This is why its been announced now. With all the tracking Microsoft has in W11, including being able to track usage to an email account for most, they will have a good idea who has binned windows and who hasn’t.

Its this volume of switching that has them worried enough to actually pretend to fix things. I say pretend as its fairly obvious what they need to remove to reduce the bloat on RAM but their business it tied to it now, like concrete over boots on a mafia snitch.

Latest hobby is photography, I had a camera for Christmas after not having a camera with interchangeable lenses in decades. I like that it gets me out the house as like nature/landscape/train photography.

Long standing hobbies are mechanical keyboards and coffee, espresso and pour over.

Keyboards I have really slowed down my purchases to just two or three new keyboards each year.

Coffee I have not purchased anything other than beans in a long time, but I still want to upgrade my espresso machine (marax) at some point.

The Aliens in Aliens are loosely based on Naked Mole Rat cultures and behaviours complete with hive mind that talks via chirps and trills, giant queen with extended baby area, specialized roles (this is more from the expanded universe), not liking other clans of Aliens, resistant to pain/acid etc. There are just so many parallels.

I say Aliens as the Alien in Alien was slightly different depending on if you consider the deleted scenes canon or not.

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.

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?

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.

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.

It was planned from the beginningas the real drivers behind the detail of the legislation, the security services, knew people would use VPNs and those have always been the main target.

Its why the legislation was written in the first place. Most people’s identity is already tied to their connection via big tech social media. Its the people who use VPNs they can lose track of.

I would expect this to be a live requirement by the end of the year at the latest.

Just be glad the client side scanning keeps getting rejected thats in the same legislation.

UK is going to be requiring age verification for VPN access. https://reclaimthenet.org/uk-house-of-lords-votes-to-extend-age-verification-to-vpns

Will this mean all VPNs will comply? Obviously not, but the bigger names will either pull out or comply as we seeing with the bigger porn sites.

The next step after this will be criminalization of using a VPN without age verification.

Loads of insecure people, most of the ones I see are vanity purchases for people.

Even the majority of trades people are better off with a transit style van as its more weather and secure for tool/material storage while having a larger load area. Even landscapers do use vans in the UK, although not all annoyingly.

Sure, farmers might find a 4x4 pick up cheaper and more reliable while good off road than a defender style vehicle, but that’s about the only group who benefit from it.

Even people that work at height such as those who work on lamp posts or power lines tend to have a specialized van or lorry with a lift built in than some shitty pick up.