I used to work in web development. When people ask me about building a website, I nearly always recommend Squarespace. It's piss-easy if you're vaguely computer literate and it all works as it should. Their templates automatically create a mobile-friendly version. You can register a .info domain via Squarespace. Paying a professional is only really advisable if you're doing something particularly complicated or unusual; a lot of "web designers" produce far worse results than Squarespace for a lot more money.

Google (and Bing etc) should automatically index your site once it's online. There's no guaranteed route to the first page of the Google search results, but you're highly likely to end up there without any explicit effort if your website genuinely has the most relevant content. Being linked to from other reputable websites absolutely helps, but any spammy efforts to get linked to will only work against you.

I used to recommend spending your money on an illustrator instead of a web developer, but you might want to play around with an AI like Stable Diffusion or Midjourney first. They're no good for infographics or diagrams, but they do a brilliant job if you just need a bit of window-dressing to break up a dull wall of text.

>>28489

Thanks, lad. It's a bit confusing as Google Domains owned the exact domain I wanted, and Squarespace listed it as unavailable. I ended up buying it via Google, but they're in the process of shifting their domains over to Squarespace anyway.

I built the website using Squarespace, on that domain, but until it's fully transferred I think Squarespace might keep asking me for money. The bright side is that it does everything I need it to. The fact that a website like this didn't exist when I've whacked it together in an afternoon is nuts. It'll take some time for the domain to transfer from Google (whatever that means), but I hope it's helpful to someone when the time comes.

I'll do the usual of recommending it via professional networks and such. If I can get a seal of approval from a few major health authorities then who knows, it might take off.

>>28475
I just grabbed a 3-4 year old thinkpad X1 on Ebay for a little over £100. Same type as my work laptop so I can use the existing dock. Not perfect condition as the internal speakers don't work, mind.

For light usage it works a lot better than a basic spec £250 new laptop.

I've got a feeling with tech in particular there's something a bit different to it- We're used to old tech going for next to nothing, because up until a few years ago, anything older than a couple of years was practically e-waste anyway. However, things have started to slow down- Not in terms of advancement, but certainly in terms of obsolescence. CPUs in particular reached a sort of apex in power a few years ago, where the average mid-range chip was already much more powerful than any ordinary consumer needs it to be for their word documents and facebook scrolling. Since then it's been possible to get away with an old computer for longer than it ever was before.

What has ended up going hand in hand with that is that people's perceived value stopped deteriorating as fast- And thus people are reluctant to just chuck out a perfectly good laptop, for example, like they used to. When it's still working just fine, only a bit on the old side, you're more likely to think "I can get a few quid for that, I'm not just letting it go". I've even ended up being that kind of person with computer upgrades, I never used to bother, I used to just chuck my old stuff in a big box of "spares" in case anything broke, and call it a day. But for the last few years I've been incrementally upgrading and selling my old parts at barely much more than about a 25% loss.

Combine all of that with constant pressure from companies like eBay and Vinted and so on, encouraging people to make a buck out of their old stuff instead of throwing it or donating it, and I think it's easy to imagine. People just have to be tight nowadays, because how else can we squeeze more blood from the stone of consumerism?

>>28481

> Since then it's been possible to get away with an old computer for longer than it ever was before.

Except if you're trying to install Windows 11, which shuts out CPUs that are older than about 2017 (especially pre-Ryzen). There are ways of circumventing that restriction, but it can mean that you'll be excluded from Windows Update, which can somehow still check if you've got one of the permitted processors.

I agree with your general point, that people hold on to things for longer. There's a lot more eco consciousness now. Where you don't always have to keep getting the newest things. Wnich is of course nighthmare fuel for any manufacturer who desperately needs to keep selling you the newest model of something in order to keep up their inflated profits.

By voluntarily slowing down the rate at which you replace the consumer goods you own, it's a way of showing extreme consumerism the middle finger, without living poorly at all.

>>28482
A "desktop" needs many pieces. Screen, keyboard, mouse, all the cables that connect them. A tablet is all that in one, or so it promisses. You just get a thing that does it, you don't have to build it.

One reason is that hardware has gotten fast enough that most people aren't upgrading every 3 years like they were a decade ago, and a lot of the stuff being disposed of is being disposed of because it's basically unusable.

