monkeyseemonkeydo

Just watched the trailer and I think that's probalby enough. WTAF?

What I don't get about things like that is why the police just stand there. Every one of them sitting down should have handcuffs on them and chucked in the back of a police van. The police should then be taking their phones off them and getting the CCTV from the garage to find out who they need to be charging with criminal damage. I get that peaceful protests must be respected and the police's hands are tied in some instances but that is clear criminal damage and can't be condoned. Sorry @aener 😉

The other problem is that it seems their actions have resulted in zero change to anything linked to climate change. I don't think I've even seen that the government are going to discuss anything or look at any options. All they've really achieved is having the public despise them literally to the point of people wanting to hurt them when they block roads and act like the aforementioned cunts and forced some law changes (I believe) making walking slowly in the road or whatever an arrestable offence.

Just stop oil protesters just seem like cunts I'm afraid. I'm all for doing what we can to improve things but watching twats like that or people seriously pissing people off sitting in roads and blocking motorways makes me want to set fire to a barrel of oil just for the shits. I always thought the point of these sorts of pressure groups and protesters were to get public support while raising awareness. If the first thing people say when they see you is 'Oh, no, not you. Fuck off' you're failing in your mission...

Just had to Google them. My first instinct is that the designer accidentally used portrait instead of landscape for the drawing... or maybe was using 16:9 instead of 4:3. Whatever, report back when you've tried them!

Climbing frame. It's called a children's climbing frame 😜

The shell is fine thankfully, I think the sound insulation caught and he was chatting to another customer when they noticed the smell/smoke and the plastics were the main casualties. Nothing camper related damaged but it would be a biiig job to transfer over to a new van I think... would rather not if we don't have to!! Most of the base camper stuff was done before we got it.

So our 55 plate Iveco camper needed a little welding done to get it through the MOT. Our usual garage man who's always been brilliant had a little mishap though and slightly set fire to it! I'm now in need of a dash, passenger side heating pipes, head lining, passenger sun visor, passenger side plastic pillar panel, wiring loom... basically that front passenger corner from a van being broken. Bad, bad times. The guy's said he'll fix it if he can get the parts for a reasonable price but if we go through his tradey insurance he reckons we'd only get the trade value for the bare van (~£2k) when we're about £15k into it as a camper...

Woo! Sorted! Came home to a nice letter from Nationwide saying the mortgage account is clear and now closed.

I joined a 3D printing group on Facebook and it really worries me that it's literally full of grown men printing Star Wars and Ironman helmets for them to wear. Virtually none of them are using their printers for anything useful whatsoever.

Yeah maybe try adding a small radius to the trailing edge first then in a separate operation add the rad to the top edge? Just to prove the theory! I've got an enclosure for the V2 and because the reel's on top it makes it huge- I had to chop down the Ikea unit it sits on so that it would be low enough to go under the wall cabinets in the utility room! We've got an Ultimaker 2+ at work and it's really small and compact (head moves in both x and y on rails so the whole bed just moves up within it's footprint) and the material is just hanging off the back so the height isnt impacted beyond the bowden tube and the depth is only ~80mm deeper because of the reel.

? To be fair, Solidworks can sometimes be a bit picky about what edges can have a radius applied to it and that's sometimes linked to the radius you're trying to use. On a small part it won't let you use a big rad that might remove chunks/features of the model. Try small and then work up towards what you actually want. The S1 looks like a good machine. I got an E3 V2 for home a couple of years and have modifed it a bit to include some of the features that come as standard on the S1. Enjoy playing!

Can you not just add a fillet/radius to the upper edge? Edit: In Solidworks:

We're actually on a 10 year fixed rate that isn't due to finish until October 2025, based on a 15 year term I think (so weren't due to finish paying off until ~2030 or so (20 years after buying)) so we've just sacked it off proper early. That was at 3.24% though so worth it in the long run. I'm not brave enough to invest money so the higher savings rates on normal saving accounts has come at a reasonable time. The plan is to look at putting additional contributions into my defined contributions pension now, which can be taken once I'm 55 and is invested in various places to earn better returns long term (in theory!). Because the contributions come off pre tax and NI it seems more efficient to stick money in that for the long term and save elsewhere to have access for toys/holidays/uni for kids etc... I'm such an old man

