Dos_Box

I've just had this email drop in from Netflix:

Was it Blackpool yesyerday evening and nice to see they have repaired the glitter ball on South Shore. It had got quite neglected and needed the mirrors replacing. It now looks very nice! And close up turns everything to pixel art! Also nice to see is the (relatively new) sea defences establishing themselves as a habitat for lots of things that favour rocky shores in the hexaganol blocks which make up the walls: This is a Honeycomb Worm colony, not corel!

If you are into nature spotting and walking then Silverdale is amazing. Was up on Warton Crag (on the southern edge of Silverdale) last Staurday and saw a Pearl Bordered Fritillary (v.rare up here). I would also recommend a trip to Foulshaw Moss nature reserve as it's not far from Silverdale. They have Ospreys there (and easily observed too) as well as a lot of lizards and adders! Oh and make sure you get a chippy tea at Arnside and sit by the Kent estuary to eat them (just over the road!). Then go up Arnside Knott for a spectacular view

I picked up a new 8GB RX580 in April 2020 for my sons PC, right at the start of lockdown. They charged me £140, which was a good deal at the time. Then a few days later they sent me another! With lockdown messing up a lot of online sellers it was a genuine mistake and they asked if I'd like to buy that one too, but at a reduced rate to save the faff of returning it. I got it for £115! By the end of the year the RX580 was going for about £300-£350 due to the GPU shortage. I would have sold them, but there wasn't anything else to replace it with!

Pah! That's nothing. I got an alert the other day that someone had necro'd a thread on another forum that I had started. 18 Years ago!!! Not spam either, which was a surprise.

I have emailed them asking for clarification about special schools and the survey and will let you know when I get a reply.

What a sad loss She was one of those peopel who, even though they haven't been in the limelight for some time, came back from a pretty awful life and then enjoyed a very long and well deserved peaceful retirement.

It seesm the newly launched AMD RX 7600 is a paltry $269 which will be the same in GBP I hope. Remember US prices don't have tax added to the list price, which is why they always appear to be cheaper. It may be that this may also force Nvidia to start to reconsider their ridicuous pricing policy. Just a shame it's only an 8GB card. https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/24/23735679/amd-radeon-rx-7600-gpu-rdna3-specs-price-release-launch Saying that, you can get a GTX 1080ti for £200 or less used and 2080ti's for about £300. My RX 580 is starting to show it's age now, so shopping around!

Not sure about the accuracy of the cameras, but I did have my first experience of smart motorways on the way to/from BETT this year. Due to the rail strikes I had to drive down and leave the car in a nearby car park for the week. On the way back (it was the Saturday at the start of the Easter hols), the M1 and some sections of the M6 were under controlled speed limits almost all the way to Cheshire (for the parts converted to smart motorways). To my surprise, it did keep the traffic flowing and not once did we get stuck in a jam, despite the high traffic levels. I did see several cars broken down on the inside lane, but the signage did give plenty of warning to change lanes. I can see someone crashing into one of these eventually though!

Just finished Neo Genesis Evengelion (on Netflix) using the orginal Japanese dub with subtitles as I've been told the English dub changes some important dialogue. My son has a small private cinema booked for a couple of hours for his birthday next month and wants to watch The End of Evengelion, so I have to be up to speed on this. TBH, it was a standard Japanese 'giant-robots-fighting-stuff' series until about ep20 (out of 26), then it really grabbed my attention. The film is the final two episodes I'm led to belive, so can't wait to see how it all pans out.

Paging @tom_newton!

Down the side of the driver/passenger seats has become the new sofa. There will always be at least £1.20 in your car at any one time.

My Superb has KESSY, and a great feature it is too. The only issue I have, well, two actually, is that if you have your keys in the same pocket, or close to, your phone, it doesn't work and that the unlock and ignition contols on the fob are obviously using different circuits as the dash will tell me it can't see my key if the battery gets slightly low, so I can't start the car, whilst simultaneously allowing me to lock and unlock the doors from within the car on the fob.

I miss my heated screen from my Mondeo. The Superb doen't have the winter pack (heated screen/wheel) and this winter had been a pain for scraping the screen! IIRC, the whole heated screen thing is a licensing issue down to it belonging to Ford and informative read here - https://www.hagerty.co.uk/technology/brief-history-heated-windscreen/

I'm just wondering what segment of the market that TLD is aimed at? Still you could have a lot of fun with some domain names there. I'd get zipadeedoodah.zip.

I hope you declared them on your insurance!

Last weekend I finally got to give my car its post-winter clean. Using some builders wipes (really useful items to have in a house!) I was cleaning down all the plasics and came across a tiny (about a 2cm tall) button on the pillar between the drivers and rear seats: Turns out it is to turn off the interior alarm. I've had the car for almost a year now and never noticed it before! Does anyone else have any hidden features in their cars that it took some time to find out you had? The more pointless the better!

TBF, the game is about jump-scares rather than gore, so will be interesting to see where they go with that on screen.

My son was well into FNaF some years back and was annoyed the last attempt at a movie fell over due to rights issues IIRC. That then became the Banana Splits Movie. I hope this is fun (in a horror way), but I feel a FNaF movie may have missed the boat.

Moving to the gaming forum, but well played!

I just got my dad a Dell Inspiron from their outlet. £360 inc vat. Not a bad spec either (well, once I added another 8GB RAM stick I had spare! I do find though that my requirements for a laptop has changed very much over the years. It used to be I wanted (and had) beefy laptops with as near to top spec everything as could be had for the price. Nowadays, with modern CPU's being quite handy for making devices last a lot longer before an upgrade is required, I'm happy with a mid-range device as long as it has all the connectivity options (HDMI, LAN, USB ports etc.) I need and is light! My days of needing a very powerful laptop are now as good as over, replaced with usability and functionality. Not to mention portability

**BUMP**

Compared to first gen SSD's I think we're not doing too badly. IIRC, my first SATA SSD died after about 18-24 months! Was a shock to see it just simply fail without notice. It was a Kingston IIRC.

I wonder if it still counts the hours if it's in standby/sleep?

After finally biting the bullet the other week I finally, once my new 1TB M.2 Samsung SSD arrived, went down the Windows 11 route now that most of the issues have been addressed. Once reinstalled, and out of pure curiosity I used Crystal Disk Info to see just how much my old SSD (a Samsung 850 Pro SATA drive) had been working as my boot drive. Turns out it's been running for 9836 hours (just shy of 410 days). For an 8 year old drive I can't help but think that it's had a relatively easy life. So, and looking at desktop drives only (no servers!), who here has the most hammered drive? One that you should have swapped out an age ago, but it keeps soldiering on despite the fact that you know it may fail any time soon!