The sort of natural looking and sincere charm that someone like Robert Downey Jr. can just turn on and work the whole room at once, not that fake or smarmy shit that has people commenting that it fake after the fact.

I’ve worked with accounts guys who can do it, I’ve watched them work close up, but I be damned if I cant just naturally do that.

This is using BMI, which while the vast majority of these people are at the very least overweight it will be missing all the unhealthy skinny fat people.

I wish they would switch to a system that takes account of waist/hip ratio as if you do not have a narrower waist than hips (with a bigger differential if you are a woman) you are carrying more fat than you should be and are also at a risk of a variety of “fat” people illnesses such as heart attacks, diabetes, etc. despite your weight being in a normal range as you lack the muscle mass and/or skeletal mass for your height

The actual number of people who need to sort out their diet and exercise is just shocking.

It’s the fact that she weaponises it, often using herself as an example of why something isn’t needed, such as DEI or maternity pay, ignoring that she ended up in an incredibly privileged position even before becoming a MP.

Couple that with her bloodthirsty desire for revenge on anybody or anything that annoys her, such as her statement that a quarter of civil servants belong in jail means if she did ever get in we would have ideocial purges worthy of any of the most nutty dictators.

I absolutely do not buy her defense that it was just a jolly jape, that’s the defense of the far right when they fail to land enough support for whatever hateful shit they just spouted.

I’m fairly broad for my height and need a taped waist on tops so I’m a bit of an outlier.

I won’t buy clothes now that doesn’t put the actual measurements of the clothes on the listing for the item because otherwise, I have no idea what the fit is actually like.

If you buying more expensive trousers then you can have the waist tailored to reduce it. I typically buy 40" and have them reduced to a 34". Obviously, this isn’t worth doing if you buying half a dozen for £50 from h&m or similar budget trousers.

I have gnome installed and setup as a backup, plus I use its greeter, but I am another who does not really want a full DE and instead using Sway as my WM day to day.

I have two 32"@4k monitors so normal manual floating window management just annoys me, I greatly prefer tiling window management to auto sort my windows for me. Its extremely rare that I need to full screen anything on monitors this large to fit everything I want in width wise so I want multiple apps per monitor.

If all of this is managed dynamically for me, and I am not manually sizing or overlapping stuff, all the better. Couple that with easy use of multiple workspaces for different tasks (I typically use three per monitor), rarely do I have a need to manually resize anything. I have it setup to open my common apps on the right workspace for me, and each workspace set to the right layout for that set of apps, so much less faffing.

My (40%) keyboard(s) run QMK and are setup to enable most of my common combos, such as switching workspace, moving apps around are never more than two keys. The more I can do without moving my hands from the keyboard, the better for me.

Final thing is that Sway is wayland and for me extremely stable.

I’ve been using it for a while now, its been robust and extensible. I think its only real downside is that its too extensible as out of the the box not much comes as standard that you might expect if you coming from something like gnome, such as a control panel, auto tiling, a lock screen, or screen capture (although this release seems to fix setting that up now). This should be expected as its a WM not a DE.

Long time Kodi user, since it first came out on the original xbox.

Assuming you are a watch and delete person then for films you really do not need more that a seperate folder than you dump films AND only films into and make sure that the film name is correct AND it includes the accurate year for the film. Vast majority of downloads will already have this in place, I never have to bother to rename or move films about as they just go straight into my download folder that Kodi is looking for my watch and delete films. Older versions of Kodi used to be much more annoying for film scanning requiring proper spacing and so on. However its very very important that only films go into this directory otherwise it will fuck up if you start dumping TV programs into here.

TV is much more complex if Kodi is doing the metadata scanning as it normally relies on the top level folder name, and a proper season and episode numbering scheme. If you watching TV I would just switch to a managed downloader like sonarr, its a PITA to manually manage weekly show downloads anyway and sonarr will sort everything out for you.

Worth noting that lower UK production, either caused by climate change such as the article talks about, or farmers either turning over fields to non farming uses such as solar or housing as farming is no longer profitable for them, means increased inflation for food. It also means we are less resilient to further food inflation if other countries have their own climate changed farming issues as we saw a little while ago.

Failure to invest in farming now means small savings today but higher food prices tomorrow.

I greatly prefer Debian and run it on my home servers, but I want something more cutting edge than Debian for my work PCs but not quite as bleeding edge as Arch that I have to pay more attention to for my daily updates in case it breaks. I kind of end stuck at Ubuntu as I don’t want something obscure and harder for me to fix due to a smaller user base to crib solutions to common problems from.