I used to work in IT for a fairly large organization and by 2018 the main reason for replacing computers was OS bloat. 5-10 year old machines being used for basic admin type work and web browsing without any performance complaints would become unusable once they were upgraded to Windows 10.
No one wants to buy used machines which can't run an in-support version of windows without spending the cost of a new machine to upgrade to a usable spec, and if you want a cheap linux box to use as a home server or whatever there are far better options than a used desktop these days.

Also stricter WEEE and data protection regs mean everything tends to get disposed of via IT recycling companies now, which means any usable stuff gets refurbished and sold on for what it's actually worth instead of "get rid of it ASAP" prices.

>>28481 is right about gaming PCs. Since crypto mining and the GPU shortage prices for used hardware have gone up enough that it's often worth selling old processors and GPUs on ebay.

PDF editing is damn hard and Adobe fight tooth and nail to keep it so. That said, Mozilla have added PDF editing capabilities to recent versions of Firefox (any released this year) so maybe give that a whirl.

>>28444
Depending on whether or not you consider it to be unusable, earlier this year I used LibreOffice Draw to redact and shrink scanned copies of documents. For text documents, you get to edit the text too.

>>28445

Thanks, did the task I suppose, but there's a trial period of two weeks.

>>28446

It seems bizare to switch browser in order to edit a particular filetype, but I will consider it.

>>28447

I'll give it a crack, thank you.

OP report: PDF Split and Merge (PDFSAM) worked well, but had a trial period.

Firefox had a nice draw and text edit function but I needed to install an extension to actually merge files, which involves uploading documents to the internet before they can be converted (not ideal).

LibreOffice Draw is easily the closest to what I was looking for. The interface isn't slick but it's practical, and I've found I can "merge" documents by just copying over pages from one open PDF to another.

Thanks, lads. Thads.

Sidenote: I did look into torrenting it, but the instructions in some of these ReadMe files were so whacky and opening EliteHackDeezNutz.exe didn't seem like a good idea.

I hope this saves someone a few hours of their time.

>>28444 I know there are some free online ones, ilovepdf.com is pretty good, it handles large files and doesnt watermark files like a lot of the others.

On a tangent but at work we use a paid pdf editor called nitro, just the handful of us in the office need the capability so we buy one off licences.
Before the pandemic they were about £50 for a lifetime licence per user, now they've gone up to about £200 as they've cashed in on the drive towards paperless.

>>28423

RIP ANGELINA JOLIE'S BIG TITS

>>28422

They're used in practically everything. Your car has several dozen RISC-based processors - in the ECU, the ABS controller, the airbag controller, the in-car entertainment etc etc. The modern world rests on the backs of Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber.

>>28424

https://www.unilad.com/gaming/female-gamers-call-out-sexist-tomb-raider-ad-from-1999

>Female Gamers Call Out Sexist Tomb Raider Ad From 1999


tl;dr: One single rudgwicksteamshow.co.uk user doesn't like obscure advert from before she was born. Wokeness ensues.

>>28425
It's a two year old article about a quarter-of-a-century advert on Unilad.

>>28425
>I saw ads like these, and the booth babes from E3 articles, and it honestly made me feel like an alien. As a child I didn’t fully understand why it made me uncomfortable, but I do remember internalising this idea that “if this is what women are, then what am I? I don’t want to be like this when I grow up!”

I have seen mountains of material depicting sexuality, men, and masculinity that I've found alienating, especially when I was younger and didn't fully understand it. It doesn't mean I'd want to preclude a community of people from enjoying it, as an adult. I can vocally criticise it, if I choose to. I also try to allow for the scope that I've misinterpreted it, that I was exposed to it too early, or that I've missed something that others see in it. I don't think we should be labelling any bit of media or art or expression as categorically "unacceptable", whether it's formally banned or not.

Not exactly a novel debate to be having nowadays, I know.

>>28424

>They're used in practically everything.

I took apart my dishwasher's circuit board unit the other day to fix a broken push button, and it turned out the dishwasher is powered by a ST Microelectronics STM32F101. That's a 32-bit ARM Cortex M3-based RISC MCU with 36 MHz. Which all seems a bit overkill just to control a dishwasher with a few buttons and a seven-segment LED display.

