection against Mumps, which seems a bit of an oversight.
I recall that you had whooping cough many months ago, which I was reminded of because I also got it last autumn. Somebody on here told me recently that it was included in the tetanus booster. Research done some years ago shows that people don't need to the tetanus boosters, but I guess whopping cough wasn't part of the study? Anyway, I haven't had that shot in 20 years now and I'm guessing virtually no others adults have either.
Boomers: Talkin’ ‘bout my generation things my parents said to me…
GenX: What sort of things?
Boomers: Awful, cold things.
GenX: Such as?
Boomers: Er … um … tax the rich to build a welfare state?
GenX: And?
Boomers: Something about minorities …
GenX: Go on…
Boomers: I think it was “don’t put minorities in death camps”
GenX; You know you’re kind of an asshole?
Millennials: Oh hey dad, big bro. Wassup?
Boomers: Your brother was just leaving.
GenX: Well I do need to go get some overtime. My mortgage is fucking killing me and apparently someone ran away with my pension fund.
GenX: Asshole
Millennials: Wow. What was that about?
Boomers: Oh, music tastes. Anyway, let’s go into the city. There’s a matching band and something I want to talk to you about.
…
Boomers: Cool band! Anyway, in the unlikely event tha
... show more
Boomers: My generation! My generation!
GenX: Hey dad, what you doing?
Boomers: Talkin’ ‘bout my generation things my parents said to me…
GenX: What sort of things?
Boomers: Awful, cold things.
GenX: Such as?
Boomers: Er … um … tax the rich to build a welfare state?
GenX: And?
Boomers: Something about minorities …
GenX: Go on…
Boomers: I think it was “don’t put minorities in death camps”
GenX; You know you’re kind of an asshole?
Millennials: Oh hey dad, big bro. Wassup?
Boomers: Your brother was just leaving.
GenX: Well I do need to go get some overtime. My mortgage is fucking killing me and apparently someone ran away with my pension fund.
GenX: Asshole
Millennials: Wow. What was that about?
Boomers: Oh, music tastes. Anyway, let’s go into the city. There’s a matching band and something I want to talk to you about.
…
Boomers: Cool band! Anyway, in the unlikely event that I die soon after plundering the healthcare system your grandparents built and laying waste to the environment, will you defeat the plans that they, and by they, I mean “I” have made? I know things are shit and it’s my fault, but I can’t be arsed to clean up after myself and the beach bar is open …
Millennials: My older brother was right. You are an asshole.
@Ghost of Hope The single dose measles vaccine they used in the 70s was not as effective as they’d hoped long term, but to be fair the thing was on the verge of being eradicated and they didn’t think it needed to be.
@Alexandra Lanes Dupuutren's appears to have gone into remission overnight. I guess my body is too busy doing measles things to worry about fucking my hands.
!Friendica Admins Any idea what the situation with the Docker image is? It seems like Phil isn't active and hasn't been for a while. Does anyone know if he's OK?
Hopefully he is, and is just taking a break. Does anyone else know how to generate a new docker image? At the moment, we're kinda stuck on 2023.12, which AIUI has known vulnerabilities.
Failing that, how easy is it to migrate an existing installation away from Docker?
I guess he is okay, but I guess that he currently is extremely busy, so that he can't do anything for the project. Sadly he is our only expert concerning Docker. It would be great if we found some volunteer to have a look at the whole stuff.
@Michael Vogel My partner, @Zoe O'Connell has expressed tentative interest as this sort of thing is her day job, but she's stupidly busy with her Open University work at the moment.
@Michael Vogel @Zoe O'Connell Heh, the basic mechanics of building a docker image given a base system and a set of stuff to install, I can do. I'm an utter beginner with stuff like GIt and suchlike though. Last time I was gainfully employed in software engineering, we were all about CVS.
So you have a service like Tailscale. Could actually be Tailscale.
You can install it on a barebones Linux SBC with Wifi. (Raspberry Pi zero W or equivalent). These things will run off a public USB port or a USB power pack for many hours.
Set it down somewhere with public wifi. Set it as an exit node. Go elsewhere.
Some hours later, do bit torrent, or whatever.
Some days later, if you are so minded, go back and collect it. Or not. These things can be cheap enough to be disposable.
It's traceable via Tailscale, were someone to do forensics on it, but you could set it up to wipe its Tailscale installation after a certain time period if you were paranoid. It probably wouldn't ever get that far.
