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Do you prefer the extended summer thread format? This poll is closed. |
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<RANT> This ICO thing is a government scam to get £40 p.a. Just had a letter saying our residents' management co probably ought to register. Well I went through their 'tool' and no we don't. Thanks in main part because our 85 year old treasurer keeps individual info re service charge payments in a notebook not on computer, and she picks that up off a paper bank statement. If I did it and put them on a spreadsheet, we would be in for the £40. It might not seem a lot, but every bloody thing I do these days the ICO wants £40. In our block, all the lessees are ALSO members of the management co which is the freeholder. (Not a common situation! This was set up in 1986 or whenever the block was built.) We get service charges in, we pay the common parts electric, cleaning, garden, roof yadayada. We are our own customer. I have a letter from them saying that even if the ONLY thing you have on your website is an email address for potential clients to contact you and you don't do anything like mailshots, newsletters, 'download our free gift in exchange for giving me your email' etc), then you have to pay up. There must be thousands and thousands of freelancers, sole traders, small businesses, who are completely unaware that they have to fork out £40 a year for this government authorized scam. It might not sound much, but if you are a struggling business who has had f*k all customers in the past 18 months (the case round here where not only was there covid to cope with but in the 3 months preceding that extensive flooding blocking main access routes, and causing destruction of stock and property.) </RANT>
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Jun 1, 2021 13:26
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forkboy84 posted:Away from current affairs, what's the rule on going to the doctors for non-vaccine related purposes? Coz for years now I've had a worthless sense of smell & problems breathing through my nose & sinus related headaches but it's mostly liveable with. But I've had a headache in the general area below/behind my right eye for a week now, Sudafed has done nothing to clear it up, & I'm suspicious I have a deviated septum related to dumb teenage poo poo (footballs in the face, a party trick of how far I could squash my nose against my cheek, very dumb) or whatever else is causing the sinus problems. Should I just endure until things get back to normal or is it entirely acceptable to go to the doctors for something which isn't urgent but is irritating? Contact your doc (or the clinic anyway!). I certainly have the impression from round here that the GPs are quite keen to get on with 'normal' problems. Maybe the GPs in this thread could confirm or deny if they read it! Things may never be normal again! I've been to do the doc with a couple of non-covid things that weren't urgent but might be cause for concern if unattended. (Photodamage from living in Cairo, swimming in the open air for 15-20 hours a week without sunscreen (sunscreen is for wimps haha), but dad and uncle both had skin cancers on their fizzogs so I thought it best to check.) I have a deviated nasal septum, I was born with it. Often get snuffles. I also had a headache where you said and problems in my eye and I finally realized it was from (a) wearing a face mask - it keeps getting in my eye so I have got a different shaped one now which is less of a problem and, also, (b) because wearing glasses irritates my face, when I'm alone and not on zoom, I shove a bit of tissue paper under the nose bridge and the fibres of the ripped edge also stick in my eye sometimes. ed: just realized what a lovely piccie of myself I am conjuring up here! You should see the portrait in my attic! Jaeluni Asjil fucked around with this message at 14:04 on Jun 1, 2021 |
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Jun 1, 2021 13:58
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.nm Jaeluni Asjil fucked around with this message at 14:25 on Jun 1, 2021 |
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Jun 1, 2021 14:21
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OwlFancier posted:You both should have PMs. I wasn't clear sorry, I meant without doxxing to 3rd party. Also, I'll delete my post too!
