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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • I have gnome installed and setup as a backup, plus I use its greeter, but I am another who does not really want a full DE and instead using Sway as my WM day to day.

    I have two 32"@4k monitors so normal manual floating window management just annoys me, I greatly prefer tiling window management to auto sort my windows for me. Its extremely rare that I need to full screen anything on monitors this large to fit everything I want in width wise so I want multiple apps per monitor.

    If all of this is managed dynamically for me, and I am not manually sizing or overlapping stuff, all the better. Couple that with easy use of multiple workspaces for different tasks (I typically use three per monitor), rarely do I have a need to manually resize anything. I have it setup to open my common apps on the right workspace for me, and each workspace set to the right layout for that set of apps, so much less faffing.

    My (40%) keyboard(s) run QMK and are setup to enable most of my common combos, such as switching workspace, moving apps around are never more than two keys. The more I can do without moving my hands from the keyboard, the better for me.

    Final thing is that Sway is wayland and for me extremely stable.



  • So Blade Runner, Alien, and Predator franchises are linked, but I also a believer that the Terminator franchise is linked into the same, shared universe. Obviously Terminator has many different endings depending at which film you look due to timey wimey shenanigans, but if you pick one of the ones that the war is averted (I pick T2 as the sequels are not my favorite), it kinda makes sense. In this universe Dutch is the special forces ace that is picked (probably unknowingly) to be the model for the T800.


  • I’ve been using it for a while now, its been robust and extensible. I think its only real downside is that its too extensible as out of the the box not much comes as standard that you might expect if you coming from something like gnome, such as a control panel, auto tiling, a lock screen, or screen capture (although this release seems to fix setting that up now). This should be expected as its a WM not a DE.


  • We’ve had three EVs for a few years now and they been great, had four in total and replaced the first one a bit over a year ago as its lease expired, so no regrets.

    Lengthy road trips aren’t a problem if you plan out your route in advance I get not everyone wants to do this so if this you then wait till there are more charging stations for your region. We plan stops based on charging stations that have a lot of high speed chargers (over 100kw) so we are never waiting more than 20 minutes and never waiting for a charger. It is faster to charge twice to around 80% on one of these than it is to charge to 100% once due to how much charging slows down as the battery nears completion. I would not even consider a car that does not have a 800v architecture due to the slower charging speeds if you plan on road trips.

    We have done 1200 mile round trips, probably small fry for Americans but a lot for us, especially as we towing for all that. Its achievable with planning in most western countries. I want to stop at most every three hours as I want to use the loo, are people who are driving 6 more hours non stop peeing in a bottle or something?

    Cost per mile is stupidly low as we charge at home when not on trips over 280 miles, 8p per kwh, with a monthly cost between the three cars of £40 for around 2000 miles a month (more in summer, about that in winter). Good luck doing 2000 miles on £40 for an ICE car. Charging when out is more expensive the faster you want to charge, ultra rapids work out about the same per mile as high economy petrol ICE, rapids or lower a bit cheaper but nothing significant. Its only going to be cheaper if you can charge at home and your energy provider has a suitable EV tariff as we do.

    Absolutely zero chance I would buy an EV right now as depreciation is already horrendous and the rate of change for EVs is rapid unless you know the car will meet your log term needs and those will not change. We lease so that all the cost of the risk is with the leasing company and we know we want the improvements.

    Edit: Plug in hybrids are fucking useless BTW, you are either doing a ton of miles and using the ICE all the time, or you are using the battery all the time and very rarely the ICE. It means carrying around both a full EV setup and a full ICE setup, so you have more than twice the complexity of either and more weight than an actual pure EV with the same battery that impacts both EV and ICE economy. Plus recent studies have shown that hybrids are far harder on the ICE part than a pure ICE, which is fucking awful for long term ownership.

    They were only ever meant as a stop gap until battery prices dropped, which they have and its now possible to get EVs with over 400 miles of ACTUAL range not just promised range.


  • Long time Kodi user, since it first came out on the original xbox.

    Assuming you are a watch and delete person then for films you really do not need more that a seperate folder than you dump films AND only films into and make sure that the film name is correct AND it includes the accurate year for the film. Vast majority of downloads will already have this in place, I never have to bother to rename or move films about as they just go straight into my download folder that Kodi is looking for my watch and delete films. Older versions of Kodi used to be much more annoying for film scanning requiring proper spacing and so on. However its very very important that only films go into this directory otherwise it will fuck up if you start dumping TV programs into here.

    TV is much more complex if Kodi is doing the metadata scanning as it normally relies on the top level folder name, and a proper season and episode numbering scheme. If you watching TV I would just switch to a managed downloader like sonarr, its a PITA to manually manage weekly show downloads anyway and sonarr will sort everything out for you.


  • I greatly prefer Debian and run it on my home servers, but I want something more cutting edge than Debian for my work PCs but not quite as bleeding edge as Arch that I have to pay more attention to for my daily updates in case it breaks. I kind of end stuck at Ubuntu as I don’t want something obscure and harder for me to fix due to a smaller user base to crib solutions to common problems from.

    I just use it as a relatively up to date, tested and supported base as I run Sway instead of the packaged Gnome, I disable snaps and all the other Ubuntu pro type garbage, even my Firefox is via PPA. Could I roll my own or use something else? Sure, but would I have the same trust over its reliability on the PCs that I use to pay my bills?


  • People asking why this is a musical is missing the point with the directors choices over the film, as its not really a musical (it has a couple of musical moments rather than being a full blown musical), and its not really what went wrong with the film.

    In order to understand what went wrong, you have to go back to the success of the first film, and how it made the director have a massive tantrum. A large part of the success of Phoenix’s Joker was people identifying with the portrayal of the character, including the sort of person who thinks Homelander is the hero of the Boys.