I just use it as a relatively up to date, tested and supported base as I run Sway instead of the packaged Gnome, I disable snaps and all the other Ubuntu pro type garbage, even my Firefox is via PPA. Could I roll my own or use something else? Sure, but would I have the same trust over its reliability on the PCs that I use to pay my bills?

It’s the cost to transition, it’s different equipment such as tractors for vines are different from tractors for cereal crops, it’s the other facilities, field layouts, soil composition, training for the farmer that they will need support with. Plus picking fruit currently requires people in much larger numbers than harvesting traditional cereals.

With the bad weather we are getting for winter crops with the heavy rain ruining planting, climate change is already here for UK farmers. We have to do something, even if it’s just funding to improve drainage for those who can.

The real problem is the lack of appetite from government as it needs actual planning and money, something lacking so far.

It will never rot so completely that’s its never not salvageable. Imagine some alternate universe that 343 actually hired people who knew what they were doing and they created a new Halo that was as well received and as talked about as much as the first Halo. That shit would fly off the shelves, sure it wont be pre ordered (nobody should ever pre order anyway) but it will sell and sell and sell once word gets out.

This is what the cling to as they try to make a successful game, despite having as much understanding as to what makes a great game as my dog does of planning a manned mission to mars. What happened was they confused the people pre ordering and buying the game off previous quality games for actual talent in game development, so they endlessly try repeating what they did previously and it just works less and less. Meanwhile utter tools add DLC of ever lower value, loot boxes and skins, to squeeze a bit more cash out of those not quite ready to give up on the series.

Pinning your hopes on tax relief on Hollywood when Hollywood is perfectly fine pushing the absolute limit of whats legal with their finances seems as daft as his carbon capture scheme. Hollywood is quite prepared to cancel or delete even expensively made content because it will make them more money as a tax rebate than with residuals or marketing costs.

Even if they don’t out right cancel it, we end up subsidising bombs like the $50m tax break wasted on Ant-Man and Wasp or $55m for Marvels that lost Disney $300m ish.

Giving them more tax rebates is also dumb because you are competing any number of other places for who can be the cheapest to work at with the largest tax breaks, its not a sustainable marketplace. Its much like the countries who offer Nike incentives to come build a factory there.

UK majority of the bank holidays are on a Monday, so Fridays would be nice as otherwise you’d lose them and what would become long weekends now.

UK we are seeing a very slow shift to 4 day weeks for more privileged jobs, I work with two people who both have Fridays off as it’s an actual thing you can apply for at my employer.

While the Tories stopped councils from offering 4 day weeks to employees, it’s got to be coming back, further spreading its availability.

Different days off and more teachers than we have currently. The same people who view 5 day work weeks as an imposition as workers should be doing 6 or even 7 day weeks for the same pay as 5, view state schools as subsidised babysitting for their workers kids so schools would need to stay as 5 days rather than drop to 4

Thin base, pistachio, rosemary, and green pesto base (no tomato). For topping honey, thyme, and goats cheese.

I still run ubuntu on my main work desktop and will likely do so until I replace it with a new one as I cannot face rebuilding it at this point in time. I like its broad support, its ease of install and use, but its becoming increasingly annoying having to disable all the enforced decisions the maintainers make, such as snap, ubuntu pro ads and so on. My fear is at some point it will not be reversible

The problem is that they did not build battery factories quick enough, they sat on their hands waiting for massive hand outs to pay for the factories rather than investing. All while profiting off existing investment in ICE that is high return at this point in its life cycle. So they ended up making more profitable per unit halo models like the F150 that they do not need to sell in high volumes to get a return on.

Batteries are about half the raw cost of an EV, if you paying somebody else to make it for you its going to be more expensive as they will want to make a profit and you are stuck being able to buy ever how many they want to sell you. In practice they have ended up funding a competitor to develop battery tech as well.

Lowering battery cost is the secret to cheap prices, you cannot truly compete until you make your own batteries in high volumes.

Always been a bloke in the pub or car boot or whatever that can supply hooky dvds or games or hacked satellite, FAST always talks tough about busting them.

Early eights it was disk and tape trading, mostly tape trading in the UK. Was a way more social activity.

Late 80s and early 90s, it was all disk, and you really needed a connected friend who could get the menu disks (custom pirated compilation disks). These were often super hoarded, only traded for a lot of games, like certain private trackers today.

Very early web stuff was all usenet and ftp servers, often hosted at a university. If you knew where to look, anything was accessible.

Early 2000s was a golden period of easy access. It would be slow, and the quality would often be low if it was a video or mp3. It’s gotten harder to find the obscure stuff as time has gone on. I

t’s like the scene only remembers out and out classics or the latest thing outside of some niche places.