Thanks for the insights. I was looking for a client not a server. So maybe this can’t help me. A server somewhat hints that it would be bandwidth heavy. I’m looking to escape the stock JS web client. At the same time, I am on a very limited uplink. To give an idea, I browse web with images disabled because they would suck my quota dry.
The readme talks about docker. I’m not a docker user. I did a git clone when I was on a decent connection. ATM I’m not on a decent connection. The releases page lacks file sizes. And MS Github conceals the size:
curl -LI 'https://github.com/Xyphyn/photon/archive/refs/tags/v1.31.2-fix.1.tar.gz' | grep -i 'content-length'
output:
> content-length: 0
So instead of fetching the tarball of unknown size, I need to know how to build either the app or the tarball from the cloned repo. Is that documented anywhere?
Photon is a strange beast. How do you install it?
It seems to only come as a docker container. That’s weird. I don’t have docker installed but docker should really be a choice.. not a sole means of installation. I see no deb file or tarball. It seems that it has taken a direction that makes it non-conducive to ever becoming part of the official Debian repos.
Then it seems as well that their official site “phtn.app” is a Cloudflare site -- which is a terrible sign. It shows that the devs are out of touch with digital rights, decentralisation, and privacy. That doesn’t in itself mean the app is bad but the tool is looking quite sketchy so far. Several red flags here.
(edit) I found a tarball on the releases page.
I often save websites to my local drive when collecting evidence that might later need to be presented in court. But of course there problems with that because I could trivially make alterations at will. And some websites give me different treatment based on my IP address. So I got in the habit of using web.archive.org/save/$targetsite to get a third party snapshot. That’s no longer working. It seems archive.org has cut off that service due to popular demand, which apparently outstrips their resources.
Are there more reliable alternatives? I’m aware of archive.ph but that’s a non-starter (Cloudflare).
In the 1990s there was a service that would email you a webpage. Would love to an out-of-band mechanism like that since email has come to carry some legal weight and meets standards of evidence in some countries (strangely enough).
As the linked post demonstrates, if you enter a link like this:...
I just need to work out exactly what the effect of the user-configured node block is. In principle, if an LW user replies to either my thread or one of my comments in someone else’s thread, I would still want to see their comments and I would still want a notification. But I would want all LW-hosted threads to be hidden in timelines and search results.
On one occasion I commented in an LW-hosted thread without realising it. Then I later blocked the community that thread was in (forgetting about my past comment). Then at one point I discovered someone replied to me and I did not get the notification. That scenario should be quite rare but I wonder how it would pan out with the node-wide blocking option.
Ah, I see! Found it. Indeed that was not there last time I checked.
I’m on both Lemmy and mbin. I have several Lemmy accounts.
Now I need to understand the consequences of blocking lemmy.world. Is it just the same as blocking every lemmy.world community, or does it go further than that? E.g. If I post a thread and a LW user replies, I would not want to block their reply from appearing in my notifications. I just don’t want LW threads coming up in searches or appearing on timelines.
I think he is talking about admins blocking instances in the settings for the whole node. AFAIK, users on Lemmy and k/mBin have no such setting.
I don't get why you want users to be able to apply cloudflare filters, though.
Suppose an instance has these users:
- Victor who uses a VPN
- Cindy whose ISP uses a CGNAT (she may or may not be aware of the consequences of that)
- Terry who uses a Tor
- Norm who uses the normal clearnet
- Esther who is ethical (doesn’t matter what she uses)
And suppose the instance is a special interest instance focused on travel. The diverse group of the above people have one thing in common: they want to converge on the expat travel node and the admin wants to accommodate all of them. Norm, and many like him, are happy to subscribe to countless exclusive and centralised forums as they are pragmatic people with no thought about tech ethics. These subscriptions flood an otherwise free world node with exclusive content. Norm subscribes to !travelpics@exclusivenode.com. Then Victor, Terry and sometimes Cindy are all seeing broken pics in their view because they are excluded by Cloudflare Inc. Esther is annoyed from an ethical standpoint that this decentralised free world venue is being polluted by exclusive content from places like like Facebook Threads™ and LemmyWorld. Even though she can interact with it from her clearnet position, she morally objects to feeding content to oppressive services.
