yes the flaky sleep is what did it for me - laptop would randomly boot up at 2am, bright lights and whirring fans. Thought it was a virus! Seems like Fedora has cracked the hibernate/sleep issue, possibly due to good intel driver support for my Dell and finally Linux has better hibernate, sleep and wake than Windows 11 (ymmv!)
I used Linux 10 years ago, but then due to job or corp. and needing Teams and Outlook I was forced to uses Windows. Now with corp job over I was finally able to switch to Linux this week (Fedora + KDE). Loving improvements made in the last 10 years, KDE will always have its quirks, but it is fast and smooth with no crashes yet. I got Claude to make me a migration script which worked brilliantly, haven't needed to boot Windows yet. Browser sessions and everything worked like nothing had changed. All my various ssh / putty configs migrated to Konsole, Thunderbird carries on like nothing has changed. Ahhhh freedom!
I resurrected my wife's 13 year old Sony Vaio as an emergency laptop recently with MX Linux. I had previously tried Ubuntu and also Zorin Lite on it, both worked - but slowly and things like hibernate were broken and freezing up if left unattended.
MX is amazing on it, it runs as fast as I remember XP did when the laptop was new, hibernate works perfectly, screen dimming, extending display over multiple monitors and handling unplugging a monitor fine...all the things that Linux has been known to have issues with on random hardware.
I have now put in a bigger SSD and 8 more GB of RAM and the laptop is a great little media centre and simple gaming machine for the kids. I'm tempted to setup dual booting my Dell with MX now, it's a great desktop and project
I was 4 when it came past, I remember going in full cowboy gear late in the evening (9pm?) to Signal Hill in Cape Town to watch the comet over the ocean. Perfect starry cold evening...maybe I'll survive long enough to see it back again!
Thanks for the all the critiques that is very valuable feedback.
wrt choosing Wordpress - it certainly does have a lot of drawbacks like you mention, our reasons for going with it:
1. There are about 10 web designers in our town, they all use Wordpres...Wordpress runs just about every small -= medium site in South Africa, so if I fall under a bus theres someone to pick up the (website) pieces
2. We had a very broad set of requirements - event ticketing with seating plans, accommodation booking with calendars, payment processing, members directory with subscription and free options. Since this was very much an 'after-hours' project we needed fairly plug-and-play functionality.
3. Low budget for hosting - this site needed to run on a shared server that already had PHP / MySQL
But thanks again for the tips, I will review them with the team and I'm sure we can get most sorted! (the broken links were Wordpress permalinks misbehaving...oops)
Regarding speed - we have done a fair bit of optimizing Litespeed cache and reducing the unnecessary scripts that get loaded but yea its still slower than we would like. Also since we are not using a CDN, if you are far from South Africa latency will be a big issue.
That's fantastic you visited Greyton! no worries about AirBnb, everyone uses it - not just international visitors. We used to rent a room on Airbnbn (maybe you stayed with us even - near the mountain :) and we've certainly travelled plenty using it.
Greyton is definitely a hidden gem, for some reason it's not on many travel itineraries with most people doing a long one day drive from Cape Town to the Garden Route - but its without doubt the best village in the Cape, decent facilities & restaurants, fast Internet, lots of English speakers (if thats all you know!)
I don't know what the solution is wrt Airbnb, for someone planning a trip around a foreign country it offers some element of security and a lot of convenience...everything gets booked in one place. But for many small towns a tourist info office is more than just a place to pick up a map and its a social / emergency / Internet connection hub of many towns. Taking away the accommodation booking commission means that they can't operate or just get replaced by a sign board and some flyers that you can pickup at any petrol station anyway.
Greyton is fortunate in that there are lots of events, festivals, marathons & MTB races to sell tickets for and keep the office open, and it's close enough to Cape Town to get the short stays.
Next time you come, book your stay on GreytonTourism.com - insider tip, there are some unlisted, exceptional properties that can be booked...just send Ros an email on bookings at greytontourism dot com!
