Make public transport, cheap and frequent through the country, along with a cheap reliable car share/hire scheme… and you’d see the need for cars dwindle.

It’s easy for certain types of people to claim the high ground, when they have no idea what it’s like for everyone else… they live in gilded cages in cities with cheap and easy to access public transport… so they have no need for a car… and thus no one has a need for car either… they’re so blinkered, they might as well be blind… and the ignorance that goes with the preachy mentality is even worse.

So when I can walk to the end of my road and catch a bus to the next town over… without it taking over 2hrs to travel 6 miles… via a 16 mile trip in the opposite direction and changing buses that means sitting around in the freezing cold for 40 mins… I’ll consider giving up the car… But the chances of that happening are ZERO because ‘capitalism’ dictates we must CONSUME, CONSUME, CONSUME… there is no will with govts or the rich to do a damn thing… and the rich account for around 49% of ALL individuals emissions.

So take the preachy bullshit and shove it somewhere dark and stinky.

The last time there was a general strike in the USA that generated real change… it took just 11 million people… about 10% of the working age at the time. These days, you could do it with a few choice professions… air traffic control, truckers, dock workers… the people that move the people and the goods would cripple the country in a week, maybe 2.

Ease of access to internet porn, ruined my enjoyment of porn.

If you are in the UK and you tunnel into your home via VPN… you are still in the UK, you need to connect to a VPN service/server outside of the UK.

I pay for netflix… dumped prime a couple of years ago and got given disney+ for free for 12 months. I have my own server and am on version 3.2 of it after my first dedicated one I built in 2009. I’ve kinda had others before then, but it was an old PC I hooked up to my old CRT tv in about 2002 which struggled to play some mpeg2 content due to the weak single core CPU it had in it.

Now it’s running on an AM4 setup with a Ryzen 5 5600G, so I can use the PCIE socket that used to have a GPU in it for a SATA expansion card, so that I can triple the number of HDD’s it could hold. I’m slowly going through it once a year replacing the oldest 6TB drives (without about 80,000+hrs of uptime on them) with 14TB archive drives I rip out of seagate external drives. 4 more to go… to add to the 4 already done.

I think my first dedicated server had 3TB of storage (2x 1.5TB) and I still have one of those drives in an external drive that I use occasionally to fill with movies and shows when I go away and take one of my shield tv boxes with me… but mostly I take an external 500gb ssd as it doesn’t require a power supply and I rarely have enough time to watch 1TB of movies and shows whilst away.

Over the last 15yrs, it’s been rebuilt a few times and upgrade many… adding extra drives, swapping out CPU’s and so on. 3 ground up builds with the last one being built in 2020… Normally when I build a new system for myself, the mediaserver gets upgraded with my old parts… Hence the last one being on windows 7 and an AMD FX 8350 with DDR3 ram until mid 2020.

Currently about 70TB capacity.

My next one will have a dedicated raid setup with parity… it’s the one thing I’ve never been able to do with such a random collection of different size drives… hence normalizing them all to the same kind of 14TB ones.

I still occasionally pick up CD’s, as I do for blurays… I’ll check out charity shops if I pass them, go to car boots… it’s why I keep an old BDrom in my server, so I can rip the files from them, convert and have them available to stream around the house.

I roast mine

About 12yrs ago, I picked up a Tassimo machine that made coffee from pods… over the next few years, I added a milk steamer, so that I could heat and froth my own milk as the pod milks were vile.

I was used to buying lattes at shitty coffee places like Costa and Starbucks in the UK… then some one made me an amazing latte at an independent coffee shop… and I realised how good coffee should taste.

I tried switching to my own ground coffee and buying some re-useable pods for the machine… they were garbage.

So a few years ago, I invested in a decent bean to cup machine with steamer by Delohngi, and started buying a variety of beans to try in them.

I’ve settled on Lavazza crema or intenso beans (8/10 & 9/10) as they’re quite strong and reasonably priced… Occasionally when I visit one of the food fairs in my area (about 5 or 6 a year) I’ll pick up a bag of extra special flavours for xmas and so forth. I’ve even tried a few of the supermarket varieties and found them disappointing.

With the price of coffee rising due to climate change and poor crops, I’m having to rethink my purchases… 4x 1kg bags of beans used to cost £60, and are now more like £100… So I’ve switched to a different lavazza now as they’vce changed packaging and these are labelled 11/13 and 10/13 for strength.

Whilst I was saving a lot of money each year by ditching pods… it was more about the waste than the expense for me… the cost of the machine meant I didn’t actually save any money for about 2yrs really due to the upfront cost, but the savings each year on beans vs pods is about £125-150… and the machine was £320.

But with prices of coffee beans rising, the cost of the pods is rising even more… so those avg savings could be more like £175-200 a year now.

All I know is that the coffee beans work out cheaper, give a far better drink and the grounds help keep the cats of the garden and the soil fresh and fertile.

I used to have a wileyfox phone using cyanogen OS, which was a fork of android with a lot of security and privacy features. That forked again into lineage OS at some point in the latter half of the 2010’s.

I mostly stuck with motorola phones after that, as close to a vanilla OS as possible without going google… but I stupidly bought a Pixel 6 Pro about 2.5yrs ago… the price was hard to ignore, but regretted it ever since.

I only replace phones when the become obsolete and security is an issue, or the phone actually fails… this one is going strong and I keep meaning to look if it can easily be jailbroken to install and alt OS… But it’s been a very long time since I did anything like that and I find myself falling behind on modern tech stuff as I get into middle age.

I pay attention to everything, and refuse to install any apps. I block 90% of the data from apps I have installed, only allowing a couple to access certain things (banking for example). The first thing I do with any android phone is go through and disable all of the bloat from google, disable chrome and turn off most of the settings. Install a decent browser and plugins to block tracking, ads and so forth. I don’t install social media apps, in fact I’m not on any corporate owned social media, I use signal/telegram for messaging… I deleted old SM accounts starting in 2012 with facebook and ending with twitter in 2018. I use email services like a duck.com address or proton mail for online signups where required, along with alias spam accounts for certain things that can easily be deleted and stop spam.

From next year, I will only be buying phones that can be jailbroken and an alt OS installed.

I go even further with my home PC’s to protect my privacy… I can’t stop it all, but I can render what they do collect as worthless as possible.

In some countries you can, I believe Canada is one of them… at least I believe it’s legal to do so in Toronto.