The blunt choice of the admin to federate or not with LemmyWorld means the admin cannot satisfy everyone. It’s too blunt of an instrument. Per-community blocks per user give precision but it’s a non-stop tedious manual workload to keep up with the flood of LW communities. It would be useful for a user to block all of LemmyWorld in one action. I don’t want to see LW-hosted threads and I don’t want LW forums cluttering search results.
Cloudflare is an exclusive walled garden that excludes several demographics of people. I am in Cloudflare’s excluded group. This means:
- when an LW user posts an image, I am blocked from seeing it. Images do not get mirrored onto the federated nodes.
- when I encounter an LW community with very little content and I then need to visit the LW host to see what’s there before deciding whether to subscribe, I am blocked. I can only see content that got mirrored into the local timeline. There are various circumstances where visiting the source host is necessary but Cloudflare ruins that option.
CF nodes like LW breaks the fedi in arbitrary ways that undermine the fedi design and philosophy. So the use case is to get rid of the pollution. To get broken pieces out of sight and unbury the content that is decentralised, inclusive, open and free. To reach conversations with people who have the same values and who oppose digital exclusion, oppose centralised corporate control, and who embrace privacy. It’s also necessary to de-pollute searches. If I search for “privacy”, the results are flooded with content from people and nodes that are antithetical to privacy. Blocking fixes that. If I take a couple min. to block oxymoron venues like lemmy.world/c/privacy and do the same for a dozen other cloudflared nodes, then search for “privacy” again, I get better results.
When crossposting from Lemmy, there is a pulldown list of target communities which is another search tool. That is broken when there are more communities than what fits in the box. And it’s often ram-packed with Cloudflare venues -- places that digital rights proponents will not feed. Blocking the junk CF-centralised communities makes it possible to select the target community I’m after.
So it works. The federated timeline is also more interesting now because it’s decluttered of exclusive places. The problem is that it’s more tedious that it needs to be. I am blocking hundreds of LW communities right now. It probably required 500 clicks to get the config that I have right now and I probably have hundreds of more clicks to go. When in fact I should have simply been able to enter ~10 or nodes.
tl;dr:
- Lemmy ← shit show for years
- (mk)bin ← shit show but understandable given its age
- piefed ← never heard of it
I’ve been using Lemmy for years, back when there were only 2 or 3 nodes and federation capability did not exist. It’s a shit show. Extremely buggy web clients and no useful proper desktop clients. I must say it’s sensible that the version numbers are still 0.x. It’s also getting worse. 0.19.3 was more usable than 0.19.5 which introduced serious bugs that make it unusable in some variants of Chromium browser.
mBin has been plagued with serious bugs. But it’s also very young. It was not ready for prime-time when it got rolled out, but I think it (or kbin) was pushed out early because many Redditors were jumping ship and those refugees needed a place to go. IMO mbin will out-pace Lemmy and take the lead. Mbin is bad at searching. You can search for mags that are already federated but if a community does not appear in a search I’m not even sure if or how a user can create the federated relationship.
The running goat fuck with Lemmy is in recent years with the shitty javascript web client. There’s only so much blame you can fairly put on those devs though because they need to focus on a working server. The shitty JavaScript web client should just be considered a proof-of-concept experimental test sandbox. JavaScript is unfit for this kind of purpose. It’s really on the FOSS community to produce a decent proper client. And what has happened is there has been focus on a dozen or so different phone apps (wtf?) and no real effort on a desktop app.
Cloudflare filters lacking
Both Lemmy and Mbin lack the ability to filter out or block Cloudflare nodes. They both only give a way to block specific forums. So you get imersed/swamped in LemmyWorld’s walled garden and to get LemmyWorld out of sight there is a big manual effort of blocking hundreds of communities. It’s a never ending game of whack-a-mole.
