I've been using a US VPS for $30 a year running a proxy server to access torrent web sites from my UK ISP for many years now. I rarely go to The Pirate Bay any more though because it doesn't seem to have as many torrents as certain other sites (I've found Limetorrents tends to beat it most of the time). FoxyProxy extension is handy on Firefox to pattern match URLs so you only use the proxy for torrent sites (or Reddit (!)...which now has subreddits ridiculously requiring age verification for UK users - plus Imgur blocks the UK entirely now!).

There's a very high likelihood (Amazon shenanigans or not - there is inflation to think about!) that a later delivery will have a higher price than the first delivery - plus it's also likely there was a discount on the original price (which may be different or non-existent for second or later deliveries) and you used S&S to get a second discount.

What I do is set the next delivery after the initial one to be 6 months (so I have plenty of time to remember to cancel), get the first S&S delivery and then cancel the S&S. It's too much of a faff to track multiple S&S's to get the higher discount levels (those higher discounts only apply to the second or later S&S deliveries and they have to be in the same month too). I just treat it as an extra 5% off for a little bit of effort to remember to cancel it.

I'm waiting for some genius to put a nuclear waste dump on the moon to go along with the base and it'll surely then be a reboot of the classic Space:1999 series?

lottery.co.uk is an unofficial UK lottery site - my point was there is no longer a reliable official text feed of the balls in drawn order. lottery.co.uk probably have to watch each individual draw video to get the drawn order because parsing the video subtitle streams has about a 20% error rate!

The UK ball-drawn lotteries are shown live on YouTube and have auto-gen'ed subtitles. With the official UK lottery site scrapping a list of the balls in drawn order in Jan 2026 (they only have them in ascending order now), it's remarkable that the only official text form of the drawn order of the balls is that subtitle text stream.

Yep, that official subtitle stream has regular parsing errors such as "[music]" instead of a ball number (yes, there's video background music that can interfere with the narrator's readout of the balls w.r.t. auto-generating subs), missing out any text at all for a ball or it might join two consecutive ball numbers together in the subtitle stream.

The upshot is that there's no reliable official way to get a text list of UK lottery balls in drawn order any more, which is very bad.

I'm assuming that having large batteries around the UK to store grid electricity when supply exceeds demand isn't affordable? It seems too obvious a solution rather than trying to persuade UK people to use more electricity, especially when UK citizens pay one of the highest rates in the world for their electricity, so are more likely to want to use less electricity!

It might be able to run Xbox and Windows games, but I suspect it won't allow you to install another OS like Linux on it. Heck, I'd even consider buying it if I could run Linux on the bare metal - it'd probably run games faster than my current Linux PC.

I would love a cheap Linux tablet (maybe running Android apps via Waydroid? Or having the ability to multi-boot between Linux and, say, LineageOS) available at a normal retailer. Sadly, this tablet is neither cheap nor at a place I'd want to buy from (remember that Indiegogo projects can take all your money up front and either deliver nothing with no refunds or deliver it potentially years later). Wake me up when it's half the price on Amazon or somewhere equivalent.

My Dad was indeed a "silver surfer" - had a desktop PC (for Web surfing, e-mail and online shopping) and a phone (mostly used for WhatsApp to keep in touch with family) until well into his 80's. However, old age eventually caught up with him (early signs of dementia - memory is poor now and he's doing and saying strange things) and he can't use tech any more. He's now in a care home watching BBC News 24 continuously (he even struggles with the remote control!) and it's sad to see his rapid decline.

OK, you used to be able to get dual tape decks for easy copying as part of "music centres" decades ago, but other than that, I struggle to think of what advantages cassette had of any of the formats that followed it (DAT, CD, minidisc or mp3 downloads). Cassettes still needed to be flipped over half way through (a terrible inconvenience carried over from vinyl), it's the hardest format known ever to skip one or more tracks, copied tapes would often introduce audible hiss and don't forget tapes getting jammed or snapped in the equipment.

