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.

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.

UK you have the concept of black box car insurance that offered a substantial discount for having either a dedicated device installed into the car or an app on your phone that tracks a bunch of stats as you drive. It’s as shit as it sounds as it marks you down for every little infringement such as driving at peak times because that’s more dangerous. Get enough points and you can have your policy cancelled. In the UK there are knock on effects for ever having an insurance policy cancelled and you have to legally declare you did when asked.

While you can uninstall the app good luck making a claim if you don’t have it installed with data for that journey. They’d also be pretty suss with no data over an extended period of a few months.

Worst part of these is that it’s expensive to switch to a non black box policy when you can afford to as you get older and more experienced.

Not the OP but having got rid of my Flair as it was too painful to get great coffee out of at 6am every morning, the learning curve is very steep unless you are already familiar with making espresso.

They would just exempt themselves from it as they did with both reporting on people accessing porn using the HoP network and with the investigatory powers bill.

When they did report on it, it was a shockingly high number for a place of work: https://www.theregister.com/Print/2013/09/04/mps_binge_on_smut_theyre_trying_to_ban/

Everything Dies by Spirted Adrift, its a cover of the Type O Negative song

Where is the footage stored? As I am conscious it often goes missing in the US for problematic cases.

You could set it to only manually download the shows, then you would go into the interface and click the manual search button. It will then aggregate the results for you into a single list and give you a single click to download, rename, and import the file to your library. You can even download a temporary lower quality version and then replace it later when a better one comes out if you wish.

I particularly like it for shows that often have a week or more of downtime as I often forget when they coming back and this saves me having to check when they back.

It’s a decent machine for the money but compared to its competitors from gaggia and rancilio what they lose in fancy programming or the pid or the easy steaming (which is still way off mine) they gain in actually having an opv (depending which one you have), build quality and self service.

I’ve seen far too many people have issues with breville stuff and then problems returning it. It’s not that good ones don’t exist it’s just that more reliable does.

To put your seven years into perspective I should be getting 30 to 40 years out of mine with some regular servicing.

They nice machines but I wanted more consistent with its pressure and water flow, better steaming, not made by breville,and made with industry standard components that can last decades.

No, its a smart thing switch as I have the hub, so its z wave. However I have a lot of smart home switches, lights and so on so that makes sense for me. Plenty of options if you do not want a hub now.

The espresso machine has a proper on off button so I just leave it in on position and the switch turns the power on and off

Majority of any e61 espresso machine is like that, pretty much par for the course for anything other than budget non e61 or some of the new high end espresso machines that use some variation of electrically heated groups.

Mine will be “ready” after about 15 minutes but as an e61 group head is a heavy block it takes along time to get good thermal stability. Difference is I can steam and extract shots at the same time with 2bar steam and 9bar espresso, shot after shot.

My espresso machine has a proper on/off switch, so I just leave that set to on and control the power from the smart switch.

Using the UK numbers, around 80k people die of smoking per year, costing the NHS alone £2.6bn, their full state pension cost is around £900m, so there is a sizeable gap between just the NHS cost and the amount on their pension as the pension saving has to be significantly more than the remaining years on their state pension as there is another set of costs next year, and the year after and so on… Total cost per year is estimates at about £12bn, but direct government cost is a bit over £4bn. This doesn’t include the fact that it ties up beds for other people who do not smoke, which means worse outcomes fro them, and this has knock on costs.

They just aren’t killing them fast enough.

A smart switch for my espresso machine so it turns on a timer each morning so it’s ready for when I get up, it takes about 25 minutes to fully warm up. Also I can turn it on or off using voice controls, great when I want another coffee later in the day.

I love mine, if for nothing more than making my porridge on a timer so it’s ready for when I get up in the morning

It’s worse than that as it’s short term tax gains now but increased public health spending later from those same taxes when they start getting cancer in a decade or two.

I had a smart watch when they first came out and the experience was miserable, poor battery and slow response times. I know that’s improved now but it didn’t offer enough over and above what I can do with a chest strap HRM for exercise, my strap doesn’t even need the phone when I go out as it has offline storage.

I have a few mechanical watches I wear as accessories when going out that I love for their function, these will last decades. This is my other problem with smart watches, the battery isn’t going to last forever and the specs are eventually going to fall too far behind. I’m not spending hundreds on a good smart watch when I can buy a mechanical watch for the same price that lasts 10 times longer.

Stories like that make me glad when I had the choice as a kid to go to Chef School or to get into Software Eng. I chose Software Eng. At the time it was down to the normal working hours being better for why I chose Tech, but as toxic and exploitive as Tech can be, it just seems to be nowhere near as bad as all of food service.

I still wonder what my life would be like if I had chosen to be a chef, and I still really enjoy cooking.