Its hands down my most useful tool, especially as I can both invite people to my events and I can share my calendar with people I choose. Everything goes into the calendar, from appointments to birthdays to holidays to when things need to be renewed. Only time I forget something now is if it hasn’t gone into the calendar.

I especially like being able to send the address of where I am meant to be going straight to my maps program, as I will usually try and work out where I want to park when going somewhere. Saves so much hassle when you actually get to the event.

I did a large scale data rationalization and migration project for a company that is heavily regulated. They can be asked to prove they have this or that document from seven years ago, for no other reason than they should have it. Not having it means big fines and negative press.

Hundreds of Tbs of data got appropriately labelled and migrated, even more got left behind on the old system till it could be decommissioned safely after a period of parallel running.

As part of the decommissioning the data was backed up twice, and I wanted the backup properly tested with some random file restores. Not a full restore, just a few random restores just a proof of life test that the backups worked. I was told that wasn’t a reasonable request and it wasn’t needed as the architect in charge of backups trusted his backup team and he “designed pragmatic solutions”.

I still mean to call in to the regulator in a year or two to trigger a restore request, lets see if a pragmatic solution design is actually the same as performing some basic testing.

I was diagnosed as dyslexic as a young child, I spent a lot of my childhood reading, and it definitely helped my ability to read. So much so I was ahead of my reading age by the time I hit secondary school.

However it did next to nothing for my auditory processing or my ability to phonetically spell out words. I did have significant coaching around this during school age but nothing ever really stuck with it.

I still cannot reliably phonetically spell out words today, many decades later. Pretty much every word I can spell I have had to brute force learn the hard way, letter by letter with a lot of repetition.

I have had the same problem with handwriting, its completely illegible unless I take my time and draw my letters the same way that people draw pictures, fine for forms but way too slow for notes. Thankfully I can type everything like that now.

I did cooking at school, all the way to GCSE, very nearly went to culinary school instead of doing A Levels and Uni. I decided against it as chefs are more likely to work evenings and weekends than your average IT nerd. I do not regret it, IT can be toxic but nowhere near as toxic as a lot of commercial kitchens.

As I got older I realised that I enjoy cooking, and I am a good cook, but I am not a chef and being a chef is a completely different level due to the volume of food and dishes you have to make. Cooking for yourself you make for a handful of people most of the time, usually a single meals worth of dishes, and you will still eat it even if its bad most of the time. A chef might do over a 100 covers from a menu of dishes and they have to be at least good, while working as a team to do so.

At least for GCSE there was a lot of repetition over dishes to get good at them and their basic techniques, and an encouragement to experiment with them. I must have spent six weeks making victoria sandwich cakes for example.

Post school, cooking books and youtube to expand the range of cuisine that I can cook.

Often they don’t actually use the cards themselves, paying is the job of an assistant so its more likely to be some sort of company credit card.

Heres Rishi Sunak completely failing to get how contactless works, literately the simplest process to pay for something, you don’t need a PIN or put the card into the machine, you just tap the card reader. Its like hes never paid for anything in his life before.

https://www.independent.co.uk/tv/news/rishi-sunak-contactless-fail-video-b2043035.html

Macro photography is always an option for indoor

Assuming you want to use the laptop for this hobby, I would suggest getting a cheap, secondhand camera, old DSLRs are like £50 with a lens and perfectly fine starting point, but you can spend as much as you want on a setup. Only recommendation I would make, is get something thats still supported today for the lens mount type, that way you know you have a constant upgrade path.

Get the camera with the right lens included for what you want to start taking, additional lenses will increase the budget significantly even at the bottom end as they can often work well with better (and more expensive) camera bodies if you decide to upgrade later on.

Then you can use Darktable & GIMP to play with the photos to your hearts content or “spend” on Light Table & Photoshop. You can do anything from basic image correction up to full blown re-imaginings of your photos. Plenty of online tutorials to walk you through the processes.

Yeah for the average user, a Mac with Apple silicon is a great choice, you do not even have to buy new as a second hand M1 or M2 can have its battery replaced by Apple for about £160 and have a warranty on the work. The M1 for the average user is still more than powerful enough if you avoid the base RAM and storage. If you get really desperate there are also the genius bars, lol.

Sure you can pick up a secondhand Thinkpad for the same amount of money, replace the battery for less, stick whatever flavor of Linux on it you like, but the average user doing that by themselves and ending up with the same easy to use experience is unlikely. I would rather do the latter as I would pick a model I can upgrade RAM/Storage myself, but then I simply do not see the average user wanting to do that.

I get paid for all OT, either a half day or a full day depending if I go over, its enough money to make it worth while as I am mattress stuffing being close to retirement.

I have been working from home for more than twenty years now, when I started doing one or two days a week before then I am old enough to predate any sort of Internet VPN and had to dial in directly.

In my time I have had jobs were I have never been into the office, not even once, for the duration of working there.

