They aren't going to be able to get good water filters but if they did they would still need to test it to see if it worked properly. :P
plus the point was if water companies are putting people at risk.
If it didn't sound serious I would say now is your chance to shine and go and film in the area as gogs south African news correspondent.

Two million South Africans lost their jobs during the pandemic so far is what I heard tonight, the images on the news I saw, the situation on the street looks chaotic. Take good care of yourself.

Thanks man, fortunately I'm pretty fortunate in terms of where I'm staying&working not to be affected by it, as long as it doesn't spread. But I kind of doubt that it will. People were mostly caught of guard, but now that the potential destruction is clear, people are starting to band together to protect businesses and neighborhoods. Even taxi operators, normally among the most hated&feared denizens of south africa's roads, are coming out in defense.

Unfortunately, as you mentioned, unemployment is a huge problem (in the vicinity of 30% even before the pandemic) which has been aggravated by the pandemic, and now by this. It creates a huge 'recruiting' pool for these riots, and unfortunately it appears that it is being organized by political enemies of the current president.

Well yeah, and they should make sure to do so regularly.
(btw: afaik, one can actually make a crude water filtration system with simple materials and the right know how)

Was going to bitch about something trivial in my life. But then I saw what's happening in SA. :(

It's hard to grasp what goes on not being there, but I hope that the desperate situation people are finding themselves in will be resolved. Thanks for the links, and glad you can stay out of the way.

My country is now the global highest in Covid new cases and new deaths in recent days. People are dying around here.
I haven't been vaccinated. I don't trust Sinovac or other Chinese vaccines due to their government's lack of transparency. But that's the most likely vaccine I'm gonna get.

My old trusty gaming laptop, ASUS G75VW (I think it is already 9 years old or so), suddenly called it quits today. :(

Or, at least almost. It just abruptly shut itself off and would not start anymore, but when I put in the replaceable battery, it would boot up with it. But the battery would not recharge anymore even if the power brick was connected.

So, I hope the culprit is the power adapter then. A new one can be bought for about 38€, so I am thinking of buying one to revive the machine. If I am unlucky, it is not the power adapter itself that is broken, but something inside the laptop is unable to take power from the power adapter anymore.

Oh well, I think I will try with a new power adapter, it is "only" 38€. The current power adapter shows green light and feels a bit warm, so it "seems" like it is working ok, but I don't have any equipment to measure whether any power is actually coming from it.

Luckily my home is full of other laptops like this eMachines laptop (even older than the ASUS) where I am writing this. However, that ASUS laptop was supposed to be my "Windows 7 era" retro gaming laptop from here to eternity, and beyond.

System admin?

It is now the fourth and last week of my summer vacation, and pretty much every week my colleagues have called me for assistance. Then again this is life in a smaller company, there are specific things where we tend to need each other's help, and frankly if e.g. the load balancers need some configuration changes, I trust only myself and my direct boss to not to mess it up, and do the changes in a coherent and sane fashion (yeah yeah I guess it should be documented how to make changes there, but then different customers have wildly different needs and you can't document each and every exception to the exception...). Similarly if someone wants some bigger configuration changes to the firewalls, I rather call our main networking guy... I can do simpler stuff in the firewalls, but some things I'd rather not touch.

Yes, Americans, we have a four week vacation in the summer. I don't get your max 1 week vacations, that is too short to even visit other countries or anything. Fly 8000 km to a remote country, spend there a couple of days, and then you already have to fly back?

Another dying laptop here and only 13 years old. Normally not a biggie but new ones are a bit hard to come by at the moment. Looks like a failing motherboard so too advanced for me to repair.