Then again, they seem to be going for six quid a piece these days, probably half that if you buy in bulk. And I've built loads of Arduino-based ATmega and ESP32 circuits myself, so I know it's nice to be free of the constraints of less powerful MCUs.

>>28381

Chromebooks usually have very low specs compared to a Windows laptop, which is why they're so cheap. You actually don't need more than they come with to run Chrome OS, so it won't really feel slow as such, but just as a reminder that you get what you pay for.

Chrome OS is also still heavily dependent on an active Internet connection for much of the more Windows-like stuff. If you're on the go a lot with patchy wi-fi, you could run into some of the system's inherent limitations.

Personally, I'd always spend 100 quid more on a Windows 11 capable laptop. Brands like Lenovo offer decent enough laptops in that kind of price range. Your minimum should be 4GB to run Windows 11 Home, but if they've got a reduced one with 8GB, that's your better option. Also make sure it has a removable SSD with at least 128GB. eMMC memory tends to be quite puny on budget laptops, and you can't swap it out for higher capacity.

Interestingly, I went to an eye doctor the other week, and he had a Chromebook laptop sitting on his desk in his room with which he appeared to be doing all his everyday office stuff. Not sure if they're really suitable for that by now, but I thought that was interesting.

>>28384
>an eye doctor the other week, and he had a Chromebook laptop sitting on his desk in his room

Chromebooks are deep deep into schools/education and starting to appear in the NHS - Microsoft is getting kicked out.

>>28385

>Chromebooks are deep deep into schools/education and starting to appear in the NHS - Microsoft is getting kicked out.

It's as much that Microsoft have adapted to a post-desktop world. The whole Microsoft 365 suite (Office, Teams, a million other things) works in the browser, with cloud-based storage and sync. Microsoft care about Windows, but it's not the core of their business and they'd be fine if it died.

ChromeOS is basically the rebirth of the thin client, with everything being managed remotely. If Gemma in HR loses her Chromebook, you just de-activate it, hand her a new one and tell her to log in as usual. For Gemma, it's as if nothing has happened, because all her files and settings are still there; for the IT team, there are no worries about data protection or data loss.

It arrived, Lenovo ThinkPad T470S but cheaper due to having Windows 10 Education edition on it. I don't know what that is. Is it going to be a pain in the arse to use or shall I just stick some sort of linux and WINE on there?

>>28396

>Is it going to be a pain in the arse to use

No, it's fine. Education edition is between Pro and Enterprise on the pecking order. The differences are all weird features that are useful for IT departments but irrelevant to normal users.

>>28374

>Which is the best image generation AI to use right now lads?

Midjourney gets the best results with the least amount of hassle, but it's only available through a $10/mo subscription. Playground AI and Mage Space aren't as good, but they have free tiers. If you're serious (and you have a decent-ish graphics card), you'll probably want to learn how to use Stable Diffusion with the Automatic1111 GUI. There are loads of tutorials on YouTube and it isn't massively difficult, but you do need to set aside a couple of hours to figure it out.

I totally agree with your position. The way that generative AI models learn to create images is fundamentally no different than how humans learn by example. The trained model doesn't contain a copy of anything. There will be bickering in court, but ultimately the argument that AI is copyright infringement is doomed to fail.

A lot of middle-class people with arts degrees thought that, even though they didn't earn as much as their peers who went into computing or finance or whatever, they were essentially part of a privileged and permanent elite because "computers can never replace human creativity". They might be struggling to pay the bills now, but they'll be laughing when all of the people who do lucrative but boring jobs are replaced by an algorithm. Unfortunately, this world view is contradicted by Moravec's paradox.

Now we've discovered that painting or journalism is actually much easier for a computer to figure out than, say, cleaning toilets or laying bricks; they're doing their nut, because their world view has been shattered and they're facing a profound threat to their status.

As a skilled manual worker, I have very little sympathy. I don't want to get all "learn to code" or anything, but skilled manual workers have faced continual erosion of their working status for centuries. Some of us have adapted and found ways of successfully working in collaboration with the machines, but plenty of others ended up on the scrapheap. Losing your job to a machine was just the natural order of things when it only happened to blokes with calloused hands, but now that people with degrees are facing the same fate we're supposed to believe that it's the greatest crisis facing humanity. These people are going to learn the hard way that their supposedly privileged status was simply a fiction that capitalism doesn't recognise.

