I have now been sent the Freecycle giant mechanical scorpion eight times

Important

You could so easily make a catastrophic error when judging if a postcode is in London. We have postcodes that begin N, E, and W, for the North, East, and West of London - but not S. Because that's Sheffield. We also have postcodes that begin NW, SW, SE - but not NE. Because that's Newcastle.

Accidentally allowed our robot vacuum to see out of the back door and now I feel bad for keeping it in captivity

They should issue the Nobel peace prize as an NFT, that way the committee could cancel the smart contra....[umbrella hook appears from stage right]

So overwhelmed I am considering hooking up an LLM to my inbox and seeing how long it is before anyone notices or I go bankrupt due to it ordering six million onions

I must not but one of you should (and let me come play)

Sources say he is doing bad things with machines again

When we put our belongings in storage over a year ago I did not expect the item I missed most to be a geiger counter

Look, if you respond to an FOI saying information doesn't exist when I know for a fact it does, this is going to go badly for you

Discovered I accidentally booked today off work and the expression of joy on my face could power a city

I wish to be friends with whoever organised these drawers in the Ashmolean Museum

My browser inexplicably learned this autofill for every password field and I can't bring myself to fix it

Reorganising the office in preparation for Monday and my hatred of cables grows with every passing second

One last project before the year ends: An analysis of historical drone display NOTAMs in collaboration with the Financial Times. Page two of today's FT UK print edition: www.ft.com/content/4479...

new fear just dropped

another robot highlight for 2025: man wearing humanoid mocap suit kicks himself in the balls

Long shot, does anyone have an unwanted rabbit hutch in London? Poor thing was found abandoned on Wanstead Flats today and we are considering giving it an emergency home

I made this years ago at my sister's prompting and it deserves better than vanishing into nothing

The company who makes children's ride-on suitcases are missing out on an entire market of adults who are me

Every day a new tech challenge with my parents. Today’s was Dad’s mouse not working with his MacBook. I said that it was likely that the dongle & mouse were not a pair. Sure enough he found the correct 2.4G dongle in the other laptop. The reason he is not using that one? He’s forgotten the password.

8 years ago but parents' Macbook had fallen behind on major OSX updates, with the result that many (/all?) Firefox pages looked like this (hashtag #ITschristmas though of course not case-sensitive :)

My dad (a former director of IT and Fortran programmer) has described and brought with him an Outlook problem he's already spent 3 hours on the phone with Microsoft about. He is not taking "Outlook will not fix this, use Thunderbird instead" well.

Went over to friends yesterday to exchange gifts. "Oh, while you are here we've lost Channel 5!" I press the down button on the TV remote. "Oh, you've found it!" #ITChristmas

Along with #duvetknowitschrismas, time for a new yearly tradition: #ITschristmas, where we share IT support horror stories from helping family over Christmas. Here's mine to start:

Time between walking through my relatives door and fixing a tech issue that has been "driving them mad": 8 minutes. The TV was in demo mode. It has been in demo mode for several months.

My pitch: Equip the train quiet carriage with a faraday cage

"AI is a force multiplier!!!" Yes but some engineers should not be having their force multiplied. It's like giving a tank to a gerbil.

Took delivery of an extremely 2000's VR glove in the pub. Yes I am on the bus. I have no shame.

Just witnessed a neighbour walking around their house wearing an actual tinfoil hat

IMPORTANT INFORMATION urusai.social/@mdmrn/11573...

If you’re in the UK and were born between 1970-1990 you can just go to your GP and get revaccinated for MMR because you may have had single vaccines, which are no longer considered valid. I went & did it this summer. Easy way to help protect yourself & your community.

Devastating realization that the rapidly increasing retirement age means I may never have someone attempt to recruit me for one last job

Very sad that I felt I had no choice but to resign from The Infinite Monkey Cage - a victory for the transphobes and other bigots - I did it because so much of the media has chosen to believe the kind and empathetic people are a fiction - they are real and so often unrepresented.

Did not expect to leave the club via Scarfolk

Figure CEO: So the aim is to build a robot that blends in to human environments and doesn't freak people out. Engineer: Sorry what were you saying? Hey look what I made it do.

This morning I used the handy "go to point" function of our robot vacuum to deliver toast to my partner in the living room and heard an "oh for fucks sake" in response

Maybe these LLM things are ok actually

This is the most compelling spam I've had in years. One Medium command center please.

Idiots: "The arts have no purpose" Me:

Currently every day feels like flipping a coin with faces labelled "fatigue" and "hyperactive, but only for seven minutes at a time"

My favourite souvenir from the Osaka Expo (World's Fair) is a pair of excellent ENGINEER brand screw removal pliers, decorated with the horrifying Expo mascot. More events need commemorative tools please.

We finally answered the question "what is shitting in our garden storage" with the discovery that cats are a liquid

While walking down the street a dead drone dropped out of the sky and almost hit me. Finally, it feels like living in the future.

I'd really like to play a real-life game of snake where the food is people and anybody who gets eaten becomes the head of a conga-line snake

Someone who is good at physics tell me why the white overflow pipe for a tank should not go above the top of the tank itself. Please help me plumbing, my bathroom is flooded.

Discovered our industrial receipt printer can produce output of unlimited length, really fast. So here's a two story high version of timecube.

Whatever this is, I am very excited about it www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCN7...

For those late night hacks, Club Mate! The soft drink of the elite hacker.

Old and busted: Cyber Soldier New hotness: Battle Poet arxiv.org/abs/2511.15304