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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • When I had my house reinsulated last year I took the opportunity to run cables from every room to a small closet, and then a run from that closet to the router. Had some… experience, learning how to wire in the sockets, and right now only my office is connected with a bit of patch instead of the switch I’ll eventually need to get the other rooms live, but it’s so much more reliable than it was with WiFi or poweline. Not to mention that those technologies only just kept up with the 36Mb VDSL I’ve been stuck on for the last 10 years. Having ethernet means I’ll actually be able to get the most out of the 500Mb FttP I’m getting next month.



  • I have a purpose made device for that job. It’s a clear plastic cone with a hollow handle at the point. Half the open end is closed off. Inside there is a semicircular ‘door’ with it’s own handle that sits inside the hollow one.
    You place it over the creature that’s getting evicted, then rotate the inner handle so the door rotates over the opening, sealing it (taking care not to trap any legs).

    Then go outside and reverse the process to release it.
    Personally I don’t mind spiders and would rather have them around than the pests they eat, but wifey is incredibly arachnophobic, so they have to go.




  • It’s definitely appearing as an option more on the pos terminals now that most people prefer to pay contactless rather than cash. I’ve only had one occasion where the gratuity was automatically added (ironically, on an occasion I would not tip because the service negatively impacted my meal and I had to strike it out) perhaps I’ve just been lucky.




  • I’ve only tested positive for it once, and that illness wasn’t even in the top 5 worst colds that year. I’ve had numerous shitty colds since, any one of them could have been Rona again, but I ether wasn’t infectious at the time I tested or it was after the point I stopped testing every sniffle.

    There’s a chance I have it right now, but I don’t know if I can be bothered to grab a test when it will be done in a couple of days.

    I’d take an updated booster if they offered me one, but my government is only offering them to over 50s.

    I’m of the opinion* that once the majority has spike protein specific antibodies, occasional exposure to small viral loads (incidental contact) is probably a good thing for refreshing an immunity that might otherwise wane and allow a serious case to take root.

    *I’m not an immunologist obviously, but I’ve previously read up on the clinical justification the NHS uses to recommend against widespread chicken pox vaccination






  • Same! I installed W10 in 2016 too, when I built a new Intel 6th Gen system. Just kept on working until earlier this year when the motherboard died. Got a new 12th Gen chip and motherboard from a different vendor, stuck my seven year old boot drive in, entered the bitlocker key, and… it just worked. New drivers installed once I was back online and I just carried on as before. It genuinely surprised me how robust 10 is.

    Eventually I ruined things this summer by accepting the 11 upgrade. I was tempted by windows subsystem for android.
    11 worked ok and I found the UI changes tolerable, but after a month I started getting bluescreens I couldn’t fix, so this week I finally gave in and wiped my antique install from the boot drive and installed a fresh copy.
    It bluescreened pretty quickly, I figured the issue was almost certainly due to a particular piece of software I used. Removed that and it’s been stable since. I could probably just restore my last backup, remove the problem program and continue. But I guess I was due a clean install, and while it wasn’t laggy or slow before, it does feel a little snappier.



  • If you cut your own hair, it won’t grow back. That was a lie my mum told me (after I experimented with the scissors). I believed her for years because there was a gap in my hairline. Eventually I realised “how would the hair know who cut it?” The gap in my hairline was just my parting.

    I believed LCD screens in digital watches were made of mercury (they were silver after all), which I knew was toxic. I thought that if you touched the display directly, you’d die. One day, I’d disassembled a cheap watch to see how it worked - I took everything apart back then, eventually I got good at putting them back together again. Drove my parents mad, but these days they always have something for me to fix whenever I go round.
    Anyway, I had this watch in pieces, handling the innards like an IED, but disaster! I brushed the back of the screen with a fingertip.

    I was dead. It was just a matter of time. I didn’t cry or run for help, nothing could be done, I was resigned to my fate.
    After about an hour of continued existence I began to doubt my assumptions. It dawned on me that something so frighteningly lethal wouldn’t be simply handed to children with nothing but a cheap, press fit case! That said this was in the 80s, and back the I also believed it was both safe and fun to help demolish an asbestos cement outbuilding by jumping on the sheets to smash them into little pieces. That one might still get me, we’ll see.