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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Physically, your local “Cash Converters” or similar may be worth looking at, depending on how you feel about them and that type of business.

    Digitally, there’s places that do refurbished laptops, for example Laptops Direct have a refurbished section which I’ve used before on behalf of other people : laptopsdirect.co.uk.

    £200 may be a struggle, but under £300 should get you something that’ll definitely do the job.

    Depending on what you’re doing, Operating System may be an issue if you want Windows, as they’ve stopped updating 10, and 11 won’t run on older machines. If you want Linux, you’re fine. Do a quick Internet search for the laptop model & “Linux” to check if there’s any issues i.e. a weird WiFi card etc.

    Double check with a nerd before you click “buy” (asking a follow up question on here should work).


  • You may already have the answer from the other comments - but specifically for subtitle transcription, I’ve used whisper and set it to output directly into SRT, which I could then import directly into kdenlive or VLC or whatever, with timecodes and everything. It seemed accurate enough that the editing of the subs afterwards was almost non-existant.

    I can’t remember how I installed Whisper in the first place, but I know (from pressing the up arrow in terminal 50 times) that the command I used was:

    whisper FILENAME.MP3 --model medium.en --language English --output_format srt

    I was surprised/terrified how accurate the output was - and this was a variety of accents from Northern England and rural Scotland. A few minutes of correcting mistakes only.





  • Sadly it’s not just inflexibility of Universal Credit - the base rate of Universal Credit isn’t high enough anyway, but you’ve also particularly got elderly people on state pension only, people with disabilities and people with children.

    Surprisingly, the majority of food bank food apparently goes to households with at least one person in work - though this might not be “old style” work where you have set hours and wages and rights, but instead “zero hours” or “flexi hours” or “our company considers you self employed” etc.

    Huge increases in gas costs are one of the biggest contributors - children, the elderly and the ill couldn’t manage to just switch the heating off all winter. Ridiculous house price/rent increases are also a massive factor.

    I’m also a little unsure about a nationalised supermarket - but there are probably some solutions in this direction that would work.


  • It’s not the fairest assessment - It has delays as “trains more than three minutes late”. Not ideal, especially when you’re changing trains, but 3 minutes rarely makes a difference, compared to the 10/20/30/40 minutes late ones.

    A few years back, when working in places “two trains away”, I was getting trains 10-20 minutes late every day, which normally meant missing the connection.

    By my own experience, Northern and Transpennine have had fewer cancellations and fewer noticeably latest.

    However, Northern are still shit at sending a two-carriage Sprinter as a commuter train that needs 3-4 carriages for everyone waiting to actually get on.




  • At their heart, most distros are approximately “made of the same stuff”. There’s differences in package management in the background (e.g. how the “software centre” works), but essentially the difference between a “gaming distro”, “normal distro” and “creative distro” is just what programs are installed by default, and how a few things are set up by default.

    Nothing stops me playing games on Mint (and historically, Ubuntu and Ubuntu Studio) - and likewise, nothing will stop you installing office programs, audio/video/graphics programs etc on something presented as a gaming distro.


  • There’s a sort of order from least to most destructive:

    Exactly correct driver >
    using an elastic band or other thin piece of rubber, between driver and screw, for grip >
    different screwdriver that fits differently (e.g. a small flat driver in any cross-headed screw) >
    again, with elastic/rubber >
    other, unlikely drivers >
    other grippy options, like steel wool >
    superglue the driver to the screw >
    epoxy resin a driver to the screw >
    cut a new flat-head into the screw head with a dremel >
    use a screw extracting bit >
    drill out the screw head >
    cut or drill out the plastic surround

    I’m sure there’s other options I’ve not remembered. A lot of it depends on which screw is stuck, and how accessible it is.