Other What currently makes your life awesome?

For me, as someone who started driving when most cars didn't even have power steering, this all seems too much like driving a travelling appliance...

Our own car is a Citroën DS3. It's a nice enough car but, even though it has no adaptive cruise control and can't to any extent steer itself, it does have traction control and stability control, which do as they should. However, compared to some cars I have had in the past, it is completely numb, no feedback through the steering wheel at all, just does it's job. It would be difficult to come up with a good argument against improved safety though.

Even everyday small cars, used to be fun to drive, not now, unless you can afford a GR Yaris...

 

Still warm, hot cross buns for lunch

Never underestimate the benefits of being married to a retired chef.

 

a nice email today telling me my pre order of the EINTA Sky Defender has shipped. This is going to be a hell of a build.

 

Forgive my ignorance, is this from a TV series or something? 'Coz to me it just looks like a horrifically busy bit of plastic.

 

It's a Gundam from the furiously overdesigned era of Gundam.

 

its neither, Basically since making the PGU 78-2 Bandai has sat on its arse for the past 5 years and done sweet FA instead opting to release nothing but 1/144 HG's from the **** witch from mercury series, naturally people are now vying for the Kings crown and we've had several stellar kits being released by China who have taken on board what Bandai did with the PGU and are having a go themselves, The Sky Defender is quite a noisy but completely original design and there's a hell of a lot of cool **** mechanically going on inside.

 

I stand corrected. Though I have to laugh that it's available from Zeonmarket.com

 

Build thread/log please!

 

hmm, not a bad shout tbh

 

So in the wake of redundancy (company shutting down) I have been offered my "work" PC at a reduced cost:

Ryzen 7 5800X (with Dark Rock Pro 4)
Gigabyte mITX board
32GB 3600MHz DDR4
Palit RTX 3070 Jetstream
Various hard drives, including 1TB M.2 nVME
Tempered glass gaming case

Total purchase price? £300. I'm calling that a win.

 

1g symmetric interwebs scheduled to be installed on Tuesday. Words cannot start to express how much I’m looking forward to this, after 3 years of balancing 4g usage caps and pitiful vdsl speeds

 

So.... recently my other half has thrown a big spanner in the works regarding our house buying situation... albeit in a good way.

Yorkshire Building Society have launched a £5000 deposit mortgage for first-time buyers. Couple of caveats, but they will not present a problem for us: can't be used for new builds, can't be used for buying schemes, and can't be used for flats (presumably because of the whole cladding thing). But it literally doubles our possible budget.

I tried calling them today to go through a decision in principle, but they're only arranging callbacks for next Tuesday. To quote the guy I spoke to, "call volumes are the highest we've ever seen" - I'm not surprised .

We did have a viewing on a flat this morning, but as soon as we got into the building there was a big notice attached to the wall reminding residents that "pets are not allowed in these properties under the covenants defined in the lease". So it was ruled out before we even set foot in the flat! Apparently this agent has only recently taken over the listing and wasn't aware of that... Wasn't a complete waste of time, it's good to see these things in person to see what you'd be getting for the money.

 

This weekend, I'll be heading to Niagara Falls with my kids and will stay for the total solar eclipse on the 8th. We're all really excited as this will be our first total solar eclipse and first time at Niagara Falls.

Also, my ex should be moving out while we're away, so when I get home my house will be all mine, which will be a massive relief. It's been very stressful being in the same space.

 

According to this, you should spend the 8th in Buffalo.


EDIT - Eclipse track for NE USA added.

 

I have nothing to do.

My OH has just left and taken her parents away for a night away.

Did I say I have nothing to do?

This is most awesome.

 

Being in the path of totality is pretty cool. We were down in Torquay, back in August '99, and it was definitely an experience I'll never forget. Everything went black, all the seagulls went mental and almost all of Torbay was lined with people taking pictures. I don't know what they thought they were photographing but beaches all along the entire bay were sparkling with camera flashes, and the effect was fantastic.

 

Hi all
My life is actually going through big changes, some of them are not that awesome but well, others are making me kinda happy...
Perhaps some of you remember that I used to live in a very ancient house with a huge garden, ( some pictures are even still here on bittech ), well, it was a familly property, I lived there alone after my father's death, but it turns out there is another heir, and he started to claim his share, so I have to sell it and move out.
Selling it isn't done yet, administrative hassles fault...but I moved out already to a flat in town, without a garden, and it is not easy to get confortable in such a tiny space but well, it's clean, the rent is really cheap, and luckilly, I have a garage under the flat, and that is a luck
Not for my car, unfortunately it'll have to sleep outside, because there's only one bedroom in the appartment, and no free room for my gear
I've sorted and dumped to the trash all what wasn't really worthy, but some of you know me, an hardware addict cannot part out of is gear, even unused, and I still have clients and unfinished projects
So my garage, became my new workshop





This place makes me feel happy and catches up the smallness of the flat, I hope I'll be able to finish some of my projects here, future will tell, but I wanted to share my happyness after weeks of rearrangments.

 

The width of that swath is all in the path of totality. It's just that the closer to the edge of that swath, the shorter the total eclipse time will be. Niagara Falls is in the path of totality and should experience ~3 full minutes of totality.