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Jun 1, 2021 14:23
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ThomasPaine posted:I genuinely feel so bad for people who were late teens/early twenties and had just gone to uni or whatever when this all hit. That's a huge chunk of some of the most important formative years of their life stolen from them. For some almost their entire uni experience has been from their bloody childhood bedrooms on Zoom. It's grim. Not to mention they've spent the whole time being gaslit by a bunch of a boomers who don't give a poo poo about them and wouldn't in a million years have made the same sacrifices had this been a disease that overwhelmingly killed young people and left the old alone. Not just boomers giving them poo poo. When the students in - was it Manchester? - were protesting about being LOCKED IN to their halls of residence during one of the covid lockdowns, one of my FB contacts (I'm getting hesitant to use the word 'friend' re some people these days!) posted about how they were the 'entitled' generation and how 'entitled' young people today felt. I don't actually think that running up debts of over £30k to go to uni when you have to have uni degrees these days to get a foot in the doorway at entry level in industries which only took O-levels in maths, english and a bit of cap-doffing to get into 50 years ago makes you 'entitled'
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Jun 1, 2021 16:15
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ThomasPaine posted:e: My partner's dad is an engineer and has told me at length about how his skills were in such demand when he entered the job market he was able to go back and forth between prospective employers and essentially make them bid on him, so he started off on an absurdly good salary. He's significantly more wealthy than my own parents and still pulls a lot of completely out of touch bullshit and I wonder how connected these things are. Reminds me of back in the day {{dooddly doo dooddly doo}} In my 20s I was a "Works Officer 1" grade in the NHS (London). I went to a national Works Officer conference about something or other 400 guys and 3 women kind of thing. Many of the guys there from the northern territories were WO1 grade and were former miners with a considerable amount of experience down 't pit or navy 'engineers' and were amazed that a mere slip of a thing, and a girl at that, was a WO1. (There's a lot of similarity between the tech skills required for mines, ships and hospitals - they have to be able to function 'self-contained' if necessary). They said that every WO job advertised oop north had hundreds of applicants. Meanwhile in London, I had demanded WO1 to accept the job they were offering me - there was no competition! I do have a fun anecdote about my boss getting HR to agree to it, but that would doxx me too much.
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Jun 1, 2021 17:00
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One of the big hurdles today in applying for jobs is so many industries rely on an online application giving no scope for a 'non-linear' career or 'double tracking' (working full-time in a job and doing part-time study and/or running a little sideline business which is THE thing that qualifies you for the job you're applying for!) and are limited by the extremely narrow thinking of whoever designed the online things. With a paper cv you can group things together eg X years in Industry A, Y years in Industry B, and the world where you can sit in the same office with the same colleagues for 10 years and have 8 different employers in the modern world once reorganisations, starting off as a temp or contractor etc are taken into account. (Narrator: that was 10 years of her working life, dear reader.) Also, as has been discussed in previous iterations of this thread several times, if you have a PhD or MScs/MAs and do not answer the 'what is your highest qualification' question truthfully, it's grounds for dismissal*. I might not want to admit to having anything higher than O-levels (GCSE equivalents for the youngsters in the thread) on an application as I need to pay the rent/mortgage/buy boring stuff like food or bog roll. *People with PhDs except in very specific roles are really not welcome in job application land because most people haven't a clue what they are, are scared of having a clever clogs around, or think you are bound to be offered some super-high-paying job on a spaceship or something anytime now so don't bother giving you a job in the meantime.
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Jun 1, 2021 18:39
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goddamnedtwisto posted:
What on earth went wrong for them not to offer you the job?! Did you neglect to fill in the blank side of A4 designed to be filled with 'why this company should employ you'? (I have known people being interviewed for their own jobs in reorgs who didn't bother filling in half the white space because they thought it was where you BS and the interviewers who had been working with you for several years would know it!)
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Jun 1, 2021 21:22
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goddamnedtwisto posted:No money in bank jobs any more. Like literally, banks keep so little cash on hand these days thanks to plastic that you'd never be able to even make back the money on the stockings over your head, let alone the shootah. No, the bank job has gone the way of the payroll blag and the cash-in-transit robbery, victims of modern society, leaving the traditional Cockney way of life untenable and forcing us down the Trail of Tears that is the District Line to the reservations at Upminster. One of my brothers put so much effort into avoiding work that he would have been better off taking any kind of job. My sister who thinks all employers are stupid and refused to do anything they asked, no matter how innocuous and in line with the job spec, managed to pull a (comparatively) rich bloke and marry him. (Getting fired was part of her strategy for working 'the system' and getting the state to pay for her existence.)
