All Activity

They could have solved this with education - if everybody thought about the environment, their fuel bills, comfort etc - all those things would happen naturally. In essence you either have the ideological state apparatus or the repressive state apparatus you can avoid either with the other.

Oh yes!. Well as you know you get good days and bad days! Mines been epic. Massive speed increases. Local llm "whats the capital of france?" working. Current affairs " whats the news?" gives headlines and options verbally if you want more detail. Will add history so you can have a conversation. Gained a further 82ms saving on STT (I know, I know !). Honestly now its so fast to respond to even complex stuff I'm well impressed. Started on timers like Alexa (a SWMBO requirement!). TBH if I coded this by hand that's weeks of work for sure. But of course I never look at the code! G n T time now!

Bastard! 😉 I'm having a shit day today. Realised it had left a glaring security hole in the Auth model. Decided to fix it, but instead has broken the (expletive deleted)ing app. It fixed part of the problem and then tried to tell me the rest wasn't important until I told it that I could grab an id and post it into the browser in a string and it would expose the entire records for a user, even when not logged it! What was supposed to be a couple of hours at most has ended up taking all bloody day and I'm still trying to explain to it what's going wrong and it still misunderstands me! Thank (expletive deleted) I'm on a dev server.

Chat has been SO good today I might give it a promotion - nothing to do with me spending 90 quid......

I have been saying for decades that for every rule we have that says we must6 do something, we have another rule that says we cannot do it.

Saved another 250ms ... yeah I know. I'll stop now! sad.

For anyone who hasn't seen it, pumped screed is incredibly fluid and that's why we have to seal all possible escape routes. The reality is that, although it looks almost like water, this material is mostly cementitious and gritty. Nearly all the water is absorbed in chemical reaction and it is solid-ish within an hour. But any gap can be disastrous. This went well. A few dribbles of water emerged through plasterboard below but that's OK. 20260618_142707_1.mp4

Agree with all of that. My issues with the planning process also extend to the fact that almost every part of it is designed to put you off. If you're doing a new build - it has to be in line with the local architecture which is usually dated stock from the 30s, 50s, 80s etc. Massively more energy efficient, have insulation, triple glazing, get loads of surveys done incl noise, arboricultural, ecological, light, bat etc. Pay through the nose to have your electricity and gas to a temporary spot and then pay again to have it moved back again. Have to provide a spreadsheet which lists what taps/fittings you're using in each room and their flow rates. The mind boggles! It's almost as if people sit in a room and think of ways they can exert their control over each part of the build process and stick on a load of regulations - which drives prices up and self builders out. I fail to see the real connection between politicians claiming we need to build more houses, but then the regulations being designed in a way that stops people from doing that exact same thing.

My analysis is a bit different - planning is a part of it but the bigger part is developers interests and councils not being allowed to build council housing. The former is a problem because they want to keep prices high and maximise profit so they have no interest in mass production as it rises the supply side and so reduces prices. The councils not building for social rent, I get that housing associations are supposed to do this but funding constraints meam means that they are actually just developers, is a problem because it forces private rental and that removes housing stock from purchasers and so pushes up prices - which just closes the loop again. So sorting planning needs much more out of the box thinking alongside it.

My post was confusing. I have an insulated garage floor slab, but I wasn’t planning on plaster-boarding or fixing skirting board. Rather than having a 25mm slice of PIR showing, I could either omit the upstand, but that sort of defeats the point of insulating the slab.

No floor covering

I need a drive way creating in North hertfordshire # remove 350mm of crush and take it 30 metres to behind the house. no need for muckaway. # install a SUDs compliant surface of about 150 square metres. Either using permeable construction or slope and run off via acco drains to already installed huge soakaway. What would be a reasonable price for this please.

I was in the W Highlands recently and discussed this with a local. There are areas where many people have become alone and isolated. Apparently a large proportion / majority from England. They retire to having affordable housing with amazing locations. In time, things change and the remoteness changes from idyll to loneliness and vulnerability. 20 miles to town was a perk and becomes a sentence. The weekly Morrisons delivery may be the only contact. The original homes are usually in at least clusters for community. New ones are isolated with perfect views. Hence communities ask for volunteer drivers and befrienders. I saw several notices on the lines of this.... a nerdy photo: you can tell it was on my mind.