>>28375

> I don't want to get all "learn to code" or anything


And please don't. One reason why there's so much shit code out there nowadays is that plenty of people who are obsolete in their line of work get sent to do some half arsed job centre course scheme for a few weeks where they learn to code just enough so that they'll be able to slap together some third-party libraries while truly understanding fuck all about them.

There's a difference between coding literacy and software engineering. You don't always need the latter, far from it, but it's much easier for somebody who spent years becoming qualified in software engineering to throw down a few lines of efficient code that does what it's supposed to do, than it is for somebody with a passing grasp of programming languages to understand the ramifications of what they're doing.

>>28376

I was referring more to the culture war trope.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learn_to_Code

>>28375
>>28374

Cunts.
Just use midjourney if you want the pretty pictures, pay the devs for their great job monetising other people's digital imagery output.
That's the real indignation around it, of course the software is just learning the patterns in a way that's similar to a person, but like a person it needs training data and it's basically just stolen all that for the profit of the fucks that wrote it.
That and it can do what takes a person years of reflection, expertise and skill to learn and just imitates it in seconds.

Whatever. I work in a factory so fuck off with your idiot middle class labour wank fantasy.

>>28378
If you think Amazon workers pissing in bottles is ok, then welcome to your new overlords.

>>28128

>So. What brand is the absolute most reliable, lads?

Any mechanical keyboard is going to be extremely reliable due to the design of the switches - even cheap generic mechanical switches have a realistic lifespan of 50 million keystrokes.

As regards mice, your best option is to install Kailh GM switches in your Logitech mouse of choice; if you can't solder, I'd probably go with a Zowie ZA version A.

https://zowie.benq.com/en-ap/mouse/za12.html

>>28128
This is my main concern with "gaming" keyboards, it's hard to tell if they're actually worth the money or if you're just paying gamer tax on cheap junk even with supposedly legit brands.

Where I work we use copious amounts of cheap office keyboards and mice from Dell etc. which see more use and abuse than the average home setup and I've never seen one fail from mechanical wear. Yet when I look at reviews for gaming stuff even from supposedly reputable brands like Logitech people are always complaining about the switches being unreliable or breaking too easily.

>>28130

Gaming mice have a very specific failure mode. When you click your mouse button, the electrical connection is rarely a clean on/off - the electrical contacts physically bounce around at the precise moment the contacts open or close, which causes a very brief on-off-on-off-on-off oscillation.

On a standard mouse, a simple circuit smooths out that oscillation ("debouncing"), but that causes a few milliseconds of delay between pressing the button and your computer registering the click. For a competitive gamer, that slight delay is genuinely noticeable and has a meaningful impact on performance, so gaming mice use just barely enough debouncing to minimise the delay. That's fine when the mouse is brand new, but over time the switch contacts start to corrode and deform, the bouncing gets worse and you start getting double clicks when you only clicked once. The problem is compounded by the fact that gamers wear out switches much faster, because many games require very rapid clicking.

Logitech are notorious for making excellent mice with shitty switches, but the double-click issue is far from unique to them.

>Where I work we use copious amounts of cheap office keyboards and mice from Dell etc. which see more use and abuse than the average home setup and I've never seen one fail from mechanical wear.

Gaming puts some really weird and extreme demands on your equipment. You know the little slippery plastic feet on the underside of your mouse? Mine are glass, because I wear through the standard teflon ones in about six months. The keycaps on my keyboard are made of a high-hardness plastic called PBT, because I will wear deep dents in standard ABS keycaps in a matter of months. Office keyboards might get bashed about, but they're barely used by our standards.

>>28128
I'm not sure hat happened to Logitech but they used to be great. I stopped using my MX518 when after a decade of use the rubber started turning into a sticky mess (currently I use an MM711 which works but I hate the feel), and for normal use I swear by my K310 which is several years old. Sure, it's a rubber dome keyboard, but the feel is honestly not that bad and being able to stick it under the tap to rinse it off is a killer feature. I have a Filco Majestouch which I adore, a couple of Cherry based keyboards (brown and blue), but I keep coming back to the K310. They used to cost under £30 and I have a couple of spares, I wouldn't spend the near £70 that's being asked for them now, but I have no expectation that this thing is going to die before me so fingers crossed...

