The new news 24 thread

[DVee8]

39 minutes ago, Six-cylinder said:

DVLA strikes again, in November we changed 13 PLG cars that were not on the road to historic tax class. We did not go to the post office to get them taxed because they were not fit to drive on the road and most were not insured. The V5Cs were posted to DVLA who changed them to Historic tax class, but also came back taxed that we had never asked for. As they were unfit for the road and mostly uninsured  I SORNed them as soon as we got the new V5Cs.

Today we got a letter from the DVLA asking why we had taxed a car that had no insurance. Turns out 1 of the 13 new V5Cs had not arrived and therefore I could not SORN it and did not realise I even needed to as I did all the new V5Cs I got sent.  Explaining this today has resulted in us receiving a £25 fine as replacement V5C cost for not reporting the missing V5C within 6 weeks.

 

This morning I received a £50 for the Daimler not being on sorn, I'm sure it is.

The DVLA are saying it isn't insured so there for must be sorned , but it is insured it's on laid up. Apparently, according to my insurance company, the dvla doesn't receive notice of laid up.

Another one to fight.

[richardmorris]

3 hours ago, Six-cylinder said:

Yes please, if money was no object I would have one of these.

V16 and so good looking.

(Please keep your window cleaner!)

I am the window cleaner. It needs doing now but was -2C today! The black with tan looked smart. There's been one in 2cv charleston colours too, but they seem to split the body panels a bit. Not that I'd turn one away!

[comfortablynumb]

DVLA lost the logbook for the range rover of too many wheels.

Because it was already registered to me, I didn't bother paying their £25 for a new logbook, I didn't need one, and I baulked at paying for their mistake.

Then all those blank logbooks ' went missing ', and when they reissued them, I got a new logbook 🤣

Of course, now that's gone back to them for historic tax class, what's the betting they 'lose' it again?

[Rust Collector]

I had the day off today, and so we decided to take the kids and dogs out for a walk. For those that know the area, we decided to go up Bo Peep to see if there was any snow up there - we’d normally go to Firle Beacon, but they charge you to park there now.

We managed to find some leftover snow, surprisingly:

The kids and dogs loved it. Best part of the day was seeing our 12 year old Labrador go mad like a puppy at the sight of the snow.

We stopped at the Long Man Brewery on the way back. It’s apparent that the council and highways agency have been busy gritting/salting the roads:

Best wash that soon!

[Christine]

Your Clio got a pair of front tyres today ..

I saw that it needs brake pads shortly too  ..  

[Rust Collector]

34 minutes ago, Christine said:

Your Clio got a pair of front tyres today ..

I saw that it needs brake pads shortly too  ..  

I miss that car, but I’m glad it’s in good hands with yourself.

It did get front discs and pads for the MOT in 2021 (can’t believe it was that long ago!), think they were blueprint from memory. I’ve no idea if 20k miles is good for pads - I’ve never done enough miles in something to change the pads twice 🤣

[Christine]

Ns front started going flat over a few days , my old lady kept driving it  half flat and it made the  outside edge  wear out . Then the snow ... so i changed it for the spare , which  went flat even quicker .  The method  of  removal of the spare and refitting under the floor  i eventually managed ! Bastard mechanism , ive sussed it now ...  The off side front is now the spare , and the other 2 got 2 part worns today .

 Anyway , she decided to use the Polo for a few days instead , and said she liked it more than the Clio ... Now  i've  had  the tyres done , she's back in the Clio tomorrow . Only the off side outer pad is worn , it must drag a bit ..the others are ok . Suprised the mot didn't flag it up..perhaps it did , i didn't look ! 

[alcyonecorporation]

My Leon is back in the garage, owing to a bad leak from the secondary cooler that sits under the radiator. 
It needed £717-worth of work to the heater matrix and heat exchange in November, which cost me three weeks' work. 

It began leaking in the loading bay last week at my erstwhile role:  they told me that I was expected to make deliveries regardless so I told them to stick the job up their arse, resigned on the spot and nursed it to the garage.
Fuck off am I blowing my car up for 35p a parcel. My mum is ill up north and if I have to go, I need to go. They can call me for 'letting them down' until the heat death of the universe; you get many jobs but only one family, and this supposed 5 day a week casual contract 'let down' had a business loan ready to buy a Peugeot Partner to carry all the parcels. 

That can now be spent on the fucking SEAT, because, and I cannot stress this enough, that job can shit snow out of its mouth until it chokes.  I haven't gone off on someone like that for about 15 years. 

I have a Dacia Sandero courtesy car in the meantime, and start a CIH job at a Chinese takeaway this Friday. 

The writing's sporadic. 

[LightBulbFun]

On 05/01/2025 at 01:39, reb said:

I have been on this godforsaken site for fully one third of my life.

And elsewhere on the internet I have 18 year olds telling me what things were like "on the old internet"

Bitch I've been online longer than you've been alive.

