Always been a bloke in the pub or car boot or whatever that can supply hooky dvds or games or hacked satellite, FAST always talks tough about busting them.

Early eights it was disk and tape trading, mostly tape trading in the UK. Was a way more social activity.

Late 80s and early 90s, it was all disk, and you really needed a connected friend who could get the menu disks (custom pirated compilation disks). These were often super hoarded, only traded for a lot of games, like certain private trackers today.

Very early web stuff was all usenet and ftp servers, often hosted at a university. If you knew where to look, anything was accessible.

Early 2000s was a golden period of easy access. It would be slow, and the quality would often be low if it was a video or mp3. It’s gotten harder to find the obscure stuff as time has gone on. I

t’s like the scene only remembers out and out classics or the latest thing outside of some niche places.

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.

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.

I would suggest that it was the broad outline of the same ending he planned and shared with DnD just implemented badly. He’s probably more pissed that they made his ending so unpopular by completely botching the landing as he now can’t use that same ending without risk of rejection. I still maintain it would have sucked as an ending even if it had been implemented at the same standard as series 5, but what we got made it far far worse.

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.

Gravy or curry sauce

The latter every time. It’s made much worse as it’s almost always achieved via a leveraged buy out, saddling the business with huge debt and absolving the vulture from most of the risk. It’s used as a one way ticket to stripping the company of any value.

So this is obviously McDonald’s but manufacturing suffers a similar path:

1. Make high quality and respected product onshore
2. Get purchased by vulture capitalist
3. Lower standards to increase profit
4. Product is offshored to cover up falling sales
5. Quality nosedives
6. Once the customer base catches on sales nosedives
7. Lower quality even more and brand becomes a joke
8. Get purchased by mega conglomerate who collects brands like Pokémon
9. Rival product gets made onshore by a small team who used to work for you

See Doc Martin and Solvair or Hunter Wellingtons or any other of a large number of former halo brands. Filson is one going through this right now

I ran Qubes for a while, really enjoyed the way it integrated windows so I could use MS Office (mandatory job requirement) as apps rather than a VM as I normally do. I realise you can do something similar with Winapps for Linux but to have it baked in was rather nice.

Sway on ubuntu, as it’s my work machine. I will switch eventually when I replace the PC with a new one

At least it’s not on arch 😞

I went from 3 to 2, as I went from 2x24@1080p + 1x34@1440p to 2x32@4k. I the jump to 4k with such large screens meant I have a massive more amount of usable screen real estate especially as I do not use any scaling on the screens, although I do marginally increase the font size. I can manage six windows per screen all neatly tiled as long as its not my IDE, that I need a good 2/3rd of the screen to actually be useful for me.

It would be unmanageable if I tried to do this without a proper tiling window manager though, I use Sway. I particularly like how the virtual desktops work on Sway as I have separate virtual desktops per screen, makes them actually useful for me. Typically I have two per screen, IDE/Terminal and Discord/Signal/Music, Multiple Browser windows and Email/Teams/Office.

Normal hifi gear, particularly second hand can sound way way better than generic computer crap. However normal hi-fi speakers are designed to work best a certain distance from the wall **and ** a certain distance from you. These distances vary between speakers but it is important to check this before spending any cash as some speakers need to be many feet from you, which isn’t always remotely practical for most pc setups.

I went with Dali Minutes for this reason, so they can be right on the wall and really close to me. I paired mine with a Rega Brio amp and RME ADI 2 USB DAC, then added a monitor audio sub later.

Most proper studio monitors are designed for near field listening they also make a good choice although they can be a little clean for some people’s taste.

What switches does it have? Are they lubed? Are the stabilisers modded? Does it have case foam or other case mods? What type of mount is it? What about the plate? Swing weight and force curve? Linear, clicky or tactile? Silent, oring, ball bearing mod?

There are so many different variables and that’s before you even get to layout changes it’s perfectly possible to build your own keyboard that is perfect or close to it for you.

I have keyboards with different layouts and typing feel that I pick for how I want my typing to feel on any given day. It’s no different from a guitarist having multiple different guitars chasing a different feel and sound.

Not everyone is going to appreciate it and that’s perfectly fine, but there are significant differences with the right changes during a build.

So big vacations we typically plan two to three years in advance and book as soon as the booking opens for the parts of that holiday. Usually means flights about 12 months before, accommodation usually a bit before then. Something like Disney or a sailing holiday we can book two years in advance as an entire package, which in the EU means we ATOL protected, far safer that far out than booking separate. I have terrible anxiety when booking lots of individual components like a backpacking holiday in Japan that had us staying in half a dozen hotels/apartments, hiring a couple of cars, getting internal flights, prebooking tickets to Sumo and Ghibli and so on, but its essential to get the best prices.

We are still paying for a family holiday in a cottage or villa as our kids are still starting their careers. This I book a year in advance, but we plan the locations far in advance of that and scope out where we want to stay.

As we work from home we can work from our van a fair bit. Earlier in the year we did a tour of wales over three weeks while working part time, later this year we are doing a three week tour of Cornwall/Devon/Somerset. We also get away a few long weekends around the bank holidays. As we stay at adult only sites that are very popular and will sell out quickly around the dates we want to go, these are booked as soon as booking opens for them, usually October the year before.

Booking early gets us far better pricing and we get to go where we want, stay where we want. Plus the planning and research is a big part of the enjoyment for us, its also essential if you want to make the most of a planning heavy holiday like Japan or Disney and not pay through the nose to use a quality planning service.

Pretty sure he pays cash or close to it rather than a traditional leveraged buy out. He normally only buys struggling or collapsed brands he can get cheap like Wiggle.

Ashley wants two main things out of his purchases, the brand name to slap on a web store with any head start it can give into running a business in that sector, and the retail space. Any decent retail space he wants to flip into residential property while stripping any fixtures and fittings of any value, anything else will be gone or rebooted into the lowest common denominator for that area.

I use powershell by default on windows and I prefer it for scripting any day of the week vs. shell scripts. It’s not the fastest but you can always plug in .net to your scripts to dramatically improve performance. Sure, I could write the script in rust or whatever to make it even faster, but that’s way more work than I need for the lifespan of the script.