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slau

2,033 karma · joined December 29, 2014

Freelance cloud consultant. I have a background in telecoms, security, and databases. https://unticks.com
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slau··on I'm being cyberattacked by Tesla, Inc
I actually think this is brilliant. Let the scanner IP get access to the most unpatched Wordpress, maybe even generate some garbage ERP numbers.

Once the asset scanner detects the vulns, everyone will kick into high gear to patch this.

slau··on Data collected by cars and sold to third parties
It’s practical to see battery level so I can optimise the electricity price at which I charge it.

Although it wasn’t worth the cost of the 3 year subscription so I now just estimate the charge status based on the charge’s power consumption.

If the car is at 10% battery, it may be worth charging at .15 or .3€/kWh. If it’s at 70% charge, I’ll wait until the price drops to .005€/kWh. The whole thing is automated in HA.

slau··on Hitachi launches CO2 heat pump water heaters with solar-friendly tariff controls
I believe he actually addresses that in his video. He mentions that 240V ones typically include resistive elements in case they’re needed IIRC.
slau··on Hitachi launches CO2 heat pump water heaters with solar-friendly tariff controls
Technology Connections has recently published an in-depth piece of the advantages and disadvantages of in-room heat-pump water heaters [1].

The tl;dw is that it is significantly slower than a resistive or gas-powered water heater, and lowers the temperature of the room by a few degrees, but nothing major. You have to over-provision them compared to your needs. And they are way bigger.

[1]: https://youtu.be/F_7B2shTPPU

slau··on I turned my RSS feeds into an e-ink newspaper to stop reading on my phone
The only thing attracting me to KOReader for my PocketBook is OPDS. The few presentations I've seen show a UI so bloated (as in, the main view for reading pages crammed full of widgets on the bottom of the screen to display wifi signal, battery percentages, and progression counters) that it makes me wonder why some people use an ereader at all.

If my PocketBook had OPDS out of the box it would be the perfect device. What has your experience been? Why are you using KOReader?

slau··on Beef and dairy drive 41% of biodiversity damage linked to global farmland
India is about 100th in milk consumption per capita, consuming less than a third the average of the top 10.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_milk_cons...

slau··on Show HN: Firemaps Spain – Live wildfire map with wind flow for ES and PT
Thanks. I appreciate you making the effort. This was kind of the response I expected. Not sure what happened in the other thread.
slau··on RamenHaus
Ittenbari in Akasaka was an absolute revelation as to what ramen can be.

Tabutchan in Osaka was the confirmation that it is the most delightful form of food invented by mankind.

slau··on Show HN: Firemaps Spain – Live wildfire map with wind flow for ES and PT
Je peux aussi te répondre en Français, mais je ne vois pas du tout le rapport avec la discussion.

Have you actually seen the image I'm talking about? This is the one: https://firemapsspain.online/og-image-v3.jpg

It shows a straight line across all of France, which appears to be a 100km wide line of fire. Considering my family, in France, had to be evacuated, I have friends who lost absolutely everything, yes, I get annoyed when people use AI slop that doesn't care about accuracy.

Especially coming from a website that tries to improve information about wildfires! I never commented on the content of the app. I just said it's odd that the image in question shows France burning, but Portugal is shown empty of any wildfires.

slau··on Show HN: Firemaps Spain – Live wildfire map with wind flow for ES and PT
The AI-generated thumbnail that is embedded is social media posts is in particular poor taste. It appears to show most of France in a blaze of death.

All the while showing Portugal as not having a single fire at all.

I understand you might be focused on Spain, and that’s fine. But please understand that people are dying or losing everything, and being a tad sensitive to that could go a long way.

slau··on More Tailscale tricks for your jailbroken Kindle
Going from EPUB to KEPUB requires conversion (I believe KEPUB has XHTML directly embedded into it, right?). It's Kobo's proprietary format to "support" fast scrolling with preview, reading time estimates, etc.

Yes, Kobo can potentially read EPUBs natively, however the support is intentionally gimped to try and push you towards KEPUB/their own store.

slau··on LG to ban residential proxies from smart TV apps
This is why I’m a bit conflicted about DoH and ODoH. Firefox and Chrome have defaulted to DoH for years if I’m not mistaken (although I’m in Europe so I believe my FF still uses regular DNS instead of DoH by default).

This also means that DoH effectively sends all your queries to CloudFlare on FF. Chrome is slightly smarter and tries to map your DNS provider to a DoH implementation if known.

slau··on Seattle Just Had an Earthquake
I think the universe is trying to tell you that whatever you wrote at that exact moment was fire. Or maybe the exact opposite, and the universe had to stop you instantly. That’s the annoying thing with the universe, one can’t ever really know with certainty what it meant, or even if it meant anything at all.
slau··on Ask HN: Are other people seeing a spike in IT problems with businesses?
I don’t think we used to be this way. I think the binary aspect of modern discourse was designed. A lot of arguments are reduced to us v them. It is as if holding two simultaneous opinions is now a bag thing.

Politicians used to rely on facts. On evidence. Colbert, like him or not, hit the nail on the head over a decade ago: “We live in a post-truth world.”

Maybe it’s a side effect of modern media platforms. You either like or dislike. If you don’t do either… do you even exist?

The tribalism has been pushed to an incredible level. You can’t agree with part of someone’s discourse. You either fully agree or fully disagree with them.

slau··on Let's Encrypt bans certificate usage in any US sanctioned territory [pdf]
3 90-day ACME certs for free. 180€/year for unlimited 90-day certs and 5 yearly ones.

That’s a pretty steep increase. I would almost be more interested in a monthly fee per cert.

slau··on Let's Encrypt bans certificate usage in any US sanctioned territory [pdf]
HID was originally American and Scottish, but became fully American in 1994.