I don't know if it was much reported outwith the area. 2 weeks ago, a large area of Kent had the water turned off because the pipe system couldn't cope with demand. Yes there is a huge shortage of water, as reservoirs have not replenished. The aquifer will likely never be replenished until use is drastically reduced. But this was the pipework not coping with use on a hot day. I forecast this becomes the norm. Yet new developments are approved on the same system.

Likewise, it is not a priority for me until it gets too warm and the boss reminds me that I told her ‘a heat pump can do cooling as well you know’. I want to try it with the UFH so don’t need to do any plumbing. Just need the confidence to play around with the settings, guess I am unlikely to break it or change anything which isn’t reversible …

My personal thought is that, instead of new build 'anywhere' projects of 100+ houses in one spot, we should be sprinkling the new builds across multiple sites and limiting development to 5-6 houses at any one location. This has a number of benefits: It stops Nimby-ism which is probably the biggest blocker to new developments It reduces pressure on specific sites - most transport/school/doctor/utility systems can cope with 5-6 new houses without too much additional work - they can't with 100+ Small developments are more likely to create neighbourhoods and communities; modern anywhere projects rarely do. Done properly this could create a positive response to new housing in so many ways.

Governments provide jack shit as we’ve seen over the last 20 years so it’s not really something to bank upon going into the future.

I think it is about 13% urbanisation, of which 3% is housing. Most of the UK is green. Even zooming it on the busy bit shows a lot of green. And zooming in on my bit shows that there is more rock than houses. Cornwall could have 1 million houses built on it and it would not change the physical character of the place.

For those chilling, how do you feel with the increased relative humidity? Copilot's calculation gives me 85-90% RH internally if I cool my house to 21 degrees on mid 30 degree days, using only sensible cooling i.e. above dew point. Dehumidifiers? Guess that's a big win for standard air conditioning systems which have dehumidification modes.

WOW oh wow! Never really looked into how a LLM generates its output i.e. the cost. Assumed its just generated at the end but it isn't. It's generated as it goes ! So each token passes through the model. Never thought of that! SO! 5 seconds with a moderately complex phrase after json compaction is now 1.3 seconds! BOOM! WHO"S THE MOFO!

The bottom of each post sits in a bracket like this, bolted down into the concrete. And at the top, each post attaches to the structure with 4 coach screws through into the post, and then two M12 threaded rods drilled right through with a nut and big washer each side. Now I know the height is okay the tops of the posts will now be cut off.

Not as such - I'm no good at plumbing so it's been bottom of my list. I now have three fan coils, but have been failing to find the time to replumb the system in order to put the valve gear in a place so I can bypass the buffer tank, and then install them. I have the valves and a plan for how to wire them (can do electrics!) but haven't started the plumbing yet. It is not helped by the system being full of ethylene glycol (Grant's official antifreeze fluid) which is very toxic to cats and ours is very interested in it any time there is a spill (despite it having bittering agent in it, as I discovered when I got a face full). That means any drip is a full scale chemical weapons cleanup. So I've had to take a side quest of flushing out the system and fitting a water filter so I can use filtered tap water instead. That's how the German VDI 2035 standard does it instead of using glycol. According to Heat Geek tap water in a pressurised system is almost there - our tap water is too hard so the filter has deionisation resin to take it down from TDS=300ppm to TDS=4ppm (according to my cheap meter). Once I've finished flushing out, the plan for this summer is to disconnect one of the radiators and replace with a fan coil to use for the summer and see how it goes. The ASHP pipework is not well insulated enough to avoid condensation drips, so either running above dew point is sufficient or I'll need to redo all of the ASHP pipework with proper insulation - the installer put some of this behind the cylinder where it's inaccessible so it'll likely need a new run. That makes it a much bigger job than I would like and I'll probably have to get someone in to do it - but really need to nail down exactly what I want first before I ask them to quote.

I meant beam to post.

That's what governments are for. Cities are much more efficient than spread out houses.

Dot & Dab brings the plasterboard off the blockwork anyway. 12.5mm plasterboard with 2.5mm skim = 15mm. Dabbed off the wall by 10mm and the front of your finished wall is circa 25mm off the block work. Why no skirting board ? People do use flush skirting with shadow gaps and stuff - is that what you mean ? We have a 25mm upstand but levelling compound and flooring will cover it. Laying the top part of the screed to cover the top of the upstand could be one answer. Yes creates a small thermal bridge between floor and wall but does this matter much ?