Coming up later in 2016

To the many many people who stop by everyday, welcome and thank you!

To those of you who might hang around and revisit these pages I'd like to just go over a few items I'm looking at performing over the next few weeks.

Firstly, I have a big technical post about setting up Trac with Subversion, including securing it, hosting it on a virtual server and really getting you up and running with project tracking and management with Trac, from total scratch.

Secondly, I have a big of Dungeons and Dragons stuff to cover, both a bit about the official rules and the in-house rules we play with, and there will hopefully be a live stream with my niece whom is D&D crazy, and even made me a D&D based birthday card, which we will play through together.

Third, electronics, I'm probably not going to get to do the PS/2 connector project previously listed, but as the autumn winds in and and the winter comes across, I hope to get back to the DCC layout stuff, not least because I have a tonne of stuff laying around for it and two part soldered projects ready to go.

Fourth, a bit of computer history, I have a manual (just a manual) for a VAX VMS, I'd like to do some coverage of that for you all to geek out over.

Fifth and perhaps finally, gaming, I'm going to be looking back at Elite Dangerous I think, with the release and massive price tag on "No Mans Sky", I'm going to go back and see if Elite has done anything more interesting.  I've also been looking at buying Squad, the successor to "project reality" and going into that.  Our good friend Chaplain has invited us to play some Arma 3 time with him, and I'm playing World of Warships still.  So we'll go through all of that.

Sixth, so yes, fifth was not final, programming.  I'm looking at a project internal to myself, something I want to actually create, manage & sell.  So we'll see how that goes, but understandably there's not a lot I can share.  You will also find me touting myself for business at www.freelancer.co.uk, and as such I hope to make up some of the wads of cash we've been spending since the wife's surgery.

I'll speak to you all soon, I may start to make a mid-month post like this for you all to catch up on, but we'll see how things pan out.

In the mean time, the pony has a new home, and she has a new friend meet our Gerty and Magic once again:

General Update -Elite Dangerous - Houses - Money

So it's been a long couple of months, our Christmas was severely cut back, and we've been waiting for the house sale to go through... It should complete Friday... So today I'm busy taking my excess hours off of work and going down to give the place a once over and then to the estate agents to hand in the keys ready for hand-over.

It has been a rather stressful time, not least with the ex-tenants we had being chased from pillar to post for debts they've racked up.. The best one being the illegal sub-tenant being prosecuted by Derbyshire City Council over a parking ticket... She appeared in court - how they summonsed her I don't know... But she still put our property address down as her own, in court, in early January 2015, despite not living in our property since October 2014...

I'd call that perjury, but I'd also call it incompetence by the court because the wife and I are on the council tax & electoral register, it'd have taken minutes to discover this and shows they didn't confirm the guilty party's address!

Needless to say, when the notice of impending removal of goods arrived, the wife ripped it open and nearly fainted, I've sent them a letter now, but we're still expecting burly blokes with bad attitudes to arrive, so the wife has her ID out and ready to show them through the window.

With all this going on Money has been an issue, hopefully tomorrow it gets a lot freer as the house funds get cleared to us, my plan is to wire cat6 shielded network wire into the upstairs and remove buy new springs for my X45 control stick.  All to aid my enjoyment of Elite, as well as WarThunder and some other games.

I've not been able to play any simulator battles in WarThunder for a while, because the spring on my stick is now as slack as a wizard sleeve, so straight and level flight is almost impossible, accurate gunnery is impossible.

I'm looking at ordering a set of springs from a place in Redditch and have a friend; a Redditch native; bring them up.

Coding wise, as you can see I've got the OCR tools working, last night was the first time I didn't do any collecting of data, I sat down with the 5 systems I had done, and I just used the tool (as shown in yesterdays post - pt6)... It was amazingly good, I tweaked one trade I had been taking Gold about for $45,000 profit (in my cobra with 36 cargo), but found I had a palladium source and consumer upping that first leg to $49,500.

The return leg I had been carrying Liquor for around £11,000 profit, I upped that to $18,500 by swapping to Power Generators.

Rinse and repeat, the viewer tool as you see in the previous screen shot worked great, a lot better than the first revision I'd put together.

Running the game in a window (though full screen border less) also gave better interactive results, I could have the collector running, and then slide the mouse out the client to use the data.  I need to add a refresh - or even an auto-refresh which detects file changes as data is collected - but for now this suits my purposes.  And it achieved results I earned a little over $800,000 credits trading in the short two hours I had to play last night... Taking me from Peddler to Dealer ranking to boot.

I am looking for testers, or backers, if you want to help, or offer advice, or offer support (in the form of servers for data collection or just money to pay for the hosting I think we'll need, just drop me a line in the comments below).

Tech Pricing - The UK Getting A Bad Deal - International Shipping & UK Import

With the news today that Samsung is not going to be selling laptops in Europe, I wondered about how in the future we here in the UK would be able to get our grubby mitts on their Chromebook offering, and other hardware.

