Ear infection day IV: The Wrath of Kahn

Vanguard sent me a survey as a recent new customer. I normally fill these things in to give feedback as that's good for everyone. So I click the button named "Take our survey" and...

It's crazy how variable the NHS is. My partner's GP takes being on the phone waiting for hours to get an appoint within a few days. My GP, go on the NHS app, answer a few questions, 20 mins later get a call asking if I can be there in 20 mins, 5 mins later and I've got the prescription I'm done.

No thanks. Can we have more dentists instead?

I'm not going to post screenshots for obvious reasons but I have been alerted that a bunch of the top posts in r/MassiveCock are anti-ICE now and anyone who defends ICE in comments is getting yelled down lol

Don’t know about you but I’d like to ban social media for boomers.

Quoted a company a couple of months ago for some in house backup servers. Came back with the go ahead, re-quoted the order from my B2B supplier and it's now nearly double the price thanks to RAM and NVMe. Now they aren't going ahead, but are going to check in 6 months to see if prices are better.

Well.

If anyone wants to dive deeper on why this is terrifying, I recommend Benn Jordan's channel www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9M...

i put all my talent points in computer and now i dont like computer anymore

So when the dentist says “only soft food for the next 2-3 days” He meant angel delight right? And only angel delight.

Same old tories, different shade of blue.

How to turn off Gemini in Gmail tuta.com/blog/how-to-...

Just had someone cancel a meeting (this afternoon) due to snow who lives around the corner & I pass their house on the dog walk, which I'm about to do. Plus they just screenshotted Google AI overview for "is it safe to drive in rugby today" as some sort of official sick note. The snow is sludge.

Every year CES perfectly demonstrates how tech is just flat out of ideas. Slightly better, slightly thinner TVs and ewaste. Every post on the tech site just leave you wondering "Who the hell would even want that?"

Microsoft have completely fucked it. They fucked Xbox. And I'm a huge Xbox fan. They fucked Windows with ads, online requirements and Copilot slop. And now somehow they are fucking office too? Unless you're into PC gaming, how do you not go for a Mac at the moment. And if you are SteamOS?

A hacker known as Martha Root broke in and deleted three white supremacists websites at the end of a talk during the annual hacker conference Chaos Communication Congress in Germany.

Cancel subs with mega corps, get a NAS and pirate to your hearts content, back small creators however you can via patreon/direct commissions etc.

Tell me we should trust AI to give us the facts. Tell me it's a future we can put our faith in. Come at me. I'm right here, waiting.

So... do Putin next?

Tough start to the 2026 FIFA Peace Prize campaign.

Just finished a 6am raid on the supermarkets to finish up for Xmas. Done.

One holiday guilty pleasure I have is the jailbreaking the hotel TV to turn tru motion off and enable the hdmi inputs. This one was quite a challenge, two network cables and a chromecast to disconnect and then a secret menu code.

Final work day of the year for me today, no time off this year except a week with the flu, super burnt out & exhausted. These next few hours of coding are going to be tough. But I did have my best year business wise, lots of stuff sorted out & have set up next year to not be as hectic & stressful.

So after spending the last month looking to finally move on from Chrome, I've tried plenty of browsers, most of them are terrible. The winner is: Ungoogled-Chromium, fast, decluttered, simple and behaves exactly as you'd expect. Also an honourable mention for Brave.

It does feel like that moment with NFTs a few years ago, when everyone had already agreed NFTs were shit but a few big corps kept making NFT announcements only for nothing to ever come of it a few months later.

Time to fire up the Disney+ boycott again! Also, if you can generate Disney stuff, does that mean we're all free to pirate all Disney stuff now and if anyone asks you can just say you generated it?

🥴

I don't really get the WB/Netflix thing. So either all the HBO/WB stuff goes on Netflix, in which case they'll hike the price (again). Or they'll keep them separate in two different Subs and what's the point? Netflix has been terrible for years.

PGR is probably the only series I'd pay full whack for a full series remaster. It still looks great, plays great but bar original hardware I don't think you can play it anywhere now. One of the cone challenges on the PGR1, in San Fran haunted me. I played it 1000 times to get the perfect run.

Wow - this guy must be really, REALLY bad with money if an extra £208 per month will “ruin” his retirement. Let’s take a look at his situation based on what he told the @Telegraph Because this does NOT add up! No, this is not a “poor pensioner” scrabbling around for pennies… 🧵1/9

Huge respect to the papers for finding both an 88 year old worried about the tax bill on her 6 bedroom Kensington house and a 20 year old fretting about only being able to save £12k a year tax free. Top work all around. These are not easy case studies to find.

Budget wasn't too bad, the rise in dividend tax is probably the worse thing for me (and a lot of freelancers & tradespeople who work through a Limited Company) it'll cost me and my partner ~£700 each. Then the milage charge for EVs that's going to be ~£300 each too. So all in we're down 2 grand?

Just stayed up to past midnight to check a scheduled program runs properly and I can get it signed off. Log in to start, notice a bunch of manually triggered programs an admin logged in an hour ago to set off. Now I can't do the final test for another week.

Got sent my final, checked by a proper person, Will (on a sunday evening?). And it looks like someone's first go on Word in 1995. Going to have to spruce it up, even dead, I'm not taking formatting and font choices like this.

Just watched the new Frankenstein. Felt a bit too much like a tv movie in parts for me. It did something’s great, but I feel 90s film did a fair bit of it better. Both are flawed “movies”, but they both have there good points too. Maybe Del Toro was held back?

Trump frickin' loves this guy lmao

So imagine you took 10 times the amount of laxatives you are supposed to. That's basically what's happening to crypto right now.

Serious life admin day. Made a small claims court claim, signed and filed a bunch of company accounts and done a bunch of work on inheritance tax so I can finish my will.

Just back from seeing Kneecap in Bristol tonight. Very good. Very naughty boys, in a good way.

A reminder. There are other OSs other than windows. Switching isn’t that hard. Don’t inflict windows on yourself, you deserve better. Even more so if you’re using it all day.

So it’s like a reverse Monica Lewinsky situation? What a world!

My goodness he new South Park goes hard.

At this point you just have to assume he’s a nonce, right? It would be more shocking if he wasn’t.

Like, if Apple just paid studios to do ports so everything is day and date, I'd be really interested in the Steam Box vs. M5 Mac Mini comparison here.

Emotionally devastating blows by my accountant this week, filing my Self Assessment, VAT return and Corporation Tax on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday respectively. I'm just hoping there isn't some other tax I don't know about tomorrow or Friday.

I don't think the biggest problem is that this relief exists. The total allowance is 60k. That's just mad. You can also park 20k in your ISA, 9k in JISA per kids, 2.8k in JSIPP per kid. A family of 4 can shelter just over 183k per year from tax.

Also, guess who learned about pensions as a 43 year old self-employed person and was pretty shocked about it all.