I've always found it daft to be told to get up an hour earlier and go to bed an hour earlier in summer, so just over 20 years ago I "noped out" and just stayed on GMT year-round. It suits me well, my sleep improved no end in summer as I was no longer trying to go to bed an hour before I normally would.

It's awkward explaining it to people, so I don't normally mention it, but I've not had any problems with work, or keeping appointments etc. At my last job as far as I was concerned in summer my work hours were 7-3 instead of 8-4, a bonus considering I'm a morning person anyway!

Same way as I did last summer - plug in the car, do the washing, turn on a/c, charge a standalone battery... it was great!

There are plans to build a 1GW battery a mile away from me (in the UK), in open farmland. It's next to a solar farm, half a mile from 4 onshore wind turbines but, as expected, the usual crowd are having a strop and it's held up in planning. Not only are these batteries needed, it's far better than another crop of 600 houses!

As for free power during sunny/windy spells, my supplier offered that last summer. I used it to charge my PHEV and got around 100 miles of free driving out of it!

Yup, it has no concept of extensions it seems.

My own house is two-storey but with a small single-storey extension (containing the kitchen). This dataset has the whole house at 2.3m high, which is just plain wrong - the majority is around 4.6m high, with the extension being 2.3.

Loads do, including mine.

Even bang up to date motherboards come with them, look up:

Gigabyte B860M EAGLE V2 (LGA 1851) DDR5 Micro-ATX Motherboard

as an example.

Surprised there's no comments about the effect on loaded sticks, or is that just something here in the UK?

(There's a roaring underground trade in Amazon Fire sticks which have been modified to allow dodgy streaming feeds - a sort of non-techie version of what nerds would do by using something like VLC).

Aibos exist, *and* they work even without their cloud connection.

On the flip side, you end up with days like today - anticyclonic gloom, not much wind, no sun, 59% of the UK's electricty being generated by burning gas (and a whopping 5% from burning Canadian forests shipped a quarter of the way around the world to us). If only we'd built some new nukes... but this is a country which can't build a runway, train line or tunnel despite decades of wrangling.

It's so bad at the moment that as I'm writing this I'm being paid *not* to use electricity by my supplier: they'll pay me 60p (77 cents) per kWh of power that I'm not using, compared to normal. That compares favourably with the 24p (31 cents) per kWh they normally charge!

When the system works though it works well. My supplier had several free electricity sessions earlier this year where they encouraged you to use as much as you could. Great fun if you have a plug-in hybrid or full electric car...

As a kid, I always thought the whole idea of tinkering with clocks was silly. Here in the south of the UK, no matter what you do, there's still too much daylight in summer (16 hours, but it's light for longer) and not enough in winter (8 hours in late December). I go to bed early, get up early, and used to struggle getting to sleep in the summer when the clocks went forward. I've never been woken by an alarm clock, as I'm a natural early riser.

So, 25 years ago, I decided I would stay on GMT year round. It worked wonders, no more trouble sleeping. To me, in the summer, it was a case of going into work an hour earlier and coming home an hour earlier, and as still I used daylight savings time at work (no missed meetings for me), it was as if every day was like a day trip to France!

I can't say I'll ever go back to tinkering with clocks, but what I will say is that you really shouldn't need the government to tell you to go to bed an hour earlier in summer, which is what daylight savings time means.

I've been using Excel since I was at school in the 90s - around 30 years, and as a nerd I soon found the "import text file" feature has options for delimiters - tab, space, semicolon, comma...

I'm guessing you were never in an IT lesson where you finished the work early, and thus had time to explore the various options and settings in Excel!

(As for CS degrees, at least in the late 90s in the UK they focused more on things like learning various programming languages, logic operations, maths, hardware etc rather than how to use Excel or how to format text files for importing data... that was deemed "ICT" rather than "CS", and mainly taught in schools).

Good! About time MS cracked down on companies, like Google, which create a hidden Admin user and use that to run their updaters, thus bypassing UAC and so forth.

Oh, it wasn't deliberate? Drat!

Oldest "PC" which gets used at least once a year - a Commodore Plus/4, with disk drive, which I was given in 1988 (on my 9th birthday)
Oldest actual PC which gets regularly used - self-built P3-450, used for old DOS games. Dual boots Win98 and Win2000. Built in 1999 - it has a GeForce 2 GTS and Voodoo 2.
Oldest PC which gets used at least once a fortnight - self-built i7-2600K in the living room, from 2011; it's my backup PC and used when I need to look something up when friends are round. (Like the P3 above, it served as my main PC back in the day).
And the PC on which I'm writing this is a self-built i9-9900KS from 2019, I've no plans to upgrade any time soon.

Mmm, 20 megs to do something which fits on two floppies with space to spare... (Back in the day, Doom used DOS/4GW - it even called itself the "Doom Operating System" as it loaded.)

Thinking back, it's absolutely amazing what they managed to do with the meager resources available at the time. I guess I just took it for granted back then!

...as I write this, I'm listening to music on YouTube played back via a SoundBlaster ZxR - which came with an analogue volume knob. That's the killer feature for me, but the sound quality isn't bad either.

As for the DOS days, I never did have a problem with any of my ISA SoundBlasters, which culminated in the AWE64. They just worked under DOS, although yes, the older ones did need configuring (IRQ7, as used for the printer port, was a good one to use, or IRQ5 as the later ones defaulted to). On the other hand, the various clones out there... some of those, the less said the better!

The author of that report ought to come to Kent (next door to London). No shortage of housebuilding here!

I live on a small island (9 by 5 miles) and in the past 15 years the western half has been trashed by the building of thousands of unwanted houses. Unwanted by the locals, that is, who watch their roads clog up, see their doctor waiting times increase and have to bus their kids to the mainland each day. The locals can't afford the houses, either, they're mostly snapped up by outsiders. (A classic is to sell a small house in London for £750K, then spend most of it on a much larger house 35 miles away, with say £200K pocket change).

This scenario is playing out across the southeast of England - wooden boxes shoved up with no garden space, all overlooked (seriously, who wants to go into their back garden and have a dozen houses all looking in), all in little dead-end estates. Awful.

What's needed instead of these cancer-like blobs is new towns and cities. Build from scratch, with the infrastructure in place from the word go: roads, hospitals, schools etc - as opposed to the current cancer-like growth system we have here.

As for major infrastructure projects, we are indeed a laughing stock and that won't change any time soon.