Other What currently makes your life awesome?

You know when sometimes your family just gets you?

I hit level 55 yesterday and my boys bought me a few rolls of Elegoo filament.

 

Got approval for the new place - we should get the keys next week. Missus is now less stressed, which makes me less stressed.

However, she's already raised questions about our corner sofa, so I doubt my reduced stress levels are likely to stay that way for long.

 

Forgot to post, but with 12 hours to spare, I joined the ranks of those waiting for their KS3 Spectrum NEXT
Exciting!!

 

Went on a date with a very attractive female yesterday, completely out of my league attractive but it couldn’t have gone better!

 

Double post, finally got the call about the job and they’ve increased the salary by 3k

I got a job!

 

Double post, double woohoo, worth it.

 

At the close of play today our Mortgage advisor has said the lender is fully satisfied with all our requested explanations and has no further questions. It’s been a stressful week, but this feels like a positive turning point. They (lender) said the only thing left is the third-party valuation. Given the house is a recent build (1–2 years old) with 8–9 years of NHBC warranty, I’m confident it should come back as expected. Even the garden shed is built on a solid concrete slab foundation…

I’m cautiously optimistic now — I won’t relax fully until the mortgage offer is in hand, but it’s reassuring that we’ve made it this far. Surely if we’d hit a massive policy/affordability/credit issue they wouldn’t bother continuing to pay for a valuation.. right?

 

From someone who's exchanging next week; you won't fully relax til you have the keys.

Don't worry about the vaLuation though, is just a formality.

 

Not to give @DeadP1xels nightmares, but you'd think the valuation would be a formality but...

Spoiler

The wife's business was buying a property ~£400k, as valued by the estate agents and a 3rd party valuation that the sellers had had done prior to listing.

Mortgage valuation peeps - "its worth £0 as its next to a pub and caravan site"...
everyone - "..."

yeah, so that didnt happen.

 

@Gareth Halfacree @MadGinga Don’t make me cry, I’m an ugly crier.

To be fair, we looked at some older properties in the area I used to live as a kid, and if we’d gone down that route I’d probably be stressing over all the issues they’d throw up—damp being a certainty!

The house we’ve offered on was originally listed at £280k. The sellers are moving to the North West, and it dropped to £274k earlier this month (the 8th I think?) after a similar house came up a few doors down at £280k. After some robust haggling on my part, we got it for £270k—they actually tried to settle at £272k.

Directly across the road are spacious 4–5 beds going for around £450–£500k (based on actual Rightmove sales history, not guesswork). Plus, it’s tucked right at the end of a development, so it’s lovely, quiet, and secluded. Although, I’d definitely love a pub nearby…

I'm confident the value is there but as things have gone our way so far I'm ready for the ****up that could still come...

 

Wet and miserable so I've lit the fire, smells great, always does first light of the year.

I remember all the bother we had buying this house, and frankly that went smoothly. Now I'm sat enjoying the place to the fullest, you'll get there

 

Fire on already

Gotta be at least another 2 months before the heating goes on here, we still have all the windows open, even with the rain

 

Not that it's cold, just for a bit of whimsy; the day's chores are done, I'm about to retire to the kitchen to make dinner and everyone is just chilling out quietly. It doesn't get better than that

 

Had a great morning on the harbour doing the last sea scout water activities for the year.
Missed the rain and spent the afternoon getting ready for the holiday.
Picked some more blackberries on the way home, having had a load the last 2 weeks for blackberry & apple crumble.
Today's haul has gone in a preserving jar to make blackberry vodka which will be ready in a couple of months.

 

Got all my cameras working in HomeKit, including the new doorbell



Does all the facial & object recognition stuff, recording, remote streaming, etc. Scrypted makes it so damn easy - didn’t even have to muck around with RTSP stream URLs, Scrypted has a Reolink plugin that just configures everything automatically.

 

built a computer that cost nearly £10k - not mine, for a customer,

64 core threadripper / rtx 4080 / 256gb RAM / 4x 2TB PCI-E4 SSDs RAID 10

was a lot of fun and now I'm jealous. going to have a ton of jenkins nodes running on it as VMs.

 

Never really touched the stuff but last night I decided to experiment with AI and try use it as a soundboard to help with a design ive been having an artist block with. Spend an hour with Gemini just tossing ideas at it and holy **** i think im onto something, it threw back a lot of **** but in amongst it all were elements that with further development I can work with, theres a lot of teeth gnashing regarding people blindly using AI to **** out art and i can see why, its powerful stuff but looking past people having 7 fingered hands 3 left feet it lacks vision and design instinct, as a tool tho i can see myself using it in the future when something im working on isnt quite clicking.

It's also scarily good at turning illustrations into figurines.

 

I won the battle to clone from 256gb -> 1tb.
Only took far too many hours, a broken nvme drive, endless attempts, 3 different pieces of software and a tip that the original drive needed to be decrypted (didn't know it was encrypted but guess the key was embedded) in order to be cloned!
New learnings obtained though