    Unlike the Boys where the showrunner just doubles down on how much of a shit and how pathetic Homelander is, Phillips decided to reboot the character into what is essentially a alt right grifter who under pressure during the court scenes recants his grift then dies like a bum to the very base that Phillips is attacking.

    He is essentially attacking a large portion of the people who enjoyed the first film, but its incredibly ham fisted and overly blunt. The trailers try to hide this because otherwise none of this base would go and see it, so the trailers have been very meh because they have had not much to work from, its a mess due to Phillips lacking the subtlety to deal with this better.

    The film has other issues, such as the first half being his version of One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest and the second half seemingly being the court scenes of a Few Good Men, but thats the crux of the matter, the director having a massive tantrum over people liking a character he thought was completely unlikable and his panic that we would see him blamed for Joker copycat killers.



  • I still run ubuntu on my main work desktop and will likely do so until I replace it with a new one as I cannot face rebuilding it at this point in time. I like its broad support, its ease of install and use, but its becoming increasingly annoying having to disable all the enforced decisions the maintainers make, such as snap, ubuntu pro ads and so on. My fear is at some point it will not be reversible


  • Hozelock adjustable long spray lance, absolutely unfit for purpose, disposable garbage that broke after 3 months.

    Last refund was a nightmare as it was a purchase from Amazon and outside their 30 day window, so initially they did not want to accept the return and directed me to the manufacturer. Hozelock just refused to engage, and directed me back to Amazon, endless loop. After going round this loop I then complaining to Amazon for a solid 10 minutes and they eventually agreed to pay for pick up of the item then refund when it was picked up.

    Replaced it with a more expensive Dramm lance that every part is user replaceable with available spare parts, and much less plastic components.



  • I have a few that will be very close as I decided a bit over a decade ago to limit myself to one rewatch a year of each to stop myself sucking all the joy out of them:

    • Alien - my favorite survival horror

    • Aliens - my favorite Nam movie

    • Jaws - my favorite version of Moby Dick, although I really like Godzilla Minus One take on Jaws

    • Jurassic Park - best big stompy monster film for me

    • Lord of the Rings - this is always over Christmas. Its not faithful enough for me to the books but it still manages to be an outstanding Trilogy.

    • Emperors New Groove - favorite body swap film


  • Never tried sharpening them myself, always used a service as standard jobber bits are less than a pound to get done for you. I normally save up a bunch of stuff including saw blades and get them done at once to save on shipping at hit the low volume discounts.

    However, its only worth doing on quality components, I wouldn’t pay a pound or waste my own time to get a cheap ass drill bit sharpened, I would just replace it.

    My saw blades start at like £70 so paying £12 to get it sharpened is good value, but a £30 blade is not really worth it, not least for which it won’t cut anywhere near as much material before getting blunt between sharpens. Same logic for drill bills, some of my SDS ones are over £30 each, my augur bits can be over £50 each, so those are worth looking after, not going to bother for a set of 10 bits for £20.


  • But don’t cheap out on drill bits, nor should you try and use the same drill bit for like a decade without sharpening it.

    Think of drill bits like a good, sharp knife. Knives cut far better and far easier when they sharp, exactly the same with drill bits. If you trying to cut something you would normally pick the right type of knife to do the job, exactly the same with drill bits.

    If you driving screws or other fasteners with your drill consider better quality driver bits if you have a lot of them to drive, such as building a deck. Good quality driver bits cam out far far less and will take more torque so be faster/go in better. Using cheap driver bits is probably worse than using cheap drill bits.


  • I use powershell for work as I need the m365 modules for work and its very flexible with decent module availability to plug in all sorts.

    However it absolutely sucks for large data handling, anything over 10k rows is just horrendous, I typically work with a few million rows. You can make it work with using .Net to process it within your script but its something to be aware of. Being able to extend with .Net can be extremely useful.


  • So I used to be massively into warhammer 30k and 40k, I have over 100k of points of models probably over 200k. I used to have one of the largest book collections going, over £12k worth when I sold it. Yet I dropped out the hobby after several decades because

    *My main army is space marines and they started killing them off so that they could reissue the entire range but worse *They dumbed down the rules progressively more and more *30k rollout and tournament support just stopped meaning that my huge investment didn’t get used anywhere near enough *models became more monopose

    • New book releases of the same quality just stopped, because they wouldn’t pay to keep the big name authors

    Plenty of people like the new direction, I don’t as it stole the ground from under me and required I rebuy in for worse.


  • It really would have to be willful negligence from the designer, the engineer and the insurance company not to have the keel and mast balanced so that if it gets knocked down even to the point the mast touches the water it will self right as long as the boat does not take on water. It’s the whole point of a keel on modern sailboats, retracting or not.

    On a boat this valuable the insurance company would want underwritten engineer reports about the seaworthiness of the boat and will only insure you for pre agreed areas based on said report. It might not be insured but with a commercial crew that is highly unlikely.

    If the keel was up for shallow draft or it fell off, this happened to a number of oyster yachts a while ago so its not that unusual, then they would be fucked. If it took on water in large quantities so that the bilge pumps could not cope, they would be fucked. However it should be unlikely that the windows are open during a storm with commercial crew onboard.

    My guess is that the keel either part or all of it came off, that will fuck you even in calm seas.


  • I switched from Pop OS tiling that I had retro bolted onto stock ubuntu to Sway, massive step up and more importantly I get to keep my Ubuntu/Wayland base.

    As with most add on WMs I had a bit of a learning curve sorting out the extra bits and pieces that just come stock as part of Ubuntus Gnome implementation such as a launcher (I use dmenu), a menu bar (swaybar for me), and even a lock screen (swayidle). Even doing things like wallpaper needed more effort.