[Spurious]

2 minutes ago, LightBulbFun said:

I was only discussing this with some friends from work. Not one had experienced the joy of 28.8kbps dial up and having to wait until after 6pm for off peak calls.

[High Jetter]

1 hour ago, Spurious said:

Not one had experienced the joy of 28.8kbps dial up and having to wait until after 6pm for off peak calls.

AOL was 1p / min anytime, IIRC. I started with a 56k.

[Zelandeth]

I started out with a hand-me-down 33.6K modem from a friend who had upgraded to 56K.  I remember one of the party tricks I had back then was that when the TCP/IP package I was running on the Amiga back then crashed - which happened regularly because Genesis was an unstable piece of garbage - was that I could reboot and reload everything and get back up and running before the modem had noticed and dropped the connection.  

Thankfully switching to Miami put an end to that nonsense once I finally gave in and paid for a copy.  Ah, back in the days when there were usable browsers out there for pretty much all the major platforms.  Think it was Voyager I mostly used back then, iBrowse being the backup.

Yes I was hugely stubborn and refused to switch to Windows as my main machine until way, way later than would have been sensible.

My main method of contact with my friend groups around the world back then was via IRC.  I still miss it...nice simple experience that was really easy to dip in and out of and which Just Worked.

[wuvvum]

2 hours ago, High Jetter said:

AOL was 1p / min anytime, IIRC. I started with a 56k.

Was it AOL which used to disconnect you every hour?  Could be irritating when one was trying to download a large file.

[Zelandeth]

50 minutes ago, wuvvum said:

Was it AOL which used to disconnect you every hour?  Could be irritating when one was trying to download a large file.

BT l, when they introduced their monthly billed service that did away with the phone charges.  The intention was to stop people just leaving the line busy continually.  

It was really annoying!

[High Jetter]

6 hours ago, wuvvum said:

Was it AOL which used to disconnect you every hour?  Could be irritating when one was trying to download a large file.

Not that I recall, used to be on there for hours doing very important* stuff.

[beko1987]

I started my Internet life on 56k Freeserve dialup @ 1p per min as all the late 90s dial up used to cost. I'm sure my dad was using something called Demon as his provider? 

Then mum had adsl installed via AOL. £9 a month for 1mb I think. Using that on the windows 98 Packard bell I had back then was lightning fast!

Nowadays I was partly forced to get fibre to my house so I can watch more 4k YouTube on the TV without it buffering... 🙄😂

[reb]

6 minutes ago, beko1987 said:

without it buffering

What I've learned from getting gigabit is that half of the internet is run on crumbling server infrastructure that is slow no matter what connection you're on.

[Fat_Pirate]

You're all NOOBS, I started at 14.4K on Demon in '94!  It was all FTP and newsgroups back then, think it was a good 6 months until I bothered installing a web browser.  Everything was such a faff (all DOS programs), I never expected internet access to become anything other than a niche interest. 

[tooSavvy]

Do those of us, from modem dayz, remember the sneaky 'Diallers' that lurked on some..err.. questionable sites 👀

🚙💨

[beko1987]

1 hour ago, reb said:

What I've learned from getting gigabit is that half of the internet is run on crumbling server infrastructure that is slow no matter what connection you're on.

I had to explain to Charlie once why his stupid bloody huge fortnite updates take ages. It's only as fast as the computer uploading is my answer (founded from decades of torrenting mostly... 😂) 

[beko1987]

49 minutes ago, Fat_Pirate said:

You're all NOOBS, I started at 14.4K on Demon in '94!  It was all FTP and newsgroups back then, think it was a good 6 months until I bothered installing a web browser.  Everything was such a faff (all DOS programs), I never expected internet access to become anything other than a niche interest. 

I remember in the mid 90s, 94/95 at dad's work they had the Internet. I remember happily browsing whatever the Web was on windows 3.1 and 95 waiting for dad to finish work! One pc they installed some games for me, Magic Schoolbus was one. Sat in an office full of chain smoking men happily playing whilst they worked. 

If I was really lucky he'd give me one of their ipaqs and I could play solitaire 😍

Dad had it at his house quite early too. I didn't use it much but remember typing a comma rather than a dot and it not working. Learnt to check what I typed that day 👌(sometimes I still remember to...) 

[reb]

I saw a lady on the bus wearing an awful white jacket, the sort of thing that is very cheaply made but tries to look fancy, it was awful. Why am I telling you?

It had the words "Disney Font" written on the back.

The manufacturer evidently got it from an example image for a font pack like this one.

[320touring]

Up early on my non- working day so I could do this

As I didn't want it to be filthy when it went here

The result of which was

Barry's comments. "Good wee motor that, it's no been fucking hingin aboot"

 

Also bonus spot!