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Jun 1, 2021 22:08
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Gruffalo Soldier posted:I've been faffing about with some javascript graph libraries and I built this quick and dirty breakdown of vote share in UK elections 1918-2019 as a test. Nice graphs  Any idea whether the number of eligible electors stayed roughly constant over the last few years? I wonder how much the change in electoral registation requirements might have affected the number of those eligible to vote. Is the figure of actual numbers rather than % available?
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Jun 1, 2021 22:53
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happyhippy posted:My three street town used to have 3 banks, and 2 ATM machines. Apparently Link are starting to provide free to use ATM machines in local towns if there is local demand. Maybe you can post in a local facebook group to get people to campaign for it? https://www.accesstopaymentsystems.co.uk/what-payment-scheme/link-atm-scheme
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Jun 1, 2021 23:02
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Comrade Fakename posted:My boiler’s on its last legs and really needs to be replaced. Because of you know, the whole thing, I was thinking of changing to an electric boiler from a gas one. Anyone know the logistics of that, or if it’s a terrible idea or anything? Gas boilers are going to be banned - in new builds from 2025 and I seem to remember it's 2035 for all gas boilers? (I might be wrong about that though!) So if you live in your own home, you may as well go electric now if you have to change it anyway. I've no idea about how easy that is to do though.
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Jun 2, 2021 02:16
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stev posted:I feel like there has to be a huge number of over 70s who just have no contact with anyone and no way of getting to a vaccination centre even if they wanted to. Not just over 70s! If you don't have family or friends close by, live in the styx, don't drive, and the centres or even GP surgeries are not within reasonable walking distance, and public transport doesn't go near (and eg round here, public transport which was crappy anyway has been slashed to pieces even more), then it could be difficult. Fortunately, my sister is driving me tomorrow for my 2nd jab else I would have to fork out £25 for a taxi* which is a special deal (and in fact may not still be on offer!) - normally it would be almost £100 return by taxi and impossible to get there and back in a day. Not only that, but the only GP surgery doing it locally is ALSO 10 miles away and going by bus makes it literally a whole day out because the bus only goes every 2 or 4 hours depending if it is a school day and the last bus back is about 5pm. If you're lucky. Some last buses are around 330pm. *I could pay that if I had to, but there are a lot of people that would find that very difficult. Ed: and also, there aren't that many taxis and you can wait 3 hours or more to be able to get one. Jaeluni Asjil fucked around with this message at 16:19 on Jun 2, 2021 |
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Jun 2, 2021 16:16
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JeremoudCorbynejad posted:Lol Virgin Media has merged with O2. I wonder what bag of absolute poo poo customer service this will unleash. As long as phone calls and texts are unaffected. I don't use O2 for anything else. Though I suspect that they may force me onto a 'contract' instead of sticking to PAYG. Why should I want a contract when I currently only have to load £10 p.a. on my PAYG? Phone calls that I think will take more than 5 mins I use skype calling for (the breakeven point is approx 5 mins), and for most of my friends and family I use various internet messengers. (I've a couple of friends WITH internet who refuse point blank to do that so even though we could make 'free' calls then (as in we're paying for the internet anyway), I end up having to pay for the call as they inevitably call me in the 2% of the day that my phone is not at my side so I have to return the call.  Jaeluni Asjil fucked around with this message at 17:43 on Jun 2, 2021 |
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Jun 2, 2021 17:40
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goddamnedtwisto posted:Yes, but you have to cancel your original appointment with no real way of knowing if there are closer slots, which adds a certain frisson to things. Don't know where he is, but this is going on in Bristol: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/02/expert-expresses-fears-over-covid-outbreaks-at-bristol-schools quote:...
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Jun 2, 2021 21:52
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Kids being failed by the government again. (Mind you, I'm not totally sure what 'catching up' means - catching up with who or what?) https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/sir-kevan-collins-resigns-schools-b1858441.html quote:Boris Johnson has been dealt a major blow as the schools’ coronavirus catch-up tsar quit his post in protest at a funding package he described as falling “far short of what is needed” to aid the pandemic recovery.