Instead of a backlit keyboard, I'd get a keyboard that suits you and a decent USB LED light. Most of the RGB backlit blah blah is expensive garbage, get the keyboard you want and just ensure you have the sufficiently minmal lighting needed to use it.

>>28128

I just relented and bought another one of these mice. It's only 25 quid but it's sill basically the best mouse I've ever used, I have tried but I just can't get comfortable with different ones. I might have to stockpile a few in case they ever get discontinued.

I also ditched my fancy schmancy mechanical keyboard a bit ago because it was registering double key presses all the fucking time, it got to be absolutely unbearable. Got a relatively cheap Razer Ornata V3X instead, which is just rubber dome, but nice low profile keys with a backlight and no other nonsense. Lesson learned about following the trends I suppose, but there again, you never know until you try something out do you.

I've always had better experiences just buying relatively cheap peripherals, because in the end expensive ones still break just as often. From now on I'm going to stick to that principle.

Are you technologically inclined? You could edit the image metadata with the Python image library. and some clever RegEx. You could knock up a script yourself or ask one of these newfangled AI things to do it for you.

>>28362
Yes, I did surmise it is something a little coding trick could easily solve. But no, I've never done anything like that before outside of editing the HTML on my blog and the like. Surely there's a software solution, isn't this a common issue in this day and age?

Exiftool should be able to do that as long as the filenames are consistent.

>>28368
Thanks, I will check that out.

If you know how to run a Python script:

https://github.com/Accords-Library/YouTube-Archiver

If you don't, one of these options:

https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/download-videos-youtube-playlist/

>confirmation that the user is human (with a simple button click, strangely).

reCaptca v3 no longer needs you clicking through pictures of bicycles, traffic lights and mountains. It quietly observes your interaction with a given web site and then determines automatically if you are a bot or a human.

>>28260
When I've had the Cloudflare Captcha, it was for 4chan and I had to do an hCaptcha, which is a different company. I despise Google's Captcha because it's obscene to make me work for free to train the AI for one of the world's largest and most sinister corporations in order to visit websites that aren't even owned by Google, but I didn't mind hCaptcha because at least I'm being enslaved by a plucky upstart company.

On the Playstation support website, to speak to a customer service person, the verification method you get given a number, and then a series of pictures of dice. You have to pick the picture in which the dice add up to the given number. Some dice have normal numbers on, others have the dots. You have to do 5 of these to get through. I hate them. I struggle to process dice dots so it takes me longer than it should.

>>28260
>Something is probably going on with your IP address, or addresses in the same block
>A device on your network might have been hacked
I'm leaning toward these being that I regularly reset my router, but again it might be paranoia. I've considered using wireshark to monitor traffic but i doubt I need any more flags on my system. Besides, if something can be hidden from the task manager it can be obscured in network traffic - especially to someone who doesn't know what they're looking for.

>>28261
>It quietly observes your interaction with a given web site and then determines automatically if you are a bot or a human.
Oh, interesting. I've been right to consciously pilot my mouse pointer around the questionable material of the web, then.

>>28264

>Oh, interesting. I've been right to consciously pilot my mouse pointer around the questionable material of the web, then


The exact algorithm of how it works isn't known, for obvious reasons, but there are ways in which a human user behaves both consciously and subconsciously that are apparently a lot different from a bot. But in essence, it's all done in the background without you actively having to solve a captcha.


https://developers.google.com/recaptcha/docs/v3?hl=en

>reCAPTCHA v3 returns a score for each request without user friction.

>reCAPTCHA v3 returns a score (1.0 is very likely a good interaction, 0.0 is very likely a bot).

If your source knows how to correctly format Wikipedia tables and uses Anglizismen like Barcode. Then run. That way madness lies.

It's fascinating, but you can't print your own train tickets or defraud the train companies in any way, which I must confess is disappointing.

>>28249

If you're at all good with repairs, try to find somewhere online that sells displays for your model number of laptop. They tend to be somewhere in the price range of £50 to £100. The swap is usually pretty straightforward, you will probably just have to unscrew the display bezel and the bottom of your laptop and then take it from there.

