I really want James Hoffmann to watch me make my morning coffee, with a 10yr old basic espresso machine that was only bought because it was on sale, and has had 100s of citric acid flushes virtually dissolve the inner workings.

I want to see him wince as I load a full hopper of Costco’s ‘cheapest this week’ beans into my grinder, that was on sale and kinda matched the colour of the coffee machine, and grind them at the medium setting because meh!

Use the double ended plastic scoop and tamp which came with the machine, to load it sloppily into the basket with a single high pressure hole underneath. Press the go button with the water that’s been sitting the machine since Friday.

Finally I let the water just run through the coffee as I blast past espresso and lungo to make a full mug with just enough room for a splash of milk, and maybe some flavoured syrup.

Perfect!

Instead of foreigners, the poor , or the sick and disabled, this time the problem is the southerners, the ‘London elites which have ignored the north for too long’.

I was hoping for something positive, but everything the UK government touches is self serving and toxic, and it’s not going to stop any time soon.

Apple released updates for all iOS devices back to the iPhone 5s, that phone is more than 12 years old and is still getting security updates.

I’m on the iPhone X and trying to buy European for my next phone, especially with Tim Apple sucking up to Trump, but 12 years of security updates is impressive commitment.

In the UK a 14-Day cooling off period applies where you have the right to cancel most online, phone, or mail order purchases of goods and services.

With this in mind I’d like to cancel my subscription to 2026, and revert to an earlier version. I hoped the new version would come with improvements over 2025, but the same problems seem to exist and the price of the optional extras have just gone up.

I think you will find I am still within the 14 day window, thank you for your attention to this matter.

If I switched on the news tomorrow and the headline is “The USA has bombed…”, any country or continent could be at the end of that sentence and my surprise (or lack of) would be the same.

The USA is being run with no guard rails by a deranged dictator, backed up by white supremacists and corporate robber barons. Any country is fair game including NATO members, in response the UK should switch to a war economy.

Just got the AirPod Pro 3 and just like a previous poster said they sound like shit, I mainly listen to podcasts and unlike my 1st gen APPs it sounds like someone speaking into a badly setup microphone, rather than just someone speaking to you.

I tried to update the firmware from 8A357 to 8B25 but found out that for some reason they need iOS 26 for the firmware update to work, so me with my iPX with the latest available iOS 16 is just SOL.

Why when all AirPods need to update firmware via an iOS/MacOS device do they need the latest version? Planned obsolescence is the only logical conclusion.

The icons in the quick look charge indicator don’t tell you which is the Left, Right or even the case!!! (Picture)

Finally when I walk more than 3m away from my laptop the pods screech in my ear as lose Bluetooth connection and refuse to reconnect automatically. I’m sure all of these issues are fixed in firmware updates but apparently I need to spend 4 hours traveling to and waiting for a Genius Bar appointment to update the firmware.

Looks like these are going back and I’ll be looking for a different option for earphones, and maybe it’s time to move away from iPhone too.

This will kill EV adoption, just to put it into perspective this is the equivalent of an average ICE car (38.6MPG) having 25.5p added per litre of fuel, in a single budget.

The even more ridiculous thing is plug in hybrids are 1.5p per mile, so people with 80+ miles of range in their Golfs etc. will pay half price, even though they are needlessly dragging around an internal combustion engine for 99% of their journeys.

Should I wait for 22.2 or just install 22.1? I think I’m going to go for the cinnamon desktop and install using a Rufus USB on my ~ 9 year old Dell XPS 13 9350.

I’ve been waiting a while as I thought the next version would be out by now, are there any resources for finding out how close the next version is?

Is it easy to upgrade between .x versions?

https://youtube.com/shorts/JzD1MUJU7qg

In 2017 my employer gave me £1150 to buy my own iPhone X for work. I knew I would not be working there forever and decided to start saving £10 per month in monthly saver accounts, 2 years later I left the company and they didn’t want the phone back as it was too old. Yay!

I continued saving every month in accounts ranging from ~4-8% interest and my most recent monthly saver just matured and my fund has reached £1121.64

I’ve also been really savvy with my mobile plans over the last 5 years, my current monthly charge is £6 but has been as low as £3, and has absolutely been less than £5 on average. So my mobile phone costs have been on average £15pm.

The iPhoneX is not getting software/security updates anymore, but there is nothing really worth having in this years upgrade:

• 120hz vs. 120hz with ProMotion
• MagSafe - meh!
• 12MP vs. 48MP camera with better low light
• 4G vs. 5G - but HD video streaming works perfectly on 4G.

Do I keep saving and ignore the upgrade again? Or am I silly for running a phone with no security updates because I’m not that interested in a better camera?

Either way I thought my little-by-little saving to get something nice and a little extravagant was worth sharing. The number of people with £50-£60 phone contracts is crazy.

Just look at her, you know she was planning something.