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Jun 2, 2021 22:54
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TACD posted:Well this explains why I thought I had two NHS numbers I still remember my old format one off by heart, but have never managed to remember the new one! quote:Hopefully they miss out on simultaneous equations, I can’t think of a more useless thing I got taught at school. I've used those a lot in my working life, and lots of other maths things. I think 'scripture', applique and french knots were 3 of the most useless things I got taught at school. Why learn all those fancy stitches when there are staplers and double-sided tape in the world? And as to learning The Magnificat and the Nunc Dimmitis etc off by heart - no use. Anyway, I couldn't do it, I've never been good at rote learning.
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Jun 3, 2021 00:32
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LOL https://twitter.com/Flora_Gibson_/status/1400089265372073988?s=20 https://twitter.com/MrJMetcalfe/status/1399852835068579846?s=20 Lots more here: https://twitter.com/search?q=%23LifeStories%20keir&src=typeahead_click Jaeluni Asjil fucked around with this message at 01:00 on Jun 3, 2021 |
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Jun 3, 2021 00:58
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JeremoudCorbynejad posted:It literally came up in a leader's debate during an election a few years ago when an audience member said they turned down a payrise because of tax brackets AND half the audience loving clapped them AND the debate moderator didn't correct them AND none of the god drat political leaders even loving picked up on it for fucks sake Problem is, our political leaders are NO BETTER at 'everyday maths' than regular people. I know this from working with a former MP who is as clueless as most of the rest of the population on basic math, percentages, tax bands and so on. I'm of the opinion that anyone entering parliament should have a few weeks induction course on fundamentals of economics, sociology, and operation of the state. They're making decisions on these things all the time but half the time have no idea what the impact will be. That's why most of them just do what the whip says because actually they are clueless about what is going on. It's only 'troublemakers' like Jezza who look into things. I remember the former MP telling me that there was a hard core of around 40MPs - from both sides - who were 'troublemakers' because they never voted without knowing what they were voting for (and he told it like that was a bad thing). Ed: also teachers are pretty much the same as regular people in their knowledge of tax stuff. Jaeluni Asjil fucked around with this message at 11:12 on Jun 3, 2021 |
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Jun 3, 2021 11:05
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thespaceinvader posted:WHy are they silly? One of the schools I went to had a 'flat'. Girls (it was a girls' comprehensive school for forces brats) in the lower streams of the 4th & 5th year (Year 10 & 11 in the new money) had to spend 3 days in the flat including preparing meals, cleaning, and a toy crying baby to look after.
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Jun 3, 2021 11:15
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One thing about rounds - when I've been really skint I've said 'I'll just buy my own' (because anyway, I simply do not drink at the speed of everyone else - whether it's lager before I had to give up booze or orange squash) people seem to get really resentful about it. And also the guys would mostly drink expensive pints of Old Buggers 4X Real Ale, most of the gals some sort of disgusting vinegar called Dry White Wine* (eg chardonnay) at £5 a glass, and I'd be nursing a Bitter Lemon (because that was the only non-alcoholic drink available at the time). And when did Presecco become a thing? When I moved to Cairo back in the mid owties, it didn't exist (in the UK I mean). When I came back 6 years ago, suddenly it was the thing everyone drank! A good thing about Egypt was the ready availability of zero alcohol beer. (Birrell and another I've forgotten what.) Sometimes you want a 'savoury' drink, not juice which is all sugar. *my family were the ones sneakily buying liebfraumilch when I were a nipper. Jaeluni Asjil fucked around with this message at 11:44 on Jun 3, 2021 |
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Jun 3, 2021 11:41
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Jedit posted:It's easy if you buy a flagship phone with unlimited data every year, because those contracts are £70 a month for 24 months. Also goes for meals out. I was out with the family (pre covid). I asked to be billed separately. I'm single. I don't drink - mostly I just have water because fruit juice is too sweet, pop gives me bellyache and I'm allergic to alcohol. My mum is widowed but she went in with the rest which included 3 couples + her. The couples put £40 in per couple. Of which a great part was the half of each couples who was necking copious pints of Cobra and in this instance the Cobra-neckers were also the highest paid in each couple so as they were paying the whole £40 per couple anyway, probably a reasonable deal for the COUPLE. My bill was £11.70. The others divided it equally. My mum who had *exactly* what I had ended up paying £20. She looked at my bill and said 'I think I'll do that next time'.
