Anything to do with Warhammer 40k after being into it for decades, even playing competitively, going to the big info dump events, weekly gaming with friends, etc.

I still have all my models, tens of thousands of points in multiple armies, just lost all desire to play with the newer rulesets as they became too simplified and even more focused on buffing the latest new shiny models stats. Plus latest models are often very limited poses, sure the overall detail is up but the scope for personalization is way down without major work.

Then due to infighting the Horus Heresy line of rules and models got intentionally road blocked after Blighs death, which I had been relying on as a more crunchy outlet and to protect my investment in my models.

Oh, and they started the long road to sunset normal Marine models, which when you have over 50k points of marines you collected and painted over the past 35 years stings more than a little.

For the company its been an enormous success, sales are hugely up, so I don’t begrudge them too much after the mismanagement of Kirby post LotR.

Only thing I don’t like with Photolab is that there is no Linux client. I ended up getting a Mac because I liked the latest version of Photolab so much for my workflow. Deepprime xd3 is just ridiculous at cleaning up my high ISO photos.

Are you using assisted culling in Lightroom for culling? As yeah, thats just missing from Darktable and you would have to use another (opensource) tool to do that.

However if you are still manual, I dont agree once you have learned the keyboard shortcuts, that’s as fast for me in both, or in my current tool of choice, photolab. Even just using 1 to 5 to do basic culling with auto advance is a game changer for manual review.

Editing really depends on your workflow, if you have a lot of similar shots you can just copy and paste a working set across everything thats similar and then manually tweak. Even if the shots aren’t the same just applying the usual set of modules with some sensible defaults across photos is very helpful. I used to keep one back from my last set as a template.

This is why its been announced now. With all the tracking Microsoft has in W11, including being able to track usage to an email account for most, they will have a good idea who has binned windows and who hasn’t.

Its this volume of switching that has them worried enough to actually pretend to fix things. I say pretend as its fairly obvious what they need to remove to reduce the bloat on RAM but their business it tied to it now, like concrete over boots on a mafia snitch.

Soldered RAM is just about impossible to upgrade/replace, you have to desolder it and do a bunch of other tasks. I have only ever seen one person do it on a modern laptop and it looked horrendous: https://gregdavill.com/posts/dell-xps13-ram-upgrade/

I would just completely abandon any plans to upgrade a soldered RAM laptop unless you are extremely skilled.

Unsoldered RAM is just push fit sockets that have a release clip you need to pull if the socket is already populated. The RAM can only go in one way, its super super easy. Just make sure you double check the spec of RAM you buying against the laptop specs to make sure you buy the right sort.

The object selection tools in lightroom are pretty amazing, being able to choose select subject on the menu and it just selects the ducks or people or whatever pretty much perfectly each time to make your mask is pretty bonkers. It saves so much time over trying to select an object in dark table.

I really like dark table, I actually prefer the way it stacks modules vs. lightroom, and this is just for complex object selection, I can select the sky or background or whatever pretty simply in dark table.

Oh and dark table does not support DNG files. My workflow using PureRAW outputs compressed DNG files and Darktable will not support them currently. Sure I can go other routes for my export but the smaller size of a compressed DNG is very attractive when I can be working with about 100 * 40megapixel images.

PureRAW can sort of be duplicated by dark table, but again its not quite as good, doesnt quite have the same list of lens for correction/denoise capability. I shoot wildlife a lot and high ISO is a factor of life. Its not that dark table is bad at this its just PureRAW is very good at removing that noise and sharpening.

So lightroom and PureRAW forces me to have either windows or macos, and a shitty subscription for the former.

Latest hobby is photography, I had a camera for Christmas after not having a camera with interchangeable lenses in decades. I like that it gets me out the house as like nature/landscape/train photography.

Long standing hobbies are mechanical keyboards and coffee, espresso and pour over.

Keyboards I have really slowed down my purchases to just two or three new keyboards each year.

Coffee I have not purchased anything other than beans in a long time, but I still want to upgrade my espresso machine (marax) at some point.

The Aliens in Aliens are loosely based on Naked Mole Rat cultures and behaviours complete with hive mind that talks via chirps and trills, giant queen with extended baby area, specialized roles (this is more from the expanded universe), not liking other clans of Aliens, resistant to pain/acid etc. There are just so many parallels.

I say Aliens as the Alien in Alien was slightly different depending on if you consider the deleted scenes canon or not.

Its hands down my most useful tool, especially as I can both invite people to my events and I can share my calendar with people I choose. Everything goes into the calendar, from appointments to birthdays to holidays to when things need to be renewed. Only time I forget something now is if it hasn’t gone into the calendar.

I especially like being able to send the address of where I am meant to be going straight to my maps program, as I will usually try and work out where I want to park when going somewhere. Saves so much hassle when you actually get to the event.

I did a large scale data rationalization and migration project for a company that is heavily regulated. They can be asked to prove they have this or that document from seven years ago, for no other reason than they should have it. Not having it means big fines and negative press.

Hundreds of Tbs of data got appropriately labelled and migrated, even more got left behind on the old system till it could be decommissioned safely after a period of parallel running.

As part of the decommissioning the data was backed up twice, and I wanted the backup properly tested with some random file restores. Not a full restore, just a few random restores just a proof of life test that the backups worked. I was told that wasn’t a reasonable request and it wasn’t needed as the architect in charge of backups trusted his backup team and he “designed pragmatic solutions”.