Hell, in a lot of places with public wifi, cable tie a random box in place and people will assume it's part of the scenery for a very long time. Your only issue is power, and there are wa
So you have a service like Tailscale. Could actually be Tailscale.
You can install it on a barebones Linux SBC with Wifi. (Raspberry Pi zero W or equivalent). These things will run off a public USB port or a USB power pack for many hours.
Set it down somewhere with public wifi. Set it as an exit node. Go elsewhere.
Some hours later, do bit torrent, or whatever.
Some days later, if you are so minded, go back and collect it. Or not. These things can be cheap enough to be disposable.
It's traceable via Tailscale, were someone to do forensics on it, but you could set it up to wipe its Tailscale installation after a certain time period if you were paranoid. It probably wouldn't ever get that far.
Hell, in a lot of places with public wifi, cable tie a random box in place and people will assume it's part of the scenery for a very long time. Your only issue is power, and there are ways to address that.
You could easily make one that looked like, and functioned as, a USB mains power adaptor.
Random VPN exit nodes, everywhere. Just need a way of getting wifi credentials onto it.
A lot of wifis want you to log in via a website, so the work around for that is that you can record a lynx session and play it back, which is essentially automating a headless interaction with a website. Then put that a cron job.
I've done this in real life to keep a raspi authenticated on a pub wifi. It worked for several days.
Have been alerted to the existence of an MMR drop in centre. Going to attend on Saturday to see if they’ll give me one to top up my 49 year old single measles vaccine.
Interested to know how it goes -- I'm in a similar position and have had pushback from GP when trying to get vaccines which are now routine in childhood.
I queried my GP about shingles and MMR and had twin punctures in my arm that afternoon. But, since I'm to old to have any of the MMR vaccines, it's a full course not a booster. I have the impression they are keen to get them done. Achey and cross the next day, but just a bit tender in the upper arm the day after.
@anubis2814 I don't know when it changed, but the eligibility is simpler now than it used to be; between 70 and 80 instead of the tighter cohort it used to be. I'm sorry to hear about your co-worker. It's miserable at any age, though not, I think, infectious in its own right. In
It was noted that Farage is seen as “vulgar” by the people who inhabit the Tory back rooms, and my response was, “ I mean, come on. Looking at him you just KNOW he’s walking around in 1970s nylon y-fronts that he only changes once every 4 days.
The guy is basically every Sid James character from Carry On, but unironically.”
Me: reading article “blah blah blah Lawrence Livermore blah
Me: This is nuclear bomb research. Nothing to see here. Also solar panels literally exist. Move along.
I swear, “fusion power stations” are the global death industrial complex’s fig leaf for bomb research just as “hydrogen cars” are the global death industrial complex’s fig leaf for digging oil out of the ground.
“Look at me pretending to develop fusion power for A HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS PER KILOWATT HOUR! Muhahahaha! Nobody suspects me of getting round non-proliferation treaties, which I literally admit to doing on my website!”
Solar panels: “Am I a literal fucking joke to you?”
America and France: Hi! We have world-leading programmes to develop and study high temperature deuterium-tritium plasmas, and also space programmes which use solid rocket boosters which you could hypothetically launch into a sub orbital trajectory with a payload of a few tonnes at very short notice. These are unrelated and very highly civilian normal things we are doing. Also, STAR TREK!
@Adam @Alisdair Calder McGregor You're replying to Alisdair, but in my thread, so I'm gonna assume "you" means me.
The answer, in general, unfortunately is "no". Posts that I can reasonably expect are only going to DFRN or ActivityPub type places support abstract (which gets converted to content warnings for ActivityPub), but unless I specifically restrict distribution, posts go to other places which handle them very poorly.
I love the idea of getting vaccine boosters, but understand that in some places it’s basically not possible. Consider the UK, for example, which is literally throwing Covid booster doses away rather than give them to people not in their “at risk” groups who want them.
I wasn't eligible this winter. I went to the pharmacy to get a flu jab and I was asked "Do you want the COVID one as well?" I said I wasn't eligible and they said didn't matter, I could still have it. I threw myself onto the needle as fast as I could. TL;DR you may not be eligible, but pharmacists can be reasonable.
@Alexis Bushnell @Sarah Brown I'm relieved for myself that I'll be able to get a booster, but angry that people in far greater need than me won't be able to afford it.
