Always nice to have a silver lining!
I really don’t want to think about a 10 year future where everyone has to go through this.

The bioaccumilation of PFAS in mortal blood is concerning for me and my colleagues.
It would be very sad to live for 600 years, only to be killed off by fire suppressant.

IIRC, the owner chose to support brexit because it might mean the UK implemented minimum alcohol pricing sooner, which might have increased his trade when the gap between supermarket and pub drinking got smaller.
It really rubbed me the wrong way that was his reason.

Spoons and BD have been on my “do not drink at” list for a while.
This underlines the BD one for me.

At this point, what’s left to cut?!

BIzzare, no idea why it didn’t populate. Fixed, anyway, thanks :)

Everyone has done a cracking job of the questions, so all I’ll add is:

ISPs:

Most ISPs are nationwide.
Almost all fixed lines have no data caps.
If you’re in a standard area, go with a provider that costs a little more, but have good customer service, and know their arse from their elbow.

Zen are good imo. https://zen.co.uk/
If you already know your address, their site will check what you can get, and how much it will be.

If you get a friend to refer you, you also get a £25 love2shop voucher.

Fixed line contracts are usually for 12-18 months.
You can get one month ones (give me a shout if you want them pointing out), but you may be better off with a 5G dongle for short term accommodation.

Further detail:

Most ISPs use the same physical wires/fibres owned by OpenReach, or an altnet, which go from your house to the nearest exchange.

You normally cannot speak to the wire/fibre provider directly, any maintenance request has to come from your ISP.
So if there is ever a problem, you’re relying on the ISP doing the legwork. So good CS is critical, imho.

You pay the provider, they pay the cable owner to get it to them, then provide the backhaul.

There are some area based exceptions, like single-provider fibre.
And there is also Virgin. But I wouldn’t go with Virgin.

What’s the pricing like on these normally?

It does look a lot more solid, and less nickable!

A very quick glance at the internet put it around £700 for their home one, a fair chunk more than the Reolink one (£70 ish when I last looked).

This is roughly what we have in the UK.

For electricity, the standing charge is 61.6p/day, then 23.3p/kWh.
And gas is 29.6p/day, then 6.1p/kWh. (The numbers vary, and you can choose to lock rates for the duration of a contract).

There has been some discussion of it in recent years (after it doubled, thanks Putin).
Whether it is fair for people using less energy…But in reality, everyone has similar 100 or 60A connections to the grid.
There are tarrifs for very low users, where the standing charge is combined with the first kWh.

Once I’m off the gas boiler, and on a heat pump, I may get my gas disconnected to save the standing charge.

On a tangent, as you may be interested, we now have the option of flexible electricity pricing that tracks the wholesale rates for the day. Usually, it’s cheaper, sometimes even negative. Link.
However, this week there has been a lot of expensive energy, so it’s been butting up against the £1/kWh limit!

“How do I get this working in 22.04?”

“Previous question answers this.” Tagged as best answer

“No, the previous question answers it with a method that was removed in 22.04”

silence

You’d probably get better coding advice in the comments.

C&D sounds like a good way to scare someone who was wasn’t previously a Barrister, Bencher, Director of Public Prosecutions, and didn’t have a knighthood for services to law and criminal justice.

#JAM

Maybe the best way to think about it is not dark, but the absence of more light.
On a DMD projector, we use tiny micromirrors for each pixel which flash thousands of times per frame of video.
The flash/no-flash ratio decides how much light makes it out of the projector. This gives us over a thousand light levels per colour channel, from near dark, to full light.
When the mirrors are not in position, the light output is very low. (1/1000th of the full output, on a projector with a static 1000:1 contrast ratio)

The screen is designed to reflect light well, which means in a non-perfect room, it will have a light floor of the reflected ambient light, plus whatever still makes it through the projector (as Cygnus mentioned, room treatment).

If you do treat a room well enough that the small amount of light that makes it through the projector at all-off is a problem, you can do things like fitting an ND filter to the lens (reducing the full light output, while also reducing the minimum).
Or you can use the dynamic iris fitted to some projectors (which reduces the amount of light being put out based on the overall scene illumination, similar to the way LCD TVs lower the backlight level to “reach” contrast ratios of 100000:1).

The biggest one was probably a combo of having an anemometer, and heat/humidity sensors in each room.

When it’s cold outside, the top floor of the house (loft conversion) loses more heat. But it loses significantly more heat when it’s cold, and the wind is blowing parallel to the floor joists.

I realised that because they’re not perfectly sealed (old house), enough air pressure means that the floor void can easily hit external temperatures, meaning the rooms have cold on twice as many sides.

I will (eventually) get some suitable insulation in them to stop this.

I love having a projector in the living room.
I won’t lie, it gets used far less than I’d like.
But it cost me almost nothing, and it’s just fun to have a massive wall of video.

Well done!

I too love the fact that HASS is a common platform for everything.
It makes duct taping lots of different devices together into automation so much easier.

Adrian Binnmann will be straight over as soon as you let that nice billionaire run the country.

AFAIK, LG still do not require internet access on first startup.
At least on their medium/high end lines (C and G series).
This was a hard requirement for me. Mine has never been on the internet.

Not just 240v, but in-wall 240v!

Not even a chance to smell the magic smoke.