Main benefits are:

–The time and cost savings of a lack of commute, which are significant

–Get paid London rates while living somewhere a lot lot cheaper

–Get to spend far more time with my kids as they grew up

–Work from anywhere, I have worked from sail boats and while camping

–Quiet days you can do what you want

Main downsides:

–Busy days can turn into no sleep multiple days if you aren’t careful

–You are often expected to be available for far longer hours due to no commute dead time

–No such thing as a snow day, and sick days you have to be really ill to be off

–I don’t get to dress up for work anymore

Its not that bad if you go with mikrotik, but their configuration isn’t for everyone as its a long way from say Asus in terms of simplicity.

Their budget 8x10gb is about £220, pretty reasonable for a fully managed switch. Sure its not going to let you max out all 8 ports at the same time with multiple vlans even with the hardware offload, but whose expecting that from a budget switch?

I am never really going to benefit from it fully, not least in the short to medium term. What I will get is the fun from upgrading.

Future proofing, at some point I will go 2.5gb sync or higher on my Internet pipe, the connection I think can go 10gb sync with some upgrades to the local exchange.

Also because I can, and almost everything else I own for my back haul already has 10gb ports and the bandwidth to support it including my router and all my switches.

Do I need it? Absolutely not, its just fun to do and the only reason I haven’t done so yet is cost of suitable hardware.

Biggest issue with this stuff as almost always is that the average consumer finds this too complicated.

The fact you have to have everything a modern and up to date wifi 7 setup, including all your devices, and make the right decisions over topology pushes it out of reach of anybody but an enthusiast or someone paying for a top tier install.

Excluding people who cannot lay cable between their mesh points because they renting, a wired back haul is always going to be more reliable and consistent. Plus the average consumer gear loses one or more radios to do the back haul.

Biggest thing wifi 7 offers is better coexistence between multiple heavy users on the same access point, assuming everything is wifi 7.

The speed increases are irrelevant to 99% of the population as I can still max out a 1gb synchronous internet link on wifi 6. My current back haul is 2.5gb, if and when I go wifi 7 I am looking at going to 10gb otherwise what’s the point? How many enthusiast level aps come with 10gb back haul?

The budget for Galaxys Edge was cut by Chapek, it was only part of what was planned and what did get implemented was often less than originally planned.

Other than cutting the budget, I think were they went wrong with it was making too high a concept for a theme park and centering it around the less popular sequel franchise time line. It made for a confusing experience for a more casual Star Wars fan.

I stand by RotR being an S tier ride, when it isnt operating broken, because its over complicated and the maintenance budgets were cut.

So I pay monthly for a few streaming services, those are rarely worth the money, although Qobuz is pretty close. I could pirate my music or buy CDs and rip them, but that would be a huge hassle and expensive for the CD route as I like to listen to a lot of random artists.

Other services I pay monthly for that I think are good value are the National Trust and the RSPB. National Trust is particularly good value if you like looking at gardens/old houses, you save a fortune. RSPB works for me as I have two on my door step and just the car parking alone is almost the cost is the cost of the months membership.

Their recommendations are from notable people in that genre too, properly curated recommendations and playlists.

They also have a strong AI charter that AI generated music must be labeled as such, similar to how Steam works. Hopefully soon you will be able to filter it out if you want to from searches.

Distro is more an alignment of philosophy between you and the distro. Something slowly updated but really stable? Debian. Something cutting edge, but with lots of guides? Arch, etc. etc.

Any of them can pretty much run any shell, DE or WM, and as that’s what you spend the most of the time interacting with, that’s a more personal touch point. The distro is really just the package manager that you regularly interact with, and thats easy enough to hide behind something like topgrade.

I have only used Sway for a few years and anything else feels bloated and slow to use to me now. I spent a long time tweaking to get it how I wanted both in terms of add ons and config, then setting the keyboard shortcuts that work for me. I even have a bunch of them configured on my actual keyboard on layers to make them even easier to activate.

Its worth the investment for me as its now transparent to my workflow. I run the same config across all my machines and its been a stable config for the longest time. Long term stability is the key for me.

He is also tying it to a company (SpaceX) that the US government relies on, so in the event one of the other basket cases drags everything else down he is trying to ensure he will get bailouts. Any sensible and non corrupt government would just require the dead bits cut off, but we know that isn’t what is in place right now.

Skiing is still top of my list for this but I know I would be too clumsy to do it at a level I would be happy doing. Plus I really really hate ski lifts and cable cars, they scare me to the point I will just avoid anywhere that relies on them to get about.

Diving is something I want to do, but not yet made the time or money available to learn, I know I will at some point.

About £600 a month for two adults and one medium sized dog. Some shared stuff that my (adult) kids also use like cooking oil, milk, washing powder etc. also use. They buy their own meals and snacks to cook themselves.

Thats cooking from scratch majority of the time, gluten free, which costs more.