Yes indeed.. “threads” in the generic sense of the word pre-dates the web. And threadiverse is a few years older than “FB Threads™”. That’s what’s so despicable about Facebook hi-jacking the name. It’s also why I will not refer to them by Meta (another hi-jacking of a generic term with useful meaning that their ego-centric marketers fucked up)
I often supply documents as evidence to regulators (e.g. GDPR regulators). A document is normally in A4 format and I digitally superimpose that onto an A4 page. Thus generally without shrinking or expanding.
I label it by printing “exhibit A”, “bewijsstuk A”, or “pièce A” in the topmost rightmost corner at a 45° angle and give a small margin to avoid unprintable areas. I do that on every single page. If it would overlap something, I shift it down to avoid overlap. It seems to do the job well but a regulator once requested that I resubmit the evidence without my markups.
So apparently they don’t like my style. Maybe they wonder if I could be making more material alterations. What is the normal convention in the legal industry? These evidence submissions are not for a court process but they always have potential to end up in court in the future.
I have some ideas:
- (only for paper submissions) I could stick a Post-It note to every document (every page?) and hand-write evidence labels. This would be inconvenient for them to scan. If they remove the notes to feed into a scanner, then the digital version is lossy and so they cannot dispense of the paper version. Or they must be diligent with entering the label into the file’s metadata or filename.
- (only for electronic submissions) I could make the evidence label a PDF annotation, so when viewing the doc and printing it the user can decide whether to show/print annotations. This seems useful superficially but it’s problematic because the PDF tools poorly adhere to the standard to w.r.t. annotations. Many tools do not handle annotations well. A recipient’s app does not necessarily give them control over whether annotations appear, and how they appear (different fonts chosen by different tools and if a tool does not have the source font it may simply ignore the annotation). The 45° angle that sets it apart and makes it pop-out better is apparently impossible with PDF annotations. And with little control over the font it might look good in one viewer but overlap in another.
- (versatile for both kinds of submissions) I could shrink the doc to ~90% of the original size, put a frame around it, and push it low on the page to leave space at the top for metadata like evidence labels. The the label is obviously not altering the original.
- (versatile for both kinds of submissions) I could add a cover page to each doc with the sole purpose of writing “exhibit A”. Seems good for digital submissions but I really don’t like the idea of bulking out my paper submissions. It would add €1 to the cost for every ten docs.
- (versatile for both kinds of submissions) Perhaps I could get away with rotating “exhibit A” 90° and finely printing it along the edge of the margin. This could even be combined with bullet 3 and maybe with less scaling (~95%).
Any other ideas?
It’s good news just considering that Peter #Thiel is a stakeholding¹ cofounder of airbnb. This is the same motherfucker who got Trump into power in 2016 by using Cambridge Analytica, Facebook and Thiel’s dark money contributions -- which more recently got JD Vance into power. Also the same xenophobic scumbag motherfucker behind Palantir. The same piece of shit who cofounded PayPal (a surveillance capitalist). Thiel’s profits are detrimental to the world.
¹ to be clear he was a stakeholder ~10 years ago… not sure if that’s still the case.
Thanks for the insight; that’s quite helpful.
The concept of easements still exists in this area but it seems like easements are not being used for façades, which kind of makes sense. The dispute I’m getting into is over a telecom company that is not serving the whole public. They are discriminatory and exclusive. I consider it an injustice that they can arbitrarily drill into people’s houses to support a “public” service which they then exclude some people from access (including owners of the homes they are drilling). Property owners then have a burden of paying €10 per cable to give notice by registered letter to all telecoms using their façade whenever a homeowner wants to perform work on their own façade.
That’s why I am looking closely at this law. I found nothing in the law that requires telecoms to be inclusive.
I would like to understand this paragraph:...
