Andrew

It's out of touch Thursday.

Bleeder Burger from GTA.

hopefully going to go look at a car next weekend

You don't need a large area for VR. My VR area is in my chair in front of my computer. If I'm playing something that requires standing up, like HL Alyx, Skyrim, FO4,LA Noire, etc., I simply just move my chair back slightly and stand where my chair was. The area I use is about 1.5x1.5 metres. It would be nice to have a 10x10 metre area for VR, but it's not required.

South Korean certifications do seem like a good place to find new things coming out. Things get certified there before anywhere else in the world for some reason.

I went on the internet and made a list of potential cars that I can go with. I did remove the secret one in case I do end up actually buying it because I want to make a funny meme joke but it won't work if you know what it is. (year, make, model, engine/spec, purchase price, estimated insurance costs, annual tax) Oofies. Also yeah, if the airbags go off, that's pretty much a guaranteed total. Airbags only go off in a crash if there's chassis damage.

Mandatory insurance. What really made it worse, was there was an official petition to the government to cap insurance costs to people without a NCB and they haven't made a claim. The government officially discussed it and said no. Since then, insurance has been slowly creeping up in price, especially for new drivers. Including people who have been driving for many years, have never made a claim but lost their NCB due to them not having an insurance policy for 2 years.

Some personal news: You can call me Chains, because I'm in a pickle right now. I do need a car kind of soonish, and one that both works and won't cost me £8000 a day in fuel. Fortunately, I have found someone who is selling a 2009 Ford Focus for £300, which in the current climate is an absolute bargain. There's nothing wrong with it, but he's willing to sell it to me for that price. However, I just got some insurance quotes. Because of the way insurance works here for some reason that makes absolutely not sense, other than a great way to get more money from someone, no claims bonus discounts are only "active" for 2 years. If you don't have an insurance policy for 2 years, you lose that bonus. Because of this, I'm effectively a new driver as far as insurance companies are concerned. The insurance quotes I got for that Focus starts at £400 a month and goes up to £750 a month. The insurance companies are effectively telling me, even though I've never made a claim in over 10 years, I will completely write this car off 16-30 times in my "first" year driving, or an average of 1.3 to 2.5 times a month. At the prices they're quoting, and I've looked this up. I will be financially better off financing a £28,000 car than outright buying a £300 car. I'm not going to do that though, I have got quotes for cars that no one wants because of the brands history of unreliability and rust which hasn't been true for over 20 years. Insurance companies don't really have that much data on this one specific car I'm looking at, and I can buy it for £1500. I'm getting insurance quotes on that car ranging from £150 a month to £250 a month, so I'll likely end up with one of those. I'm not saying what it is right now :3

I actually just had a look at the phones available from my network provider. I sorted with price being the highest first. These are the top 20: Google - £1749 Samsung - £1749 Samsung - £1479 Sony - £1299 Samsung - £1209 Apple - £1169 Samsung - £1049 Apple - £1019 Samsung - £929 Google - £849 Apple - £829 Motorola - £799 Samsung - £789 Apple - £759 Apple - £729 Apple - £689 Google - £599 Apple - £584 Samsung - £449 Apple - £449 Beyond that, they're all pretty much the same price until you get to the 8 year old Windows Phone Nokias. The top two Android phones are tied at £580 more expensive than the most expensive iPhone and the iPhone doesn't even make it in the top 5 most expensive phones available. The only feature those two have that the iPhones don't have is they can fold, not sure why anyone would want that anyway. Those folding screens are made of plastic and scratch incredibly easily. The £1479 Samsung doesn't fold and doesn't do anything that the £1169 iPhone can't but despite that, it's £310 more expensive.

General Motors are cowards. In 2001, they were going to make a 450hp V8 hatchback for the road. This is because at the time, they were racing in DTM and wanted to have a road version of their DTM car. It would have had a 4L V8, front engine, rear wheel drive based on this. Instead, they decided against it for whatever reason and the best version of this car available to the public is a front wheel drive 2L turbo making 160hp. The V8 version would have looked like this They didn't even have to make it mass production. Mercedes did that exact same thing except actually made the thing. This is what it looks like So did BMW with the M3 GTR Strassenversion

Rumours are USB-C is only going to be available in the EU. On the one hand, I can see Apple doing this. See: mmWave 5G only being available in the US and I believe Canada. But also, it seems like a waste of money to not making all of them USB-C, like they did with the iPad Pro. We'll find out soon enough anyway.

Apple’s September iPhone event: how to watch and what to expect - The Verge WWW.THEVERGE.COM The iPhone might not be the only device due for a refresh. It's always interesting to see what new and innovative features Samsung are going to put on their phones in 8 months time There should also be some news on iOS/iPadOS 17 as well as macOS Sonoma, possibly a new iPad, and maybe the M3 announcement for their computers.

And it was only £38.

I really do need proper controller for this. I've been using my Xbone controller, but I'm unable to get one that lasts more than a year before it breaks. I'm not even abusing it, it seems like Microsoft aren't making controllers like they used to. I'm thinking of getting the full Honeycomb setup because it's great for GA planes as well as Boeings. It's going to be a while before I'm able to buy one, so it looks like no MSFS for me for a while.

Cities Skylines

TreeSize Free.

Cities Skylines: I named the university after the creator of Spongebob.

Congrats everyone who won prizes. When is the next event?

Smoked salmons

It's nice that I had good folding weather all weekend. It's a shame I'm a moron and switched my computer off for the first night, not realizing that if I do that, the folding stops. At least I remembered to not switch it off for the other two nights.

WUs I'm getting are pretty inconsistent as far as PPD goes, at least compared to what I'm used to. The last time I folded, I was consistently getting 2.2-2.5M PPD but over the last few days, it's been jumping between 1.2-3.5M PPD.

This is running on empty, stolen intro. I bought some Five Guys because they're new in the area. Bacon cheeseburger with onion and mushroom is 6/10. Better than McDonalds but the price pushes it down a couple of points. If it were the same price as a Big Mac, then it would be an 9/10. For £1 more I could have got what's basically a very good home made burger. Fries are 7/10. I don't get the hype. They're the best I've had from a fast food place but could do with some improvement. Milkshake is 10/10. I'm pretty sure this is just Haagen-Dazs salted caramel ice cream blended with some milk. It's also 8 inches and thick