HID was acquired by Assa Abloy in 2000. No idea whether that means we now consider it Swedish.

ZeroSSL used to be Austrian until their acquisition in 2024.

I used to work for a company that got acquired by HID. It looks like HID has retained their original offices in some form.

slau··on Wow, if it's this easy in 1998, I bet it'll be even easier in 2026
What a brilliant piece of writing. I remember almost every single step—safe for actually getting angry emails. Maybe I ended up being the one writing them.

What a glorious time period.

Interestingly, it would’ve been impossible to share this writing with as many people as the author did by publishing it on mastodon and then it ended up on HN in 1998. The network effects are real.

slau··on Valve says it's ready to launch the Steam Machine this summer
Without the paywall: https://archive.md/AkF6v
slau··on Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment
Maybe the original source that the current article links to is a better link: https://epicompany.eu/media-insights/bancomat-bizum-epi-sibs...
slau··on Microsoft Edge stores all passwords in memory in clear text, even when unused
OK, fair, I never left my keepass file exposed like that when I used keepass.

If I remember correctly, 1Password still requires a "vault key" in addition to your username and password, and it was definitely too long and not used often enough for me to remember.

slau··on Fedora is now the default Linux recommendation, and Ubuntu did this to itself
Isn’t Bazzite based on Fedora?
slau··on Microsoft Edge stores all passwords in memory in clear text, even when unused
> Remove all passkeys from your phone and laptop

I don't have any passkeys on my phone or laptop. They're all on the Yubikeys.

I don't really see a difference with (some) password managers, though. If you use one of the keepasses, and you lose access to the file, you're in the same situation right?

And yeah, you're right, there is a risk of inconvenience. I'm not debating that. I just choose to organise my life in such a way that it is just an inconvenience.

slau··on Microsoft Edge stores all passwords in memory in clear text, even when unused
I travel a lot. By train, plane, and car. I also use passkeys when possible. I have multiple Yubikeys, stored in different locations. I also have a password manager, where I typically keep track of which logins aren’t yet backed up across physical tokens.

It takes a bit of effort, but it’s not impossible.

Yes, it means that in the event of catastrophic failure I might not be able to log in to some services until I get to one of the backups. I haven’t been able to imagine a scenario where that would be truly problematic.

slau··on Said it couldn't see her eyes. The car then automatically disabled
I didn’t look at the account or provenance, but I’m more wondering about the actual content.

“I was in Europe” -> where? Why would the car be configured in English? I’ve rented cars in Spain, Germany, Denmark and France, and they were all in the country’s language.

“6 lane highway” -> again, where? Or is it meant 3 lanes per side? Because 6 lanes on each side are few and far between in Europe.

My car will get pissy when it’s in semi-self-driving and it can’t detect my hands on the steering wheel. It will start beeping and stuff for a very long time before slowing down and eventually stopping.

I’m also a bit surprised about the statement she couldn’t figure out what was wrong. Do people _not_ look at their dashboard when the car makes a noise to get their attention?

It’s also odd that she didn’t mention the actual car brand and model. This is 100% something that needs to be investigated and checked, and name and shame is the correct approach.

I doubt I see what this has to do with government tracking; it’s about making sure people don’t doze off. I don’t believe there’s any facial recognition involved.

slau··on Ask HN: Who wants to be fired? (May 2026)
I’m not quite at the point where I want to quit, but some people have turned off their brain, and it frustrates me.

They don’t think critically, let the LLM add random stuff, and then let the LLM argue for them on GitHub. When I talk to the human they have no idea. But 60s later they post a 3 page essay explaining they remembered and why x or y.

The thing is, I can tell why the LLM threw it in. It picked up on a side discussion in the comments, but we agreed in person to do something else in a different PR. Now all of a sudden it added a whole bunch of stuff unrelated to this PR.

slau··on Mise-En-Place
My team at work uses Mise for nearly all repos, regardless of stack (Python backends, React frontings, data science repos). I typically prefer to use Make for this kind of stuff, but they were already using Mise when I joined.

It’s been a fairly pleasant experience overall. I think sometimes it tries to do too much, but it works okay-ish.

The only thing I would recommend to stay away from is the encrypted secrets stuff. That’s way too much of a foot gun.

slau··on Euro-Office – Your sovereign office
Discussed 9 times in various forms over the last month: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&prefix=false&que...
slau··on Oracle files H-1B visa petitions amid mass layoffs
I hate Oracle as much as the next guy, but this seems like a nothingburger.

Oracle didn’t file “thousands of H1Bs”. Oracle filed 2690 applications in FY2025 (Oct-Sep), and so far filed 436 in FY2026, according to the article.

If anything, this would indicate that Oracle slowed down on hiring foreign workforce. Oct-Mar is half of Oracle’s fiscal year, but they only filed 16% of the H1B applications as in 2025? That seems in line with a hiring freeze and subsequent layoff.

slau··on VR Is Not Dead
Apologies if this wasn’t clear, I thought it was obvious: you have something sitting on your face, isolating you physically, visually, physically, and emotionally.

When I’m playing on my couch with my wife, when something happens on screen we still look at each other and laugh—regardless of whether it’s a single player game or not. There’s eye contact.

If I’m engrossed in a game of RL in my office, I can still look down at my dog when she comes and boops me. There’s eye contact.

Virtual reality, for all its qualities and ability to let you be digitally present with people online or also in VR, is physically isolating users from the people who are physically nearby.

slau··on Office EU: European-owned cloud based office suite
> EUfforic Europe B.V

> built on Nextcloud Hub

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