Not sure if this works, but I have an esim from airalo (but there are a lot of other countries) that I top up once a year.

I believe Giffgaff pay as you go is what you're after. They will send you reminders of you use no data, calls or texts for 6 months or so, but if sending some data then you're golden.

Try checking RWG Mobile , ScanCom or Mozillion

I bought a SIM card from RWG a while back that was a 1 time payment for 2 years contract for 1GB data per month. It was so cheap I never actually got round to using it.

I believe the other 2 do similar plans.

EDIT -

If you have no luck try searching IOT SIM / Internet Of Things SIM / Prepaid Sim

I can see some offers for 500mb valid for 5 years for £5

THe SSD Boot option was added to a firmware update a few years ago

More trips to urgent care for spontaneous double ear infections; my GP can't fit me in 'till next week.

That's to have them looked at, not be issued with some.

Had to cancel a long-planned trip to Norwich for the beer festival

Trying to find waterproof trousers I can cycle in that actually fit. Sports direct refuse to give a refund, just a useless credit note and ordering another size online has extra delivery fees.

So standard Scottish weekend?

Edinburgh and Glasgow here. Pretty bloody windy. Trying to avoid walking near trees.

The rain on Saturday was insane, and legitimately horizontal at times.

Thank you most benevolent and gracious lord and saviour 🙏

You are forgiven for your transgressions

The 2nd coming is a cat? Blimey the 20s really are crazy

My bins were slightly eschew, I think last year one storm knocked them over so it wasn't as bad. But it was the first named storm of the season, we shouldn't be judging it too harshly.

I think the family are going to treat it as an immaculate conception

Blimey that's serious wind

it definitely left its mark - blown in one fence, a small bio bin has gone missing, and the neighbours cat is pregnant

East Midlands. Not been too bad tbh, believe it must have fizzled out quite a bit before it got to us

Yeah I do not understand the need for PxE boot, though I've jever had to manage more than 10 nodes at a time

SSD boot, no problem. At some point I booted RPis over the network from an image, but that was more hassle than it was worth.

I've not had a single SD card failure since I've switched away from PiOS to debian, with sys logs in the RAM.

Plus she's not recording her shows, so nothing is being written to disk 99.999% of the time

Can you even boot from an SSD?

Is the Pi OS on an SD card? I put all Pis I use on SSDs and haven’t had a single failure for five years. Before I did that a crash was an annual treat.

Obviously SSDs are expensive, even more so these days. With Linux disk writes the SD cards hold on only so long.

My mum has one of those Satellite boxes that runs constantly even when she's not watching her shows, gives out tons of heat, and it uses Scart input so she can't even get the high Def stuff the satellite picks up. Plus it adds to the chaos of wires behind the TV.

So I decided to scrap it, and repurposed an old Raspberry Pi with an LNB USB stick^[Linux compatible ones are hard to come by. Sundtek is a good brand, but they basically no longer exist, so shipping takes weeks]. LNB/Coax cables usually need signal boosting, so I was nervous that a 5V Raspberry Pi couldn't do it^[13V/19V is usually the standard], but its genuinely fine!

Using Tvheadend as the streaming server^[Satellite Position --> Transponder Frequency + Polarity --> Scan for 'Muxes' --> Assign a Mux to a channel], and Kodi as the main interface. The LNB stick came with an IR remote and Kodi already captures most of the default signals, so everything just works. She gets HD satellite channels, and it uses less than 1p of electricity.

Plus, I put a PoE hat on it, so it's only a single ethernet cable now going to the back of the TV where I mounted the Pi, and I can SSH into it whenever I want.

I'm now thinking: well, finally found a use case to have an always on SBC at my mum's, maybe it's time to put HomeAssistant on it as well and start automating her house

More work travel abroad and next week will bring more of the same. Honestly, I’d rather not go especially as this one is long haul for over a week.

Walking the dogs just now was interesting. It is rather blowy.

How was yours?

It’s a children’s’ TV show - a lady and her dog, flying around and visiting various places, often related to nature. You can find some of the episodes on YouTube. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLhOnau-tupSD15TezN59asHKmBlGx6rF

We have most of them downloaded because unlike today’s children’s TV, kids can watch it without developing epileptic seizures and ADHD. I’m only half joking.

Had a rough ol weekend start to the week, Garage conversion underway lots of issues. Having a bit of moment in myself feels like I'm getting frozen out of all my outlets and communities. They've all either become no responsive or taken over by people who are the opposite of what I'm looking for in those spaces this includes lemmy sadly. So I'm not sure where I go from here but going dark seems like the direction I'm being pushed.

Maybe you'll win at potty training.