One the one hand, "hydroplaning" is another word for "aquaplaning" so you were wrong to correct OP.

But, on the other hand, the message being conveyed was clear enough that you knew what they were saying, so you were wrong to correct OP.

But, that said, on the other, other hand your tone is just gratingly smug and, even if your actual point was valid (to reiterate: it wasn't), based only on your condescending manner you were wrong to correct OP.

Different subnets, similar to how you describe. It would be really tricky to have them on the same subnet, especially if you want a firewall between them.

Good. There is literally no reason to have a phone in school. Most schools already have bans already and a few I know have had EXTREMELY belligerent parents cause havock because they insist on being able to constantly monitor their children. Having the government on side is helpful. The kids will manage. The ones that complain the most are also the ones that need time away from their phones the most, and they quickly get used to it.

FWIW, I use the VLAN approach. I have a VLAN (101) specifically for IoT shit. The firewall allows devices on other VLANs - general purpose (104), infrastructure (102) and servers (103) to connect in to 101, but nothing can reach out. Works seamlessly. The only issue you might bump into is that some devices use UPnP/mDNS for discovery, but OpenWRT has a proxy module you can install to facilitate that.

You may be wondering why the tags I use for my VLANs are so odd. I also wonder that sometimes.

How long does the enbiggenining process take? Instant, fair enough, but what if it takes a few seconds? Those are seconds you could have spent on the bean.

I assume you just mean mobile data in general and, yeah, a few. My car has a remote app that works over WiFi, so I installed a small LTE router running OpenWRT with a WireGuard tunnel back to the home network that makes it accessible to Home Assistant anywhere. Now Home Assistant can keep an eye on charge/fuel levels, door locks and more, as well as remotely trigger the heater or start/stop charging. The SIM is £2.50/mo for 2GB which is far more than I need.

For other things like weather stations I'd be inclined to say that you'd be better using a less centralised, low-power network like LoRA (eg. Meshtastic).

Just to chime in: I have a couple of GPS Meshtastic lumps I use for tracking my cars in Home Assistant. I live in the North West of England - if you take a look at a map, I get reliable coverage as far north as Lancaster and as far south as Wigan, with unreliable coverage as far north as Barrow-in-Furness and as far south as Liverpool. That said, there are a lot of Meshtastic users in the area thanks to a lot of publicity from a local YouTuber (Ringway Manchester) who is into his radio kit, so your mileage may well vary.

You also need to use the real remote to block GB News (or FOX, etc).

"The good news is that we were able to deflouce the liberellapop from your upper guttyworks and it was a clean removal. The bad news, I'm afraid, is that we found some graspellies and blongongs in your drivelbox and signs of borpus... normally we'd start treatment but I'm afraid they're quite advanced and... look, I'm sorry, but you have the pleb and... it's johnternus."

Love to see it on its own merits, but even more so for shedding Barclays in particular. They have a bit of a stranglehold on UK NGOs, charities, government departments, schools, hospitals and most of the rest of the public sector, and they have grown very complacent about it.

That line, though:

I tell her that the flat she could have bought for around £20,000 would now be worth somewhere between £350,000 and £400,000.

No, it fucking wouldn't be "worth" £400,000, it would still be worth £20,000, but you'd need to fork over twenty times that much for it. That's the problem. The worth of the houses haven't gone up, but the prices demanded for them has. That flat went from costing a year's salary to costing ten years' salary.

Wow. I've got, like, a dozen of those sticks in the cupboard. Never even occured to me to do anything with them - I just assumed it was ultra locked down. Even getting OpenWRT rocking on them would be amazing.

Oh, yeah, sure they get to plug in a goddamn boat no questions asked, and yet my phone says I shouldn't connect it's charger if it's wet. Once again, it's one rule for the elites and another rule for the rest of us. The hypocrisy is sickening.

/s, ovbs

Leave the car behind and joule be saving the planet and your wallet.

Roll my eyes and get pissed off that my local TV channel is having technical problems. Again.

Comic Sans was hand-crafted, technically excellent, highly legible and served it's purpose perfectly. The only thing it has in common with this shite is that people used it for fucking e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g.

Comic Sans was - is - a frigging superb font. It was destroyed by being abused.

I can calculate IPv4 subnets in my head with ease. Usually when I set up a network I use 26, 22 or 20 bit masks and it drives my co-workers nuts.

You of all people.

We don't have "Flock-style" cameras at all. We have a statutory system with a strictly defined remit that was subject to years of argument, scrutiny and rewrites before it was turned on, not an invasive profit factory run by ruthless, messianic psychopaths. Secondly, our cops are all educated to degree level, they're not just a bunch of otherwise futureless thugs who sit a three-week impossible-to-fail class and are given a gun. Neither the UK ANPR system nor police are perfect, far from it, but both are orders of magnitude better than what you have the Land Of The Free™.

I know enough about the ANPR systems on public roads that the UK police have access to. Firstly, it's centrally managed through the PNC and every single query is logged: each query has to me made by an authorised officer who signs in with a federated identity and has to make the query in the context of an investigation - any query made without that immediately launches to an internal investigation and instant no-questions-asked dismissal is on the cards for anyone who makes a query without official justification. You know how American cops can shoot a protester and go back to full work after a two-week fully-paid break? Last month a cop in the UK was fired and blocked from ever working in the police, as a security guard or even as a doorman for the rest of his life without any possibility of appeal. He stole a reusable carrier bag from a supermarket.

Also, different people in different organisations have different levels of access. The DVLA can see if a particular license plate has been logged anywhere in a given month to see if an untaxed car is in use, for example, but they can't see anything else. A traffic cop can see if a car has insurance, tax and an MOT certificate, but not the owner's name or address. The biggest loophole at the moment is private car park owners who can ask the DVLA for the details of the owner of a car to issue parking fines, but that's being clamped down on and, regardless, is nothing to do with public cameras.

Also, also: as a public, statutory systen the UK system is subject to FOI and GDPR: anyone can demand a copy of all of their own records from it. Highly recommended.