Are you saying tends is not a false friend and the French and English meanings are quite similar? Because in English that word is astonishing in this legal context. Commercial translation tools are often better quality than Argos, so I was more tempted to trust the commercially translated version.
(edit) tends has a couple different meanings in English. One might have a tendency to do something or feel something. You might also tend to a store, which means to oversee something. Perhaps it’s that latter meaning that is intended by lawmakers. That the telecom operator oversees agreement.
I would like to understand this paragraph:
> § 2. Lorsque (un opérateur d'un [¹ réseau public de communications électroniques]¹) a l'intention d'établir des câbles, lignes aériennes et équipements connexes, de les enlever ou d'y exécuter des travaux, elle tend à rechercher un accord quant à l'endroit et la méthode d'exécution des travaux, avec la personne dont la propriété sert d'appui, est franchie ou traversée.
Argos Translate yields:
> § 2. When (an operator of a [¹ public electronic communications network]¹) intends to establish cables, airlines and related equipment, to remove or perform work therein, it tends to seek an agreement on the location and method of carrying out work, with the person whose property serves as a support, is crossed or crossed.
I think tends is a false friend here because it seems unlikely in this context. A commercial machine translation yields:
> § 2. When (an operator of a [¹ public electronic communications network]¹) intends to establish, remove or carry out work on cables, overhead lines and related equipment, it shall seek agreement as to the location and method of carrying out the work with the person whose property is used as support, is crossed or is being traversed.
Sounds more accurate. I’m disappointed that there seems to be no requirement that the telecom company obtain consent from property owners. Is that correct? The telecom operator does not need consent on whether to use someone’s private property, only consent on how they deploy the cables?
Surely the tax law must be reachable in other forms like Moniteur Belge publications which are openly public. But it’s still alarming that any public service would operate exclusively. I’m not sure what FisconetPlus is exactly and if it *uniquely* gives access to any information....
Surely the tax law must be reachable in other forms like Moniteur Belge publications which are openly public. But it’s still alarming that any public service would operate exclusively. I’m not sure what FisconetPlus is exactly and if it *uniquely* gives access to any information....
What do you say? Am I too lazy or it is unpractical to stay away from big tech?
Laziness is what the surveillance advertisers are exploiting. It is everyone’s duty to resist the tyranny of convenience that Tim Wu articulates in a famous essay.
After a year I'm starting to think that maybe my data is not worth the hassle just to keep big tech out of my digital life.. I guess Big Brother wins
Think of it as boycotting. Exposure of your personal data may not be worth the effort of protecting it, but the big picture is that privacy seekers are not just looking for confidentiality. Privacy is about power and agency. You are exercising your right to boycott a harmful entity. Boycotts are no longer simply a matter of not handing money over, because data is worth money. So boycotting now entails not handing your data over. Giving Google your data feeds Google’s profits.
So you are really asking, “should I give up the boycott”? The answer is no, because the boycott is not just a duty to yourself; it’s a duty everyone benefits from (except Google).
Cloudflare is not at all sensible from a privacy standpoint. Cloudflare is a bigger privacy offender than Google and far more detrimental to our rights.
https://git.kescher.at/dCF/deCloudflare/src/branch/master/subfiles/rapsheet.cloudflare.md
Reverse proxying your website through Cloudflare is actually an attack on privacy. You make yourself part of the problem by arbitrarily blocking several demographics of people from your website including Tor and VPN users (people doing their part to retain privacy).
The FOSS app Argos Translate enables people to locally translate their documents without depending on an external service and then hoping their content is not snooped on (while simultaneously hoping to get translation service for free). Argos does okay with quite popular language pairs but it’s really not up to a good standard of quality overall.
The machine learning input into Argos known as “models” are trained on samples of (hopefully manual) translations. The models require huge amounts of data. Apparently the effort to gather large volumes of input leads to grabbing poor quality samples, which ultimately leads to bad translations. To worsen matters, you have a sparse scatter of different projects making their own models. So the effort is decentralised in a detrimental way. End users are then left with having to experiment with different models.