I still mean to call in to the regulator in a year or two to trigger a restore request, lets see if a pragmatic solution design is actually the same as performing some basic testing.

I did cooking at school, all the way to GCSE, very nearly went to culinary school instead of doing A Levels and Uni. I decided against it as chefs are more likely to work evenings and weekends than your average IT nerd. I do not regret it, IT can be toxic but nowhere near as toxic as a lot of commercial kitchens.

As I got older I realised that I enjoy cooking, and I am a good cook, but I am not a chef and being a chef is a completely different level due to the volume of food and dishes you have to make. Cooking for yourself you make for a handful of people most of the time, usually a single meals worth of dishes, and you will still eat it even if its bad most of the time. A chef might do over a 100 covers from a menu of dishes and they have to be at least good, while working as a team to do so.

At least for GCSE there was a lot of repetition over dishes to get good at them and their basic techniques, and an encouragement to experiment with them. I must have spent six weeks making victoria sandwich cakes for example.

Post school, cooking books and youtube to expand the range of cuisine that I can cook.

Often they don’t actually use the cards themselves, paying is the job of an assistant so its more likely to be some sort of company credit card.

Heres Rishi Sunak completely failing to get how contactless works, literately the simplest process to pay for something, you don’t need a PIN or put the card into the machine, you just tap the card reader. Its like hes never paid for anything in his life before.

https://www.independent.co.uk/tv/news/rishi-sunak-contactless-fail-video-b2043035.html

Macro photography is always an option for indoor

Assuming you want to use the laptop for this hobby, I would suggest getting a cheap, secondhand camera, old DSLRs are like £50 with a lens and perfectly fine starting point, but you can spend as much as you want on a setup. Only recommendation I would make, is get something thats still supported today for the lens mount type, that way you know you have a constant upgrade path.

Get the camera with the right lens included for what you want to start taking, additional lenses will increase the budget significantly even at the bottom end as they can often work well with better (and more expensive) camera bodies if you decide to upgrade later on.

Then you can use Darktable & GIMP to play with the photos to your hearts content or “spend” on Light Table & Photoshop. You can do anything from basic image correction up to full blown re-imaginings of your photos. Plenty of online tutorials to walk you through the processes.

Yeah for the average user, a Mac with Apple silicon is a great choice, you do not even have to buy new as a second hand M1 or M2 can have its battery replaced by Apple for about £160 and have a warranty on the work. The M1 for the average user is still more than powerful enough if you avoid the base RAM and storage. If you get really desperate there are also the genius bars, lol.

Sure you can pick up a secondhand Thinkpad for the same amount of money, replace the battery for less, stick whatever flavor of Linux on it you like, but the average user doing that by themselves and ending up with the same easy to use experience is unlikely. I would rather do the latter as I would pick a model I can upgrade RAM/Storage myself, but then I simply do not see the average user wanting to do that.

I get paid for all OT, either a half day or a full day depending if I go over, its enough money to make it worth while as I am mattress stuffing being close to retirement.

I have been working from home for more than twenty years now, when I started doing one or two days a week before then I am old enough to predate any sort of Internet VPN and had to dial in directly.

In my time I have had jobs were I have never been into the office, not even once, for the duration of working there.

Main benefits are:

–The time and cost savings of a lack of commute, which are significant

–Get paid London rates while living somewhere a lot lot cheaper

–Get to spend far more time with my kids as they grew up

–Work from anywhere, I have worked from sail boats and while camping

–Quiet days you can do what you want

Main downsides:

–Busy days can turn into no sleep multiple days if you aren’t careful

–You are often expected to be available for far longer hours due to no commute dead time

–No such thing as a snow day, and sick days you have to be really ill to be off

–I don’t get to dress up for work anymore

Its not that bad if you go with mikrotik, but their configuration isn’t for everyone as its a long way from say Asus in terms of simplicity.

Their budget 8x10gb is about £220, pretty reasonable for a fully managed switch. Sure its not going to let you max out all 8 ports at the same time with multiple vlans even with the hardware offload, but whose expecting that from a budget switch?

I am never really going to benefit from it fully, not least in the short to medium term. What I will get is the fun from upgrading.

Future proofing, at some point I will go 2.5gb sync or higher on my Internet pipe, the connection I think can go 10gb sync with some upgrades to the local exchange.

Also because I can, and almost everything else I own for my back haul already has 10gb ports and the bandwidth to support it including my router and all my switches.

Do I need it? Absolutely not, its just fun to do and the only reason I haven’t done so yet is cost of suitable hardware.

Biggest issue with this stuff as almost always is that the average consumer finds this too complicated.

The fact you have to have everything a modern and up to date wifi 7 setup, including all your devices, and make the right decisions over topology pushes it out of reach of anybody but an enthusiast or someone paying for a top tier install.

Excluding people who cannot lay cable between their mesh points because they renting, a wired back haul is always going to be more reliable and consistent. Plus the average consumer gear loses one or more radios to do the back haul.

Biggest thing wifi 7 offers is better coexistence between multiple heavy users on the same access point, assuming everything is wifi 7.

The speed increases are irrelevant to 99% of the population as I can still max out a 1gb synchronous internet link on wifi 6. My current back haul is 2.5gb, if and when I go wifi 7 I am looking at going to 10gb otherwise what’s the point? How many enthusiast level aps come with 10gb back haul?