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Jun 3, 2021 12:34
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Bobstar posted:I was too unspecific, the "silliness" is the second half of the sentence: "why didn't they teach us X life skills instead of this useless trigonometry crap" - there is room for both. When I were a lassie at Welsh primary schools in the 1960s (including in the Valleys) we did French at school. Now the kids have to do Welsh. So for a lot of south Wales the teacher is one chapter ahead of the kids in the books.
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Jun 3, 2021 13:43
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Flayer posted:Christ, buying rounds is just a pleasant way to drink with mates. If you're counting the pennies to see who's getting more value or whatever just don't take part. Everyone hates the guy who makes it weird. Sometimes though you're not drinking with mates, it's a work thing. Where I used to work if you didn't go out and get plastered on a Thursday night you were "not a team player" and noted as such which had a knock on impact on perceptions during the working day.
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Jun 3, 2021 14:04
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Bobby Deluxe posted:99 please post the 'gently caress it' corner from your build. If I am round buying, I write down the order on a post it note. If there are more than 3 drinks I just can't remember them all. Some people get arsey about that too!
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Jun 3, 2021 14:24
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Meanwhile in real life: is there a tool which can crawl a website and save it? My relative has just had a new website built and there are a lot of errors on it which the developer made. The developer is now being really arsey about it and my fear is, knowing my relative, that it will get to the point where the developer will simply take the whole thing down. It has many pages, so visiting each one manually will take eternity and a lot of the links aren't working properly. It's not a wordpress site and I don't know what the developer used. Developer is also hosting it and relative's new domain name. (One reason I like to keep domain name separate from hosting! At the very least you can post a blog somewhere - not on a wordpress.org site as you can't repoint to those - and temporarily repoint the domain name in situations like this! Which are not rare, I've had to rescue a few peoples' sites from hosts who disappear or whatever.) Ed: I've saved it in the wayback machine for now but I don't think that crawls all the pages. Jaeluni Asjil fucked around with this message at 14:31 on Jun 3, 2021 |
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Jun 3, 2021 14:29
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sinky posted:wget is the command line tool for doing that, which works very well. Not sure about gui tools though. Thanks I'll try it later. Just off to get my Bill Gates 2nd chip inserted so assuming I'm alive to see it.
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Jun 3, 2021 14:44
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I posted on FB that I've had the Bill Gates and a friend said 'why bother, the govt says the vaccination won't protect you'. (a) I've not heard that, (b) I don't listen to the govt, if what I do coincides with their requests so be it, (c) as I replied, nothing is 100% protection (which seems to be the argument I've seen quite a few anti-vaxxers using - if it isn't 100% then it's all a lie. (This friend is not an anti-vaxxer but she occasionally has strange opinions.) Queue at Cwmbran stadium this afternoon was humungous. Like the fungus among us. Took 45 mins from arrival to getting jabbed.
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Jun 3, 2021 19:34
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Portugal is going 'amber' from 'green' and June 21st 'brakes off' for England in doubt.. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/03/concern-over-delta-covid-variant-tightens-borders-of-uk quote:UK tightens borders and travel rules as variants spark new alarm If anything is going to finally negatively affect Johnson, I think if June 21st doesn't happen, this might be it.
