arwen

Thanks! After years of simply taking photos without much of a plan I've been going to a photography group for about 6 months now. It's been fun and I've learned a lot from it, aswell as forcing myself to take different styles of photos.

Some baby birdies from over the weekend.

I do have a little faraday pouch for keeping my car key in at home. However it's probably not required as the newer Ford keys have a motion sensor in them. If the key doesn't move for 40 seconds it stops transmitting and will not respond to wake up requests untill it detects movment. Easy to test by leaving the key close to the car, then waiting for more than 40seconds and try opening the car without moving the key.

I tend to have left over pasta/soup/curry from the night before. Or at the start of the week I'll go the shop before work and buy a bag of salad, cold meat and a load of fruit, maybe even some rice cakes. These stay at work and keep me going for the week. We do have a canteen on site so I do occasionally get something from there.

Gaming, chatting on discord, walking, learning piano, taking photos, go out on my motorcycle, reading, crochet, house diy... Sometimes I think I have too much choice.

It's all in the hips ;-) Point your hips where you want to go, and the bike will more than likely go (unless you are pushing the bars the other way.) Press down with one hip to "tip" the bike over on that side when going round corners. Also, slow down and take the corner at the speed that you feel is safe to go round it. Then accelerate out of the corner. Never accelerate into a corner. Sharply slowing down (either engine braking or brake) mid corner will cause the bike to sit upright an force you to go straight ahead rather than round a corner.

Loads of stuff has shot up by crazy percentages I've found. Alpro soya being the most obvious to me. In early 2022 I could pick it up for around £1.20 in most shops. Now, it's around £2.00-£2.50 depending what shop. I've moved back to asda own brand soya thats £1.10ish. It used to be 80p

My main gripe about bills right now is council tax. Why oh why do we still run a system of charging houses based on what they were/would have been worth in the 90's. Even if the house didn't exist then. How is what a house was worth relevent to what council tax pays for!? I live in a 3 bed house alone (for now). Yes I get a whole 25% off my bill. But I generate a whole lot less waste than the families around me in the same houses, and houses across the road that are a lower band...

I've loved reading everyones early memories! My first gaming memory would be around 1991 me aged around 3, sitting on the couch not feeling well but "helping" my mum play Tetris on my brothers GameBoy. I'm pretty sure the repetative music helped me sleep at that age! First time I remember me actually gaming would be playing the "hidden" game on the Sega Master System when I was around 4/5 years old. We had just moved house and my older brother showed me how to load the game up. That little snail game kept me busy while everyone was moving all our stuff into the new house

If you are connecting via RDP then there was a thing a while back about firewall rules being duplicated each time you tried to log on that slowed log in times drastically. I'm sure if you google you can find the script that fixes it. Might also be worth checking there isn't confliced in any group polices being applied. ALso, how's it's resource use? Does the CPU and/or RAM creep up over time untill it is maxed out ? Possibly dodgy or corrupt proccesses running if that's the case.

Restarting the inventory service within the vcenter server/VCSA normally fixes this for me. I tend to just reboot the vcenter though, since they tend to behave better if rebooted every so often.

I've got an AVG K5. It's a nice helmet, very plush and comfortable liner and the visor and pinlock work well, as does the drop down sunvisor. However I find it noisy due to there being a gap behind my ears... I have no idea what to replace it with.

I've used https://www.digitalab.co.uk/ to print all my photos at home. Quality is fantastic, and you get a choice of all sorts of things. I've never had a canvas from them, but I wouldn't hesitate to order one from them if I wanted one.

Is there no information on the back of it at all?

I really like the ducting that looks like normal skirting boards. I'd be using that all about the house to make running cables a breeze. Save having to worry about decorating if you ever need to run another cable.

PS3 and chrome casts for us. Never had a problem with the Netflix app on either of them.

I'd be encouraging them to use software that eventually will allow them to use the pc without a monitor. It is much easier to learn these when they still have some slight left. I have used Dolphin SuperNova Magnifier and Screen Reader (costly) and NVDA (free) with various people/kids and they have all gotten on well with them. Dolphin is a bit more slick, but NVDA is awesome for free.

For anyone who uses flickr and has not seen the news yet.... If you have a free account with more than 1k images/videos then they will start deleting them from 5th Feb 2019 if you don't pay for Pro. ($50) More information: https://www.flickr.com/lookingahead/

^^^ That is a beautiful Caterpillar @Dos_Box !

I rarely shop at Tesco, I always find them too expensive for what I need (shopping for 2 folk normally- not a family of 5) I don't want 50 rolls of toilet paper, I have no where to store that much. Neither do I need 3 loafs of bread and 12 pints of milk. Even the 3 for 2 multi buy on 6 packs of Muller corners is too much. As for their "fresh" fruit and veg. Go in around 8am and you will find half of it still frozen from when it has been stored/transported. No wonder it only last a day or two in my kitchen before they go off. Asda, Lidl and Aldi (in that order) are where I do most of my shopping. I tend to vary which one I visit cause I hate shopping at the best of times. Morrison occasionally gets a visit too.

Some snaps from my few days off

If you know your highway code then it is simple. Read the road markings. Dashed lines across the junction mean the minor road (slip road) gives way to the main road. No markings means its a "merge in turn" style junction. Be thankful you even have slip roads. Many of the roads joining the A90 and A92 up here (two main trunk roads) are barely more than right angled turns! Google maps

It's reading threads like this that makes me glad my water and waste chargers are part of my council tax bill. Yes We probably pay slightly more than two people living a similar lifestyle in the rest of the UK do. But not by much, and so much less hassle! Unmetered Charges 2018 - 2019 - Scottish Water

Lovely looking bike that @Oaktech! I took the long way home last week on my little bike. It's lovely to have the nice weather again

Extension tubes can be good fun. I got a cheap set from Amazon for my micro 4 3rd and had fun experimenting with them. However I do most of my shooting handheld, so they end up being too much of a flaff for me. This photo however was shot using one, handheld.