Shouldn’t Académie Française (the French language protection org) have some interest in the public having access to resources that give high-quality translations into French?
Consider that Académie Française members each spend €230k on clothes (yes, that “k” after the number is correct), surely they have money sloshing around to promote French. If playing dress-up is worth €9.2 million (€230k × 40 members), just imagine how much money they must have for their mission of supporting the French language.
My question is what is forcing me to create an email address.
Does the law force me to create an email address (knowing that it would then be unavoidably used to facilitate the sender sharing whatever they want about me with Microsoft)?
It’s important to note that if your email address falls in the hands of a gov or org, they will use it without encryption. They will share willy nilly anything they want with Microsoft (their email provider) in the loop. And if you make a GDPR art.17 request to have your email address erased from their records after they abuse it, they ignore those requests and continue using your email address. So it’s best not to give them an email address to begin with.
(edit) govs and orgs seem to always put my full name in the e-mail headers, sometimes even including my middle name. And they usually greet me by surname. This ensures that Microsoft trivially knows exactly who to associate the content with. IMO it infringes on the data minimisation principle.
This question is inspired by Belgian law but there is no Belgian law forum and I think it’s likely that Netherlands would have the same problem. So answers w.r.t. Dutch law would be interesting enough.
It’s increasingly common for law to mandate that people give the government their email address in various situations. If someone has no email address, I have to wonder how can they be expected to comply with the law? When the law requires disclosure of information that does not exist, is it implied that we must take necessary steps to make that information come into existence in order to disclose it? Is it implied by that law that we must enter the private marketplace and subscribe to email service, then periodically check our email?
I happen to have email addresses but I refuse to disclose them to users of Micosoft Outlook or Google. That includes government offices because the gov uses MS Outlook and simultaneously does not use PGP. Since my workflow of non-disclosure to MS & Google has ensured that email has the tiniest of roles in my life, it would not be a big step for me to nix email altogether and end my subscriptions. But I need to know if it’s even legal for me to do so.
French law often adds a “bis” (e.g. “Article 29bis”) if more law is added later and for whatever reason they don’t just append it to Article 29.
It’s ugly in text, but I’m writing a document in LaTeX so I have freedom and control to do something better. At the same time, I don’t want to invent something that alienates readers. I just want to know from people who have read a lot of well typeset French what style is common. I think italicizing the “bis” is common. But what about making it a subscript or superscript? What about putting a ½ space between the bis and the number?
I’ve only been to Denmark but certainly concur with voting Denmark last.
- society is designed to render people without a CPR № dysfuctional
- could not check out a library book without CPR №
- could not make a photo copy without CPR №
- could not open a bank acct without CPR № (bank falsely advertised to expats the possibility to process paperwork before even arriving)
- could not get student rate on trains until the CPR № was granted. Took a month to get the number, the clock of which only started ticking after finding a seemingly legitimate place to live. Not counting time sleeping in a classroom. No way to get the train fare difference back retroactively.
- society is designed to render people without a bank account dysfuctional
- many restaraunts refuse service to cash payers, including university campus snack shops
- university events required electronic payments (someone has to use their personal bank acct to let cash payers participate)
- someone could not simply do laundry
- university e-mail outsourced to Microsoft, forcing everyone on campus to share their school-related email with a US surveillance capitalist
- university itself used Facebook to announce events, thus excluding those who do not use FB
- university forced 2FA on some academic resources, which then required SMS (thus denying students without a mobile phone or the will to share their number access to school resources)
- university outsourced e-book service to a Cloudflare service (Proquest), who then blocks access to some demographics of people
- banks themselves are cashless. If your ATM card fails because of some persnickety paperwork issue, you have no money access unless you visit a branch during opening hours, at which point a banker actually has to walk down the street to an ATM with you, carrying a special internal ATM card. So getting your own money out of your bank account is comparable to asking dad for money.