Minidisc was interesting because it was easy to record to (CD recorders were never a popular hi-fi component, but minidisc recorders absolutely were - I hsd one) and smaller than a CD so portable players could be smaller too, but never took off. I always thought they should have released PC minidisc recorder drives as a high tech successor to the floppy disk but they never did. It means that the CD remains the best physical media to play your albums on after some 40+ yeard, though some people have moved onto BluRay audio discs but that remains a niche.

I think complaining about using -ise endings instead of -ize is a bad example because British English now considers either ending valid. If the originators of the English language can accept both, why can't Canadian English?

I must admit that I did chuckle when the most definitely American company Google (or Alphabet, take your pick) used the most definitely not US English spelling of Aluminium for its possible Android/ChromeOS merger project. Would only make much sense if the project was headquartered in Google UK'S offices, which I highly doubt it would be.

The cheaper Android tablets (sub-$200) tend to have lower resolution screens and slower CPUs, which I find detracts from the media/game consumption that you'd traditionally use tablets for. I standardised on 10" or larger and a resolution of 2560x1600 (which first debuted for me with the Nexus 10 way back in Nov 2012). My last two tablets have been the Xiaomi Pad 5 and 6, but be careful about the Pad 7 - it''s bizarrely ditched the ideal 16:10 aspect ratio for the terrible 3:2 (3200x2136) which is bad for media/gaming.

Pre-installing a game store with every copy of your shipped PC OS surely automatically makes that game store a monopoly on that PC OS since *everyone* has it? To date, I only know of 2 instances of this - Windows Store on Windows (many 100s of millions of PCs) and Steam on SteamOS (5-6 million on Steam Decks/Lenovo Legion Go S). If anything, I'd argue Windows Store is an order of magnitude bigger monopoly game store than Steam is.

What's been confused here is market dominance (being so much better than the competition that users gravitate towards it despite having several game store choices on PC) vs monopolistic practices (where the barrier to market entry is made higher by behaviour of the market leader e.g. by bundling the game store with the OS). Steam provides such a better quality of life for gamers and its sales (and policy to allow often even cheaper third party sellers of Steam keys) are so good that it's almost a no-brainer to consider the Steam version of game first unless the non-Steam version is significantly cheaper.

Heck, I've picked up close to 1,000 freebies (paid games that go free for a short period) from Epic, GOG and Amazon, but I still don't play that many of them - despite Heroic Games Launcher making it easy to do so - because I prefer the Steam ecosystem and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

The only major stumbling block for Linux gaming is kernel level anti-cheat, which some people equate to behaving like malware anyway. Several anti-cheat systems (e.g. BattlEye, Easy Anti Cheat, XIGNCODE3) have Linux support, but some game developers refuse to enable them on Linux for...reasons. Some feel that it forces them to fully support Linux when they don't see an economic reason to or other claims it's ineffective because it's not kernel level on Linux.

As far non-Steam gaming stores go, I use Heroic Games Launcher, which has Linux, macOS and Windows versions and supports easily playing all your GOG, Epic and Amazon titles in one launcher. You can also use Lutris to cover even more game stores in one client, but I found it less friendly than Heroic. I don't play multi-player games and I do a quick check on protondb.com if Steam says a game is "Unsupported" (which doesn't mean it doesn't run on Linux - quite often the reverse is true). I reckon at least 95% of my 3,000+ Steam Library (plus almost 1000 games in other stores - almost all freebies from GOG, Epic and Amazon) works on both my Steam Deck and my Fedora Linux desktop fine.

When it comes to IMAP - a well-documented and widely implemented e-mail protocol - Microsoft takes a "not invented here" attitude to it and has a disgracefully half-baked IMAP implementation of it in Outlook. Pretty well every popular non-Outlook mail client out there implements IMAP correctly, but a trillion dollar company called Microsoft apparently can't.

My biggest grievances are that it often won't pick up changes to your IMAP inbox automatically and it doesn't implement the IMAP delete properly either (leading to mail not being deleted on the server while Outlook only deletes its local copy - not good if you have a mail server quota [another thing that Outlook doesn't query by IMAP either]).