I’m now at the stage of having lost count of the number of vaccinations I’ve had — a function of the fact that they stopped filling in those little cards. I know I’ve had them at roughly six month intervals though and that, on two occasions, it’s only because I was absolutely determined to get one and not lapse. I’m preparing for another assault on the system next month, prepared to work out how to work the system again.
@gz @Bích-Mây Nguyễn :verified: in dual resident in the UK and Portugal and neither is going to give me a measles booster if I just rock up and ask for one. They’ll just tell me to fuck off.
@bicmay I thought you were dual resident but didn't realize that neither would give you the vax. That's bonkers considering the outbreaks that are occurring, at least in England.
“So you’ve found this website because your ADHD is flaring up to the point where deciding to boil an egg because it’s nearly midnight and you have known for the last six hours that you need to eat, might as well be designing the logistics for a manned mission to fucking Pluto. Here’s a simple 87 point plan for getting yourself out of this funk. Point 1: have you tried not having ADHD?”
Honestly, I think this is a wakeup call for the fediverse. This time it was mostly harmless spam images.
Eventually though, someone is gonna use the same trick to send seriously nasty stuff to our servers, and our timelines. The sort of stuff that you need therapy to try and unsee.
We, collectively, need to try and stop that before it happens.
The patriarch of a right-wing Canadian family of 11 had had just about enough of gay people in his country. “We didn't feel safe for our children there in the future anymore,” father Arend Feenstra told Russian media. “There's a lot of left-wing...
@gz @Ghost of Hope back rows first is actually terrible. There’s a video about this somewhere.
The best way to do it without assigning everyone a unique birding number is to just go, “plane’s here. Get on”, which is basically what Ryanair does, only they use both doors simultaneously.
@grayface_ghost What's bad about back rows first? I like it when there are no jetways but not many flights without them, at least in the USA. The last time I used stairs was in Long Beach in 2009.
@gz @Ghost of Hope it creates congestion because everyone is trying to reach the same rows at the same time. It’s better to introduce a bit of randomness because the gaps that develop stop things bunching up.
Ryanair planes all have air stairs, which they deploy before the ground staff even get there. My record from fan stop/seatbelt lights going off to divining away in my car, via passport control at Faro is 4 minutes.
@grayface_ghost That's incredible, 4 minutes! My sister has been flying to Faro for over 30 years (they have a place near there) but she's never mentioned anything about the airport.
@gz @Ghost of Hope last time I came through there a few weeks ago I was first off the plane. As I passed the gate area for the return flight on my way to passport control, I heard, “Ryanair is now starting boarding of flight FR-whatever to London Stansted. Please have your passports and boarding passes ready for inspection”
More than half the incoming passengers were still on the plane. They’re that fast.
@gz @Ghost of Hope All their planes have airstairs. They use both front and rear entrances (with ground steps for the rear one), and they only have two classes of boarding: priority (where you get to use the overhead bins) and non priority (where you do not, unless you’re in an exit row). You wanna use an overhead bin, you have to pay extra.
@Michael Vogel a pleasure. I know nothing of php but … code is code, I guess, and once I went and had a look at where the error was coming from, the place to look became obvious.
@Sarah Brown Specifically in this situation, you would be better off disabling PHP errors showing in pages and cutting the deprecation messages from the logged errors (respectively display_errors and error_reporting in the relevant php.ini file)
@Sarah Brown It's likely the very display of these error messages was preventing loading of proxified remote content. Since it runs through a local PHP script, any text output in what is supposed to be binary content would have broken media decoding.
@Sarah Brown Not precisely, but you can figure this out by going to Admin -> PHP Info. This page will list the configuration files PHP is using. The default on Debian-like is /etc/php*/[apache2|php-fpm]/php.ini.
@Hypolite Petovan OK, so the docker image doesn't have a php config file. It has two sample ones in /usr/local/etc/php/. I Just did cp php.ini-production php.ini in that directory in the docker container and restarted, and it seems to have picked up sensible defaults, including the ones you mention above.
!Friendica Admins Has anyone found a better way to deal with these spam instances than degenerating them one by one in the "Moderation" page? It's a bit tedious.
I don't seem to receive the spam here. How do these spam messages look alike? Are these posts with a huge amount of hashtags? If yes, then this is handled by the automatic spam protection in the current release candidate.
It looks like this. I get it via academicchatter@a.gup.pe which I do not want to block. It was way more two days ago or so. Allow Spammers for vegan steaks!
BashStKid
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Hey, they could drive the Enterprise with a touch screen, what’s the problem?