Where are all the uk.d-i-y greats gone?

I think that's improved a lot since they cut off access through GG. Unfortunately it's also cut off those who found GG convenient and never looked beyond it for their usenet service.

Nick

For people without a newsreader there's always

Nick

In my case several things happened...

Signal to noise ratio dropped.

I stopped using a Solaris desktop, and hence stopped using my own build of Karl-Johan Johnsson's knews, which I found extremely good for scanning for the interesting signal and ignoring the noise within a second, and following threads I was contributing to.

I now use a Mac and Thunderbird for Usenet which is nowhere near as good as knews was.

I got busy with other things. I am pretty much full time doing prostate cancer support and awareness. I presented at the European Association of Urology conference in Paris a few months ago to 250 urologists and oncologists. I also still do Repair Cafes.

I have been doing DIY, but mostly at my brother's place, where I've rewired, replumbed (including gas), dovetailing into trades knocking down walls, putting in RSJ's, plastering, etc. Had to get my work signed off by Gasafe and NICEIC, both of whom asked me if I wanted a job! The gas engineer in particular was very impressed with my pipe bending (one of the pipes had 7 perfect bends in it without any joints, and he wanted to know how I bent 28mm pipe without a 28mm pipe bender.)

I think we need photos… ;-)

Tim

There is a pipe bending wiki page they could be added to :-)

Yup. I got lots circuit boards for that I designed

PICO PI with wifi, a temp sense chip, and a mains relay all the size of a 13 A backing box.

Not written any code for it yet tho,

I'll happily offer a trial site. Only 50 miles away:-)

Oh, ok.

It's a bit down on the list of projects, but I'll announce when I've got it going.

The tricky bit is communicating with it from afar. I.e outside your domestic network.

its not that difficult...

just set up a port forwarding rule in your router...

Prefrably you have a static IP in your router. If not, then you will need to sign up to DynDNS or No-IP

I have a static IP and I haave a port forwarding rule for my VPN server and personal domain name server.

And what IP address is your *dynamically assigned * router on? Ive been into this extensively and its why most numpty level stuff uses a cloud, so the IOT kit talks to the cloud and so does the remote user

Which doesn't always work and is hard to do without a server on your network

So do I, but not Tim - and we are in a very small minority

One approach would be to use the Andrews & Arnold L2TP Light tunnel service. This costs £2 + VAT per month. It gives you one static public IPv4 address and a vast number of IPv6 addresses. The maximum connection speed is 3Mbit/s and the monthly data limit is 1Tbyte. (There are faster services with more data at higher prices.) You can use this service from almost any internet connection.

To use this, your device would need to support plain L2TP

- it doesn't use IPsec - or if you have several distributed around the premises you could configure a router or some small computer like a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W to handle the L2TP tunnel and maybe run MQTT.

John

I'd definitely count Andrew Gabriel as one of the 'greats' ;-)

J^n

For me I use a Pi Zero W as the gateway unit for SSH tunnelling all traffic. The ISP is Virgin so an almost static IP4 on cable, not changed for 3 years here. SSH port on the router is open to the Pi Zero W. That runs the script for updating the dynamic DNS in use. Should the IP from Virgin change, the scripts should update the DDNS after 15 mins. The Pi connects over Wifi, it's fast enough for what I need, ISTR I can move about 10mbps over SSH. The Pi Linux is tweaked to save all logs to the RAM disk so the SDcard is seeing few writes and is over 2 years old now. SSH uses SSH keys only, no root login, no passwords yada yada. Fail2Ban runs with aggressive rules to stop "friends" from Russia,Iran,China et al. banging on the SSH port for too long. Both the Linux and Windows desktops at home can be woken with WOL packets from the Pi which gives me the ability to connect back to home systems without leaving them on 24/7 sucking power.

My suggested application is a bit tongue in cheek. Commercial greenhouse users would have a 7 day attended operation and be able to monitor interior temperatures, open vents, doors and initiate fans etc.

Unattended domestic glass houses are probably managed by installed thermally controlled vents together with the operator making a judgement about upcoming weather prior to leaving.

The simplest control operation for me would be an extractor fan or so managed by thermostats.

I envisaged TNP's device as being linkable to an i-phone having remote temperature reading ability.

It's like DABSWTFM disappearing from uk.tech.digital-tv. Most of the arguments and vitriol have gone.

Could be done. Depends on how 'remote' As its programmable there are many ways to set it up...

My all steel, painted builders barrow's tub, was rotten. I'd fitted a new plastic wheel and tyre last year, frame was still OK, but I looked on Facebook for a complete, replacement, galv barrow. Instead, I found someone selling just the tub, but galvanised, and really cheap. So I bought that, and the barrow is now good as new, after painting the frame.

If you just need to get into your network from afar, rather than the world get into your network, another option is a private VPN service like Tailscale or Netbird. This is very different from the kind of VPN you may have seen adverts for. Effectively they're a cloud service which links up endpoints like your home network and your roaming phone/laptop, and they do VPN+crypto+NAT jiggery pokery so that all the machines appear on the same virtual network (which their servers can't access, since the traffic is point to point and they don't have the keys).

So you depend on the service but only as a way to bring up the connection and then it's all private and you aren't passing traffic through their servers. You install their client on any machine that wants to be able to connect into the VPN. Most of them use Wireguard for encryption which is simple and fast.

They have free tariffs, and some of them have open source implementations of the cloud endpoint if you ever needed to self host them.

Theo

Definitely :-)