Other What currently makes your life awesome?

My new "Carte de Sejour" turned up today so no need to return to the UK and I can now complete my application for my exchange of driving licence from UK to France.

 

Got a offer from the company I had a 2nd interview with.

£10.5k more per year, waiting for the offer paperwork etc to come through so I can check all the details over.

Spoke to my boss who is panicking now, because he doesn't want me to leave but doesn't think the company I work for now will get anywhere near that as a counter offer.

 

Nice, let them squirm and see what they can come up with. Would you stay if they beat the offer?

 

Fully repaired Amiga 600 board courtesy of a local company (AmigaKit)



Apparently there was much electrolyte leakage, and this also killed the 555 chip. But clearly this wasn't an issue to replace.

Honestly it's so much nicer when I can drive to a local company and talk to people. Instead of being "A.N. Other Faceless Internet Seller" it's "those really nice guys met who really care about what they do".

 

Whilst on an epic quest to find a copy of the new Battletech boardgame I spoke to a shop in Coventry of who the owner was a massive Battletech fan, he pretty much had everything bar the base game so I thought I'd pop in and pick up some mini's. we end up hitting it off pretty well as he was as into the lore of it as I was, turns out he's running the UK regional champions in November; as he's inviting me to join and compete (urk) another one of his Battletech players comes in and we end up yakking about everything from the video games to the more recent HBS tech and more, next thing I know im being invited into the Coventry Battletech community and being put in touch with people at FASA/Catalyst games.

**** it, i thought; he's a good guy i'll give him some extra cash, so I pick up one of the new neoprine (sp?) mats and the Clan expansion. As I'm walking out the door he hands me a tub of raffle tickets and tells me that because I've spent so much I can have x amount of goes at a raffle hes holding in the store, if the ticket ends in a 6 I win.

So now not only have I been invited to the Battletech regional championships, a community group of players; introduced to people who work at FASA and Catalyst game labs, I also now own £140's of Harry Potter boardgames.

Not a bad morning out.

 

Excellent, always good to see Battletech stuff popping up. Pretty sure that I have a load of Mech figures kicking about somewhere from years ago.

 

Oh, OK. This device pretends to be a Divergence Meter. Fans of Steins;Gate will be familiar with it. I'm building a steampunked version for the gentleman chrono-explorer/adventurer. For real-life practical purposes, it's also a clock:



And here it is in Divergence Meter mode, showing a worldline (a 1.n; yikes! We've just accidentally made a major alteration to history!):



Here are some videos of it in action:

Clock mode:


Worldline mode:


(The reason I wear a glove while operating the button is because there are some 170V lines running close to the edge of the PCB in that area, and I don't want to zap myself).

 

My coming out letter is complete. 14th is going to be interesting

Many tears were shed

 

Good luck, and you be you.

 

Nice. Shout if you need another Kickstart ROM and I can point you in the correct direction.

 

Woohoo, just had a letter though the door saying that fibre installation up our road will be beginning within the next week. Should finally give us a stick that we can use to poke Virgin with to get a better deal or move away from them.

Not that they have been bad to be with, we get a very consistent 100 to 109 Mbps down and around 10 up, and the service has been reliable, only odd hiccups here and there (had a couple yesterday due to some very short power cuts, as in off then on again).

I would very much like to get away from having a land line (having it with Virgin at the moment makes everything else cheaper - more services for less money, makes no sense), but if we have to have one for the new service then fine that is what we will do, someone else can have this spam infested number (pretty sure whoever had this number prior to us had got involved with a lot of dodgy stuff, always getting calls looking for them).

 

Even if you get landline service ... you can just, like, not plug a phone into it. I know seems stupid (but no stupider than making you have a landline for broadband anyway).

 

Going to true FTTP might well triple your upload speed too, depending on ISP.
Most now offer an "up to" 500-ish down, 40-ish upload.

 

I'm feeling quite spoilt with FTTP here at 1Gbps up and down for 40 euros a month. I think the fibre rollout here in France was partially funded by the EU.

 

True. Although we do keep a phone plugged in just in case some of the older family members, or those overseas want to give us a shout. Not many of those about anymore, but still. If we do end up getting rid of it completely then fine, that'll just have to drag them into the current age.

I am not 100% on how much fibre is actually going in. They have been putting it in down the road and it just seems to be going to the main cabinets thus far so we shall see. Anything has to be better than the "superfast" up to 8Mbps that we have been quoted over current phone lines - the extremely busy exchange is about a mile and a half away at least and that serves a very large area now, certainly much larger than it was originally designed for.

 

This should probably go in the other thread.

Telekom knocked on my door and asked if I wanted FTTP.

Of course I said yes as emphatically as one can without hugging a stranger, especially in these times, so.. Maybe I'll get non VDSL internet one day.

But they'll probably take a decade to implement it, and I'll have moved by then.

 

They're not cheap --although you can pick up a real bargain on eBay these days-- but I do like a solid bit of kit. A bench power supply is essential equipment for any self-respecting geek, along with a multimeter.

You can also just see my steampunk home-made soldering station.

 

It's good to hear that even in the rural depths of Limousin there is now good broadband. It's not something I could live without.

(Potential house search continues... What do you know about Toulx-Sainte-Croix?)

 

Try the checker here to see if they're willing to poke glass through your wall.
https://www.openreach.com/fibre-broadband/where-when-building-ultrafast-full-fibre-broadband

Note that some of the red areas (like mine! ) are partially done already.