- banks app can receive inbound international money, but cannot send outbound international transfers (only domestic)
- housing crisis: the waiting list for an apartment is years; had to sleep illegally in a classroom and dodge night guards, or deal with lots of dodgy landlords exploiting the crisis. Had a landlord who was illegally subletting, who demanded cash payment (fine) but then refused to give a receipt.
- severe shortage of on-campus dorms. Just enough to house foreign exchange students. All “dorms” for locals are scattered in private apartments. Getting one close to campus is a competition.
- was denied a CPR № because the dwelling had more people than officially allowed on paper, despite some of the officially known people not actually living there.
- expected this country with the world’s highest degree of income equality to be quite liberal, but the people & culture were ironically conservative. No concept of privacy.
- cycling actually sucks. You might expect it to be the best place in the world for cycling, but the cycle paths are so popular they are like driving on a highway. Overcrowded. If you cruise along slowly a bicycle traffic jam becomes possible. Car driving stresses are there on the high traffic cycling lanes.
That’s just off the top of my head. The nannying is endless.
Can anyone confirm or deny whether many of these issues are replicated among Denmark’s neighbors?
Luckily you don’t need to burn uranium to avoid 5 steps of energy transformation.
I had a look at what I pay for gas and electric in recent years:...
In 2016 it was €6.50 for 5 EU stamps. I thought that was extortionate then, as US stamps were 47¢ for a letter that has roughly the same range....
The rumor I heard was that if you buy a product that fails before the warranty ends, you do not need to contact the manufacturer (in #Belgium). You can simply return the product to the merchant and the merchant must deal with the warranty service....
The rumor I heard was that if you buy a product that fails before the warranty ends, you do not need to contact the manufacturer (in #Belgium). You can simply return the product to the merchant and the merchant must deal with the warranty service.
A store manager refused to accept my return of a device that died after 2yrs+2 months, which was covered under a 3 year warranty. He said I must deal directly with the manufacturer. I threatened to complain officially and the manager gave in. But then as he was angrily returning money to me, he said he is only required to handle warranty service for the 1st two years and that he is making an exception for me. I figured he was confused because 2 years happens to be the length of the EU implied warranty. I had not heard that it was also a limit of the store’s obligation as an intermediary.
To complicate matters, the product was marked down on liquidation because the store apparently severed ties with that manufacturer. Though I doubt that’s relevant to my situation because it would not void the warranty. But the article also says merchants must accept returns for any reason in the first 14 days, yet the store makes that zero days for liquidated goods. Does that break EU law?
Anyway, I need answers. Maybe I owe the manager a bottle of wine. The EU article indeed confirms sellers must handle warranty returns for up to 2 years. But that’s EU-wide #law. What about #Belgian national law?
Next question, out of curiousity: normally manufacturers have a choice whether to replace, repair or refund. Is that choice passed through to merchants? Or are merchants required to handle this with one instant transaction (thus no repair as the consumer would have to return to the store later)?
I have a limited internet connection. So I will need to find internet cafes and grab whole damn thing (which is what, 100gb?) I think I saw 4 BDs for past releases, but I cannot find a mirror that has BDs for Bookworm. But perhaps I’m looking in the wrong place.. it’s often quite non-intuitive to navigate. I looked here:
http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/dists/bookworm/main/installer-amd64/current/images/
and here:
http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/dists/bookworm/main/binary-amd64/
The docs:
https://www.debian.org/releases/bookworm/amd64/ch04s02.en.html#where-files
I just see small files. No ISOs. I’m not just after the Debian system, but all official packages as well. In principle I would want an installer and a separate disk that is all DEB files, but IIRC the only way to easily get a full set is to get the BD ISOs.. maybe via torrent, not sure. I have no optical drive, so I guess I would put the ISOs on a drive and mount them.
I know it’s theoretically possible to go through the list of apps I need and find out which CDs they are on, but I looked at just Libre Office and LaTeX and noticed the files for these packages were scattered all over the place. So it really seems impossibly complex and I get the impression I will likely need every single CD anyway.