I hadn't really thought about overpayments much until I did a quick calculator thing online (Halifax have a nice simple one: https://www.halifax.co.uk/mortgages/mortgage-calculator/overpayment-calculator.html) and we came to the decision that it really made sense to pay what we could (within the limits so you don't get stung by fees/charges) to save literally thousands in interest and also knock it on the head early. We've been in the very fortunate position that by doing this it hasn't hugely impacted the rest of our finances or stopped us doing anything we would've otherwise but it's definitely worth looking at if you haven't already. To start with we would only chuck in an extra £50 a month but as things changed and we settled into it we started doing £250 then £500 while we could. The added benefit is that with the overpayments 'banked' you have the option in many cases to take payment breaks or reduce your monthly repayment (rather than reduce the term) so it does give flexibility. More recently we've been in the position to max out our overpayments at the beginning of each mortgage year so that we've been chucking £13k on in one go which then helps the interest for the rest of the term.

So close! Interest is now just over 1p per day! The flip side of this of couse is the slightly eye watering: which is from the past 7.5 years.

Sounds like F1 for the past 15 years...

Ultimately we screwed ourselves over going fixed but there you go. We bought ours in 2010 which wasn't long after the global financial meltdown and although interest rates were low we assumed that things would bounce back and having the security of a 5 year fix made sense to us. At the end of that we signed up to the 10 year deal, at a good chunk better rate, but still expected rates to rise and in fact they literally have only just started that in the past 6 months when we're about to finish paying off. If we'd just stuck with a tracker or even short term fixed we'd have paid thousands less in interest but that's now history and overall I'd probably do the same thing just for the definite stability it provided. I think the way I/we look at property is reasonably different to a lot of people though too as we went straight in and bought a 3 bed semi, have added an extra 2 bedrooms by extending and expect to be here at least until the kids (currently 8 and 10) leave home, more likely a chunk longer. I know a lot of people get into the habit of moving reasonably regularly and climbing the ladder but it just doesn't interest us. In theory we could sell this place for £450k, stick that down as a deposit and start a new 20 year mortgage to buy a £1M property but we simply don't want or need something like that. Having a home which is pretty much perfect for what we need which hopefully will just continue to slowly be worth more as time goes on but being financially very secure with far greater saving potential than ever before seems like a good place to be.

Overpayments are your friend!! Every little helps and does make a difference to either reduce the term you're paying for (what we've done) or reduce your monthly payment moving forwards. We'll have knocked ours on the head in 12 and a half years and I'm going to be very (very) happy to be mortgage free at 40!

Ah fair enough. Yeah I think when we were remortgaging the LTV was below 70% so we didn't have any restrictions on what 'products' were available to us. As I understand it having a better LTV opens the doors for the lower rates. The actual house value doesn't change what you pay but having a favourable LTV will help the rates which has the knockon effect of reducing your monthly repayments.

Does that change anything for the renewal? I'm sure when we moved from our 5 year fix with Virgin to a 10 year fix with Nationwide that it just came down to how much we still owed on the original mortgage and that was it- no updated valuations were mentioned. We're now tantalisingly close to paying it off- Currently owe about £2k and will have all but paid it off at the start of March with one final £150 payment in April. Not quite counting down the days but not far off! I have a spreadsheet .

I finally bit the bullet and have used our Cyclescheme... to buy a gravel bike of all things!! I'm part of a sponsored cycle thing supporting Alex Lewis and the handcycle round Salisbury Plain in March. We had a bit of a dry-run the other day, the man behind it riding an 8kg £12k Specialized gravel bike and me on my 2015 Whyte T130 weighing about 15kg and running 2.6 knobblies... He won! I've put an order on a £2k Ribble Gravel Al which they've got on sale at £1500 at the mo and I will hopefully get for about £950 with the Cyclescheme savings. Weirdly looking forward to getting it which is really quite worrying!

Was that one of the Advent Calendar days? Congrats whatever!

I managed to blag two of those off of Amazon Vine but haven't done anything with them yet. Good to know they do the job though!!

RWilly's spacial awareness is just inhuman. Some of the stuff he pulls on an airbag and can then transfer to resi etc. is insane. He's definitely something else!