Photos Latest Purchases Thread: v2.0

So much yes and like for the Sprawl series of books there. I LOVE Neuromancer, read it so many times - hence the line in my sig

Looking forward to the series next year although I'm not daft - high hopes and low expectations

 

Part II of the drill press chuck saga - a very happy conclusion! New-to-me chuck arrived today, an old school Cardinal Mark II which is likely over 50 years old and was refurbished by its previous owner, a machinist. After a little fettling with the arbour adapter, the fit is damn near perfect and runout is almost nil. I don't even need to hook up the DTI to know that there is literally zero wobble of any sort, and pictured below with a 2mm HSS bit, it's just sublime to watch.

 

I re bought and read the sprawl trilogy a couple of years ago and enjoyed getting back to 30+ years later, along with the Burning Chrome short stories.

On balance I think I prefer the Blue Ant trilogy, having read it a few years ago.
I can't say why, but it clicked with me
/heresy

 

It's a wee bit early for these but my wife thought I would enjoy them as a test run for Xmas.

 

Noooooo, its not even October yet!

 

There should be a forum rule against discussing purchase of Christmas goods before December Novemember October...

 

Getting used to an old-school flip phone again is… odd… Especially when it’s one that runs Android and has a touchscreen, but has a keypad with T9 predictive text.

Very few incompatibilities so far though. The only app I can’t run so far is Authy (for TOTP two-factor auth), which refuses to work without Google Play Services. But Proton Authenticator works fine, and swapping over to a new 2FA app is a good excuse to clear out some of the near decade-old cruft that’s built up in Authy.

Microsoft Authenticator is the only one I need that I haven’t tried properly yet. It installs, but I haven’t actually tried it with my work account yet.

 

Byron, I had a video pop up on my YT feed about Balance OS yesterday.
Never heard of it before, I see it's another way of doing what you have done with an existing phone with OS subscription or buy a basic Samsung Galaxy phone preloaded with it outright
Balance OS

 

Aye, I’ve seen a couple of things like this pop up here and there. A while back I tried out the Smile launcher on iOS, and it looked great, but my main problem was that it was still the same iPhone underneath the new launcher.

There’ve been a few “high profile” “minimalist” phones, like the Lightphone, but they’ve been quite expensive devices, and they seem to come with a whole “lifestyle experience” that strays into “weird cult” territory. But there is definitely a growing market for “dumber” phones, which have limited “app” support and aren’t just the same black slab that’s so ubiquitous. Form factors we haven’t seen for a long time, like “candybar” or flip (not folding screens).

Some do it because the phones look quirky or different, but many people are in more or less the same boat that I am: we need some modern apps, like messaging services or bank apps, but we just don’t want all the other shite that comes along with modern smartphones. One of the things I’m growing to like about this phone is that although it’s a touchscreen Android device, it’s actually hard to use it as a smartphone. Sure, I could install Reddit and endlessly scroll on it, but do I actually want to try and do that on such a small low-res screen? I could pull up the browser (Fennec, a Firefox fork, is preinstalled) and bash off some long-winded nonsense on this forum*, but that’s a pretty unpleasant experience on such a small screen.


*This particular long-winded nonsense is brought to you courtesy of the iPhone that I still have, and some “me time” on Le Cràppìèr…

 

Couple of things in the Steam Autumn Sale.


Stray -
Hogwarts Legacy -
Sleeping Dogs Definitive Edition
GTA 4 - & Episodes from Liberty City.

All for a whopping £24

 

Sleeping Dogs was great

 

Couldn't agree more

 

Aye, Sleeping Dogs is very good. A funny game in that it's simultaneously incredibly generic and derivative of other games (a bit of GTA, a bit of the Arkham games, etc), but at the same time it hangs together really well and has something of a unique atmosphere. A very enjoyable game.

 

Planning way ahead for a change and got me some tickets to

 

You nearly had me interested but I misread boots wrong.

 

Oh I fully expect there to be many of those too, and daisy duke shorts, only downer is that it's my wedding anniversary and I'll be with the wife

 

Oooh, mate.

I'm quite lucky, if there's something worth oogling at my OH may very well point it out to me

 

Added a few games to my 360 and PC collection today. All came to a grand total of £31.75 from CeX (local so no postage cost).

Games by xaser04 posted 3 Oct 2026 at 15:13

"Artsy" shot as they have just been cleaned and I am cataloging them and tagging up if they are backwards compatible and/or have local co-op. Very simple system with different colour stickers inside the case for the above.

WIll pop to our local independent tomorrow morning to see if they have any that take my fancy and are <£5 each.

Don't really have plans to get a complete PAL collection or anything, I just choose ones that I like the look of, know I enjoy or fancy playing.

 

Nice haul

 

Apart from my 360E deciding it won't connect to the internet atm (stopped part way through testing and won't connect since) all of the games tested fine and I ended up playing quite a bit of Kingdoms of Amalur (on the Series X) last night. Really enjoying the game tbf and love the overall art style (so colourful!! - why are modern titles so muted in comparison?!) and tone.

Mindjack on the other hand.... oh boy.... Think generic 3rd person cover shooter albeit with terrible AI, hilariously bad dialogue and graphics that barely pass the sniff test for the PS2....