Depending on your eyesight, this might be a good time to also invest in a magnifying lamp, because all the components and connectors inside a recent laptop are often very tiny and delicate.

>>28250

For less expensive laptops that don't have super high resolution displays, you're looking at more like £30-£40. You don't need any special tools, just some small screwdrivers, although a couple of spudgers and a guitar plectrum will come in handy.

It's a very easy job on most recent-ish Lenovo laptops. There are connectors on both ends of the LCD cable, so you don't need to go digging about in the guts of the machine. It's a ten minute job tops, even if you've never done it before - you just need to be patient and gentle like making love to a beautiful woman

>>28249
It looks old. Consider upgrading to a newer, but still old, refurbished thinkpad and swapping the hard disk in.

Surprisingly easy. Plastic was disappointingly flimsy on the hinge of the laptop itself, so the plastic hinge cover got a bit chipped. Otherwise, just needed a small screwdriver and a thin plastic object. Worth the money and 30 minutes of time.

I will still probably purchase a new laptop within the next year or two, but very happy. Thanks lads.

>>28372

Thads.

You can get free VPNs. The Opera browser comes with one that you can toggle on and off almost effortlessly, although it's practically useless for any usual VPN purposes.

Why are Labour picking such terrible policies lately? I don't agree with abolishing the House of Lords either.

Why? What are kids doing with VPNs? Porn? Or are they cool enough to be torrenting stuff again? Whatever, I'm entirely convinced Keir Starmer will spend the whole of his first parliament telling people "now is not the time" while MI5 plot to have him killed anyway.

>What do you lads think of this?

If true, then it's completely laughable.

VPNs were originally designed for secure business communications, to allow people to remotely access a private work network over an unsecure public internet connection. They're still essential for that application and are essentially mandatory in a lot of industries for data protection reasons.

In their role as a means of evading censorship or monitoring, VPNs have managed to confound even the most repressive regimes with incredibly sophisticated and well-funded surveillance infrastructure. It's quite straightforward for anyone with a modicum of tech savvy to use a VPN in a country like China or Iran. Our civil service simply doesn't have the competence to implement a ban that would be anything more than a minor inconvenience.

The Tories were pressuring Meta to remove the end-to-end encryption on Whatsapp, until Meta explained to them in very simple terms that they use Whatsapp all the time for their own private communications. They're dimwits, but they did eventually twig when someone basically said "Remember the phone hacking scandal? Remember when all the tabloids were running front page stories based on the contents of Hugh Grant's voicemail? If we remove the encryption on Whatsapp, we can't guarantee that those front pages won't be filled with stories based on the contents of your Whatsapp messages".

https://www.zdnet.com/article/labour-party-secures-vpn-from-hackers/

>>28225
>Why are Labour picking such terrible policies lately?
Because Starmer is trying so so so hard to be a centrist, and appeal to both guardian and daily mail readers at the same time.

I obviously oppose it, but I also wouldn't really worry at all if they did.

I mean what are they gonna do? I use a VPN to access the torrent sites that are already banned to download the media I'm already not allowed to. Do they think there won't be another way around it?

>>28220
>and also not shit

This is the difficult part. Most of mine are with Network Solutions, who are expensive and shit. I believe AWS can do them now too, and their prices for .uk domains seem reasonable - $9 per year.

https://d32ze2gidvkk54.cloudfront.net/Amazon_Route_53_Domain_Registration_Pricing_20140731.pdf

I have a .org domain, which I've owned since 2004. It doesn't host much, but it matters to a few people.

You now found yourself in the same trouble, I guess. I have no fucking clue how .uk domains are handled, but you can shop around, yet find that every other offer just resells what you already have.

What you also need to be clear of:
Do they take care of mail (I'm careful to say not MAIL or MAILX)
Do they control your, A, AAAA records?
Do some weird fucking redirect on your hosting where it's an iframe (HAS HAPPENED, never use 1&1)
Mostly , just learn that owning an domain gives you a bit of power, and where you host some basic HTML is a just a few quids away.

Even if you need to learn apache or nginx.

>>28220
I think namesilo are the cheapest for transfers at 6.50 USD
I've had a few domains with them for years now without an issue, no price hikes and free whois privacy. wholeheartedly recommend.