Whilst trawling the interwebs, I became more and more infuriated, now this is a matter I've seen before, but I've largely ignored it.  But with the purse strings needing tightening here at home I've had to think carefully about hardware changes and upgrades, but this problem I'm going to put forward just pisses me right off...

International Pricing... Specifically with technology kit, I was watching a review from Linus Tech Tips, and he was telling how this kit he had costs less than $1000 US... That's £612.89 at the time of writing, not a bad price for the overall package he was touting... However, paying for the exact same kit, from supposedly the same suppliers here in the UK came to a wallet busting, mind numbing, pay-packet stealing rip off price of £1014.58, over a thousand pounds, which is $1655.41... A six hundred dollar price hike...

I could pay for the same goods in the US, pay shipping and import and not end up paying as much!

Here's an example, two Amazon pages, both showing the same item (honest it is the same graphics card, just different pictures)..

£330 to $339... It almost seems as if they've taken the dollar price and slapped a pound sign in front of it, this clearly aids them, in this particular case the card comes to £208 if we convert the dollar price to sterling... £208 for the latest graphics card seems a lot better than £330... So where does the additional £110 come from?

Well, I looked at "Value Added Tax" in both the UK and US... I wondered if Amazon UK was having to add more, and it seems not, most "General Sales Taxes" in the US are calculated per state, and start around 23.5%, so that's more than the VAT 20% rate in the UK... So the US is paying a lower price even after tax.

Okay, what about shipping?... Are there significant shipping costs to bring goods into the UK?... Nope, same container ships burning the same fuel... And then once in the UK they are moved around on a single tank of fuel, unlike the US where deliveries are quite literally transcontinental!

So, if the sellers of goods are not paying more to deliver, and we in the UK are not paying more in TAX where does this £110 hike come from?...

It plainly seems to be because of greed, I can't fathom out a single other reason for the difference, all the goods I've looked at are made in the far east, it's just as far to sail them across the Pacific or around to Britain... It's less distance from any port to Amazon warehouses in the UK because we're such a small island, even if we look at Jersey, Guernsey, the Isle of Mann they all stack up to be less distance than some of the Amazon Warehouses from Manhattan!

All in all, it makes my blood boil... 

So, what if I just bought the goods from the US?.. Well, apparently here in the UK I'd then have to pay Tax again, so I've paid for the goods taxed in the US, then to even bring them into the country I have to pay again?...

http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/customs/post/buying.htm

This, this just makes no sense, in this modern age of the internet and it is full of holes, I can go onto Steam log into a US server and order then download a game, paying for it once in one place, I can do this with Music, with Films, with Streaming services, with Porn, with News, with almost anything on the screen... But I have to pay tax to import the screen, and pay for the imported delivery service, and pay to then get it off of the customs chaps who poke and prod it?... Mental.

And I think just a way for the exchequer to keep an eye on what I'm doing, and to skim off the top.

So, how much do I pay?... Well, say it's this £208 graphics card... This comes under the "Non-EU Country" and its "All Other Goods", and I have to pay "Customs Duty on goods with a value that exceeds £135" and "import VAT on goods with a value that exceeds £15"

So how much are these two costs?

Well, the HMRC website doesn't want to give you clear straight forward figures, they give calculators for VAT deadlines, link upon link to registering for VAT.... But never do they give a figure...

So you go to the internet to find out, and you're met with searches which ironically relate to overseas imports from overseas countries... For example this: http://www.dutycalculator.com/popular-import-items/import-duty-and-taxes-for-graphics-card/ it has a very nifty calculator, so I stuck the $339 price in, selected $50 shipping and $20 insurance, so this is a total of $409, which is still only £250, so we're still making a saving on our price even importing the item...

The calculation site gives us zero duty, and 20% VAT, to be added, this brings the price to £300... Still a £30 saving.

It's a lot of faffing about, but it's a possible saving... My question now is, who wants to try this out?

Where the fuck is our £180?

The wife and I have been saving a little bit of money each week, all year, so we can buy the kids (nieces and nephews) a nice Christmas gift, this cash was kept in an envelope at the in-laws, and the wife went to collect this on Friday.

Now, she remembers picking it up and counting it, then thinks she put it down again... Somewhere, or in a pocket, or whatever...

Yes, you get the picture, it has been lost.

So, no Christmas pressure off of our wallets, oh no, utter and total waste, and not only that, but the wife has lost it, I'm pretty sure she dropped it outside here in the street between the car and the front door, and some lucky bastard has walked off with a £180 Christmas bonus...

But the wife of course, blamed me... Now, I admit I just asked her to think about where she'd last seen it, what pocket it was in, what she was wearing... so you know, I was being unreasonable, asking her to THINK!... And then of course, asking her to do things a set way, like... Keep money in your purse... or better yet, as I originally suggested keep the fucking money in the savings account in the bank so it can't get lost!

Oh no, all my fault, my problem, mine to sort... So annoyed, so utterly and fucking annoyed with it all.