Living in a small village in a rural part of South Africa 2 hours from Cape Town. Off grid solar & water, keep chickens. Coder / remote sysadmin mostly for EU based companies. Same timezone as CET, so it works well. No cars needed, everything is in walking/biking distance & reasonably cost of living. Online shopping is big here, so if you are prepared to wait a couple days everything is available (no Amazon but it's coming soon I hear)
From a sample size of one ATC I know. After they retire with a very generous pay package, they spend their time getting involved in local flying clubs, going on holiday and spending time with their families. They have enough money not to need to work again.
3.5GW is almost 4 levels worth of loadshedding...ok sure it won't have 100% efficiency but South Africa is one of the best countries in the world for solar.
If solar keeps getting installed at this rate, loadshedding will be just about completely averted within 2 years, for the entire population - whether you have solar or not. Poor people are benefitting from solar already from lower loadshedding levels, and by having more reliable power at work (since many businesses are now running on solar out of necessity...and generators of course)
SA still has a mostly functioning grid, just an ancient fleet of coal power stations and badly built new ones that don't give the power needed.
So while many homeowners wouldn't have installed solar if they weren't forced to, they (myself included) are also discovering that unlimited free power when the sun shines is awesome, and with a decent Lithium PO4 battery it's not hard to be fully off grid for much of the year. "Green loan" schemes from many banks are covering installation costs and it's easy to save more than half on you electricity bill since most of SA is really sunny.
+ the environment is a big winner...the more power plants worth of power that can be installed in solar & wind, the more old coal plants can be shut down forever.
have the Jellyfin integration running on Home Assistant OS on a Raspberry Pi 4B, works brilliantly for music, movies and series. Appears to have no support for photos. Android & Roku apps are fast and seem to have less network buffering than Plex, no 3rd party accounts or logins needed, on Plex I had to keep logging in every few days not sure what the issue was.
Something my 4 year old Asus zenpad does perfectly. It has a profile for everyone in the house...all with their own apps, email accounts and personalizations.
Permaculture is a balm to the soul for techno-jaded coders. Having visited locations in N California, UK, Spain & South Africa there is clearly a strong appeal of natural systems design for technological systems designers.
In a sense, designing a living environment is like coding. Maybe you're a full-stack developer and you want to terraform your land - run the digger routine to build some swales and ponds. Sprinkle in some pioneer species functions to structure the sub-soil and add nitrogen and provide shade. Run the groundcover script to stop evaporation and erosion and plant a few fruit trees.
Then add whatever framework of your choosing for creepers, vines and berries.
Start some background processes of mulching and compost turning (this is a sweaty function), maybe add a worm bin for your kitchen and food waste.
Then just watch your biological programme running, the plants, birds & bugs and it is good.
..................
Maybe permaculture isn't going to feed the world, but there are some important takeaways:
1. Focus on perennial plants. If you have a garden or land and you don't have lots of time or energy, don't waste your time with annual vegetables instead plant perennial food plants and trees...too many to mention but good, hardy, high producing options are granadilla (passion fruit), mulberry, pecan (and other nuts depending on your location), rhubarb, kale, spinach, ginger, figs, lemons and other citrus.
2. Never leave soil bare. "Nature abhors a vacuum" so weeds will grow, mulch any exposed dirt or plant a groundcover.
3. Observe the edges between everything, that's where the magic happens. Create more 'edge', in other words instead of a perfectly round pond, make an irregular pond with protected areas for critters to breed in. Instead of a straight path, have some curves.
4. "The problem is the solution" probably the most popular permaculture saying there is, but a useful concept. If you have slugs and snails in your garden you don't have a snail problem, you have a duck deficiency. Got ducks to eat the snails? but pong their pond smells...this is a problem, but its also the best fertiliser water you can get to put on fast growing plants so its the solution to your fertiliser needs.
Anyone whom has taken a psilocybin containing mushroom will tell you that mushrooms have strange and magical powers ranging from deep insight to madness, so it doesn't seem so far fetched that a mushroom can improve cognition. I have found Lions mane, reishi and chaga mushroom supplements taken in combination over a few days have a noticeable effect increasing my calm and keeping me focused. Apparently microdosing with psilocybe mushroom has a similar effect according to my psychonaut friends.
I don't get it, people who work for megacorp and then object to rules of said megacorp. If you're bright enough to work in big tech, surely in this age of internet opportunity you can do something else that pays. Maybe you won't be rich but you can live the life you want.