“ClientEarth alleges that the Belgian National Bank's participation in the CSPP, by not taking into account climate, environment, and human rights impacts, violated Article 11 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU and Article 37 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights (both concern the obligation to integrate environmental protection into EU policies).”
^ wow. Really disturbing that a national bank has such controversial investments. When a commercial bank invests in fossil fuels, we can boycott. But you can’t boycott a national bank.
For example, this invidious instance offers a download option for a YoutTube video, as that instance does for all YT videos:
https://invidious.fdn.fr/watch?v=lU4vv7qCQvg (see update)
Exceptionally, if you opt to download it it merely opens a player to watch realtime. While other downloads from the same invidious instance have no issues. Why is this one getting different treatment?
update Apparently it’s an instance-specific problem with that particular video:
works → https://invidious.fdn.fr/watch?v=lU4vv7qCQvg
broken → https://iv.ggtyler.dev/watch?v=lU4vv7qCQvg
I’ve seen other instances where this particular video download is broken. AFAIK, invidious.fdn.fr is the only place where it works as expected.
ATMs I’ve checked:
BNP Paribas: no balance inquiry option. Nor did it print the balance on the receipt.
Attijariwafa: no balance inquiry option. Both ATMs are always out of paper, so no way to check whether the balance would be printed on the receipt. Anti-feature: you must enter your PIN before it shows you the menu. Does that mean it connects to my bank even in the absense of a transaction?
Ing: no longer has ATMs? KBC: no longer has ATMs? \#Belfius: no longer has ATMs? (answered) Aion: only has 1 ATM (unplugged & vandalized) Europabank: has no ATMs? DHB bank: has no ATMs? Fintro: ATM is the same as BNP Parabas? BBVA: do they still exist? Bank of Baroda: has no ATMs? Beobank: didn’t check if they have any ATMs Keytrade: likely has no ATMs BinckBank: likely has no ATMs
Batopin (3rd party w/Ing & KBC): no balance inquiry option.
This website claims to give a way to check your balance, but I’m not so trusting:
I have a few apparently cast-iron chimneys bedded in concrete. They have no hats on them. I’m not sure how the fireplaces were blocked off but it feels solid, as if they bricked them shut and plastered over it.
Isn’t this a bad idea? They don’t seem to be filling up with rainwater yet it rains quite heavily. I assume the fireplaces have been blocked off for over a decade at least. There must be quite an ecosystem of creepy crawlies going on in there.
So what if I want to open the fireplace back up and install a boiler, sewer vent, wood stove, kitchen range hood, or ventilation system? Can they be restored or must they just be treated as wasted dead space?
My façade was old & cracking. Chunks looked like they were close to falling. I removed all the loose bits and re-rendered with new concrete. I did the proper bonding steps with polyvinylacetate (#PVA). That previously cracked part of the #façade seems relatively strong and water resistent now (i.e. the color remains light colored and slightly shiny even after rainstorms).
There were old parts of the façade that I did not touch because there were no significant cracks. But these old untouched areas appear to absorb water. They are always wet looking. They only appear dry if there is a quite long stretch of no rain. I think it takes several weeks of mid-summer dry weather before the water evaporates. I think the constant moisture will shorten the life of the affected areas and the moisture is apparently getting into the house as well.
anti-stucco paint school of thought
Painting #stucco is controversial. Some people insist on it, and some say stucco is meant to “breathe” and should never be painted.
I’m personally in the anti-paint let-it-breathe camp. However, I think my situation is a bit exceptional. Perhaps the original stucco was not the right stuff. It’s too porous. Re-rendering seems to have a high cost/benefit.
As a hack, I am tempted to prime and paint the part of the façade that appears to be holding water. I would like opinions on this as well as alternatives. I would also like to know if any exterior paint will do the job or should I look for paint with waterproof properties.
Note that I do not care much about cosmetics. I just want to reduce the water ingress but ideally without suffocating the wall too much, if possible.