doesn’t matter bro, they’re your thoughts and that’s what makes them awesome 😊

have you tried getting someone else to do it?

Figma balls wheeeyyyy

Oh that sucks. I bought a multi pack of bin bags (or trash liner or whatever they’re called across the pond). I’ve used the company for years because the bag material is fairly thick, and it doesn’t just perish away if any liquids sit at the bottom. Decent quality.

This batch though must have been produced when the machine that seals the bottom and perforates it 5mm below the seal, must have been needing a service. The perforations looked like faint dents in the plasticy material, which meant that when you tried to rip a bag off the roll, it just stretched the plastic rather than tear off cleanly along the dotted line of perforations. It meant that rather than just fucking one bag up, it often pulled across the seam of the next one, making two bags useless.

The whole multipack was fucked and it was infuriating. I can only imagine the machine’s perforating teeth were blunt as fuck.

Little things.

Well jeez, I didn’t expect to find an Escape from the Planet of the Robot Monsters reference here, especially this late to the party.

Here’s another good source if you’re interested.

The stage one music is a banger too.

Chuck it in the oven for ten minutes, no drama at all.

Then pre-book the following day off work with a dodgy stomach.

The preferred cereal of JEFF.K!!!11

Honestly, I didn’t have a scooby about amateur radio until I watched a few videos by Ringway Manchester - he’s a really knowledgeable amateur. He’s a bit of a wanker to people in his comments who dare to offer dissenting opinions, but his videos are generally presented with a classic no-bullshit British vibe.

The point of this is that he pushed me in the direction of the Baofeng UV-5RH, which is a handheld that operates on the VHF bands but is very versatile. The company gets grief for producing hamstrung cheap shit, but honestly being a so-called Baofeng Warrior has provided me with the inexpensive entry point into the world of Ham Radio - and it even has a function for listening to FM radio for the… lesser-legitimate audio broadcaster needs 😊

My advice would be to get a UV-5RH (around £25), get a quarter-wave magmount antenna for the car (around (£15 for a cheap one), and check out Essex Ham’s videos on Foundation-level radio guidance (free with a recommended donation).

If you like it, brilliant - get your chequebook out and go wild. If you don’t, then you’ve invested forty-odd quid and you can get half of that back on various internet auction sites.

Have fun!

edit: but yeah if you want beyond line-of-sight communication then £300 would be well under a lowball estimate 😢

Very little 😂

No I got into it to learn the theory of it more than anything. I’ve been faffing about with a VHF setup to see if I could establish a little station that could be heard anywhere in the town I’m in. That’s inexpensive to do and you can probably knock together a basic station with decent range for £100 and the time and effort needed up a ladder.

The next step is to look further afield and build a station that operates in the 20m band, but I’m yet to be able to convince Chief Girlfriend that an end fed antenna dangling across the back garden, or a fiver metre whip mounted to the roof is a good idea. HF transceivers are exponentially more expensive, and require some support devices too.

Otherwise, I go “hilltopping” and head up elevated positions with a quarter-wave antenna and a cheap handheld radio to listen out on what’s happening. It’s good for the geek in me; it’s good for the mind being at such pretty viewpoints; and it’s good for the body walking or running up hillsides.

Alternatively, I’ll sit in the garden while the kids play around with FlightRadar24 open on a device and a handheld radio tuned to the local airport approach frequency, and talk about what an aircraft is or may be doing while listening to the chatter.

So yeah, I don’t do a lot really. I live quite close to the coast so getting into marine frequencies is something on my list to do; and speaking to folk worldwide would be a laugh!

I’m in that age bracket and I’ve turned to spunking the little amount of disposable income on amateur radio kit and equipment.

I wish I’d picked up a debilitating cocaine habit instead. It’d be cheaper.

In the end, “this” doesn’t even matter

My other half worked for a large retail chain in the UK. One of her colleagues (let’s call him Bevin Koyle for no reason whatsoever) was a particularly tiresome dude - not a bad guy by any means, but just super fucking irritating. Very self-centred, happy to dodge responsibility and let a colleague take a fall, and a bit of a gobby twat.

Back when she worked the quieter hours and mobile data plans were quite anaemic, she would put her mobile phone hotspot on for her colleagues to listen to music or whatever.

This one shift, Bevin had run out of data, and already forseeing this situation happening, she had already set the password accordingly. “I can see your WiFi”, says Bevin, “but what’s the password?”

“BevinKoyleIsACunt”, she loudly announces.

“No seriously,” says Bevin, “what’s the password?”

“BevinKoyleIsACunt” she once again says loudly.

Bevin is getting a bit fucked off now, and is like “stop being nasty, give me the WiFi code”

Not grasping the rudeness of his own demands, she says “I tell everyone the same thing, BevinKoyleIsACunt”

He stormed off oblivious to how helpful she had been each time. I still raise a wry smile whenever I remember how supremely helpful she had been.

You can generally tell how well a push has gone by looking at your phone at 9pm on the Friday nights.

If there’s no missed calls, it’s gone well.

If there’s two or three figures worth of missed calls, then it’s gone really well and it’s just been people wanting to congratulate you on how well it’s gone.

Either way, a Monday task.

I had the Atari 800 edition.

I didn’t know what the fuck the “enter your account number” was at the start. Young me didn’t realise it was a thinly veiled password system. Quite clever actually

Wasn’t it done in David Crane’s heyday too?

edit: wow, I didn’t realise quite how bad the NES edition looked, though I’ve never played it. Seems that doubling of RAM paid off for the early Atari 400 platforms. The Atari edition did miss that final tower ascent section though.

Funnily enough, I got an email from MS plugging their Copilot shit.

I don’t give a fuck about what I’m subscribed to, I give a fuck about the link to unsubscribe from it.

I vote (illegally) for MetalJesusRocks.

The Star is somewhere between The Sun (a Rupert Murdoch spec tabloid rag with a “publish first, verify sources later” approach) and The Sport (contrary to its name, is less about the development and performance of elite ball games, and more about substituting the journalism with as much softcore pornography as possible).

Admittedly, the Star is highly entertaining - like the “nottheonion” comm in print form, with an approach more like a magazine than a newspaper. It’s usually a fraction cheaper than most of the major tabloids too.

Obviously fuck all on television after Christmas.

“hey look, the news has gotten around, the head of HR and my line manager want to see my elephant impression too!”