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Jun 3, 2021 22:19
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sinky posted:wget is the command line tool for doing that, which works very well. Not sure about gui tools though. NoneMoreNegative posted:WinHTTrack Website Copier is free and will download a full site for you, but it will convert dynamic pages to flat html files so you can browse locally, if you need the original files that are on the web (for evidences sake that a bad job was made) you'll need access to download the originals via FTP. I couldn't get either of those to download the sites past the index.html. I did find this though: cyotek which was really easy to use, GUI, and downloaded everything (and listed all the missing bits giving 404 errors) - css files the lot. Some of it seems to be where the developer has reorganized the site but left 'trailing empty folders' in there which have been picked up, so a question of trying to locate the missing bits elsewhere and find the bad links. Anyway, thanks for your help both, put me on the track of what to look for!
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Jun 3, 2021 22:41
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stev posted:The man told everyone they could have a normal Christmas and yanked it away with less than a week's notice. Even that didn't dent the fucker. I think this might be a step too far now. It is 6 months on from Xmas. The non-political 'soft' tories on my facebook are going wild.
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Jun 3, 2021 22:49
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BizarroAzrael posted:poo poo, guy I work with has come over for a funeral from Portugal today, guess he may not be online tomorrow. They're not moving to amber til Tuesday. Maybe he'll make it through in time.
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Jun 4, 2021 02:16
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sebzilla posted:https://twitter.com/patrickkmaguire/status/1400559711360098308?s=19 Speaking as a Unite member, this has made me more determined to vote Beckett. Anything that pisses off that dreadful, hypocritical, old witch is good in my book. Anyway, aren't unions supposed to be politically active?
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Jun 4, 2021 02:18
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Neurolimal posted:Getting closer and closer to the 20 points ahead dream. Maybe I'm wrong, but I thought it was supposed to be labour 20pts ahead of tories (under any other leader but Big J) not tories 20 points ahead of Labour under the establishment dream leader?
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Jun 4, 2021 12:42
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https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/tim-martin-wetherspoons-brexit-b1859135.html (Mark Steel article) quote:... Everyone who voted brexit should do a one month stint at national minimum wage in the hospitality venues and on the farms because this is what they voted for because they knew to the nth tiny degree what they were voting for.
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Jun 4, 2021 12:53
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TACD posted:That’s the joke I know I was being 'ironic'  OwlFancier posted:I have a specific pain tolerance, in that I am fine with things I know for a fact aren't actually dangerous. Anything I can't see or I don't know where the pain is coming from freaks me the absolute gently caress out. That reminds me, Isaac Newton apparently used to shove a glass rod up there to stop his precious bodily fluids from being wasted.
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Jun 4, 2021 14:31
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quote:Wales moves to alert level 1 source: email from Business Wales.
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Jun 4, 2021 14:35
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Seeing as we are discussing malfunctioning body parts just now: A good thing about facemasks - a postcrown near the front of my mouth fell out just now. Too late to get to either of the shops that might sell 'temporary bonding cement'. I bit on something hard a couple of weeks ago and it's been getting wobblier. But I have to wait another couple of months or so before I can get on the NHS dentist's list. Off to see if Home Bargains or Waitrose sell any such stuff! I shall refrain from trying the Gorilla Glue. Selfie: 
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Jun 4, 2021 17:25
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crispix posted:the dinner hall always smelt like cabbage, even when no cabbage was being served in there It's embedded into the paint they use "Institutional Green with Added Cabbage Odour" in schools, hospitals and probably prisons.
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Jun 5, 2021 00:58
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goddamnedtwisto posted:Yeah, the Remain fleet showed a complete lack of discipline, failed to form a proper line of battle, let their main formation get alee of the UKIP fleet, and failed to use the Momentum squadron as either distraction or a boarding/pell-mell force to break up the UKIP line. It's no wonder the country is in the state it's in, poor Nelson must be turning in his grave. But isn't that how we defeated the Spanish Main with whatsizface Drake? - can't be assed to google - playing bowls on Plymouth Ho or whatever it was, by having speedy little boats nipping in and out in a seemingly disorganized manner instead of the more disciplined Spanish galleons?
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Jun 5, 2021 12:06
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