[Split_Pin]

Well it's definitely worth getting a car from England. I got a touch up pen for the new Saab and while I was there I had a good look underneath. Apart from some surface corrosion on the subframe (mint replacement now in my garage) and a few bent bits on the jacking points (sprayed some stonechip to seal) there's hardly a mark. I could envisage what it would look like if it had lived closer to its country of manufacture! 

[Lord Sterling]

4 hours ago, beko1987 said:

 Then mum had adsl installed via AOL. £9 a month for 1mb I think. Using that on the windows 98 Packard bell I had back then was lightning fast!

Fatha_Sterling had the Internet installed at ours in Brussels around 99/00. Then in 2001, Mother_Sterling took me and bought a computer/Internet package from PC World in Birmingham. We had it brought and installed, we had Windows XP which was, then, pretty much a marvel. I can still almost smell the new computer smell.

[beko1987]

1 hour ago, Lord Sterling said:

Fatha_Sterling had the Internet installed at ours in Brussels around 99/00. Then in 2001, Mother_Sterling took me and bought a computer/Internet package from PC World in Birmingham. We had it brought and installed, we had Windows XP which was, then, pretty much a marvel. I can still almost smell the new computer smell.

Nice! My first pc was a pc world special Packard bell in 1997ish. White beige box, speakers bolted to the crt etc, Packard bell before they became Packard Hell. Even came with the Lexmark printer with ink that cost £70 for free as everything did back then 😂

That kept going until my mum met my stepdad, who worked in IT. When I was old enough, 2004ish he got me 2 weeks work experience in their tech department. That was awesome in itself and I learnt alot. But my surprise payment for that was a new computer! They carried a big pile of parts out and told me to assemble it and flash xp on it then said it was mine 😱 80gb hard drive, 1gb of ram and a p4 3ghz Prescott, it flew! Kept that around for years eventually turning it into a frankenmachine. 

[Lord Sterling]

7 minutes ago, beko1987 said:

Nice! My first pc was a pc world special Packard bell in 1997ish. White beige box, speakers bolted to the crt etc, Packard bell before they became Packard Hell. Even came with the Lexmark printer with ink that cost £70 for free as everything did back then 😂

That kept going until my mum met my stepdad, who worked in IT. When I was old enough, 2004ish he got me 2 weeks work experience in their tech department. That was awesome in itself and I learnt alot. But my surprise payment for that was a new computer! They carried a big pile of parts out and told me to assemble it and flash xp on it then said it was mine 😱 80gb hard drive, 1gb of ram and a p4 3ghz Prescott, it flew! Kept that around for years eventually turning it into a frankenmachine. 

Mine, I think was a HP or summat. White/Beige and a light metallic Green, speakers slotted on the side of the CRT. It kept on going for years but eventually it too became too old to carry on. When I finally took it to a computer shop in exchange for a better machine, I felt a tinge of sadness.

Didn't have the same luck as you unfortunately in regards to inspiration for IT.

[beko1987]

50 minutes ago, Lord Sterling said:

Mine, I think was a HP or summat. White/Beige and a light metallic Green, speakers slotted on the side of the CRT. It kept on going for years but eventually it too became too old to carry on. When I finally took it to a computer shop in exchange for a better machine, I felt a tinge of sadness.

Didn't have the same luck as you unfortunately in regards to inspiration for IT.

I can thank that stage of my life for it. Problem nowadays is it's all a bit out of date and I wouldn't know what generation of i5 is better than the other without a good Google 😂

[High Jetter]

I'd had an Atari 2600 for a while but didn't get a PC until I went to one of those distress debt recovery auctions in Brighton, in a room above a pub(!), I guess around '92 or '93. I bought a computer and a printer which came from the Garrick Theatre Worthing, before that company went into liquidation. The printer was a massively heavy laser, yes laser lump that I never got working. The PC was an 80286 in a case with a lid that hinged giving access to the (spacious) inside. Either had MS Dos or DR Dos, on it which taught me a lot. Also had Wordperfect and Sage Financial Controller which was fun to experiment and learn with, and Norton Disk Utilities, getting me into the weird world of Hex for a while. I added Lotus 123, a spreadsheet I loved as you didn't need to type '=' before a mathematical sum, which annoys me about Excel today.

I had that PC case for years, expanding and updating it before building a different PC entirely, though that got used for many years before my sister needed a machine quickly.

[Lord Sterling]

Wow, something actually went OK today.

As some might know, last week during the big freeze, the air flow sensor on the Vectra decided to go on permanent strike, it just wouldn't idle at all and kept on cutting out. At first, I thought it was low on petrol, topped up but same symptoms as before. I did a bit of research and found it was the air flow sensor, I unplugged it and the car was fine.

I bought one with the right part number, a bosch one as despite them making utterly shit wipers, I think their air flow sensors probably fair better.

Plugged it in and all is well again, but to be fair, the car seemed to cope quite well without it 🤨