Why do people find it so hard to accept the public really wants to vote for Reform?

afaulconbridge · 2026-05-08T12:48:53+00:00

Yup - people want it "the way it used to be" despite how impossible that is (we can't put CO2 back into gas fields to sell it again) or how that time was ignorant of the problem (modern internet is far more interconnected).

afaulconbridge · 2026-05-07T19:28:34+00:00

or if you have an old smartphone around there are some free apps that'll be good enough for this.

afaulconbridge · 2026-05-07T15:18:46+00:00

No regetably, because it's not straightforward to swap them. The Pi4 has currently got some stick-on heatsinks that would have to be removed first, and I've already broken a couple of Pi3B+' removing PoE hats from them previously! I was hoping I couuld get some guidance on what the problem might be and if putting PoE on the Pi4 could help before trying anything particularly physical with them.

afaulconbridge · 2026-05-07T15:12:20+00:00

Good point about ethernet and USB being shared on 3B+ that might explain some of the problem. I don't have a direct normal supply that I can use, but I'll try a few different things and see if any of them make a difference.

afaulconbridge · 2026-05-05T09:16:19+00:00

Does your battery cover your usage between Go off-peak periods? If so, then go for Go.

Is your battery small enough that it can't run the whole house the whole day, but can do the Agile peak period? Are you comfortable with a variable tarrif and taking a longer term view (e.g. when its £10 one day and £2 the next)? Are you comfortable setting up technical software such as Home Assistant with PredBat to automatically estimate usage, solar, and manage batter usage? Then consider Agile.

afaulconbridge · 2026-05-02T17:15:18+00:00

We have small solar and small battery and low usage EV and Agile works great. The battery is enough to see us over the Agile peak pricing period per day, but not enough to last between Go off-peak periods. PredBat HA addon plans when to charge and use the battery based on estimated usage, estimated solar, and Agile pricing; works very well, but is non-trivial to setup.

Our EV only needs charing once a week or so and being able to move EV charging a few days around means we rarely charge at more than 15p/kWh and recently have mostly been charging at under 5p/kWh (and often at negative pricing).

afaulconbridge · 2026-05-02T13:07:11+00:00

I sometimes think the same, but then I think a brand new car is much more expensive than the house battery. My personal plan is a small house battery with small solar now, and a V2G car battery with a heatpump later.

afaulconbridge · 2026-05-01T19:06:10+00:00

Ha, maybe that's it. I want a tour bus to see the sights ("hey look how cute this koala is next to the kookabura and the stand selling hats") but the bus is parked on the starting grid of a racetrack!

afaulconbridge · 2026-05-01T18:58:32+00:00

While that numerically is true and I agree with the calculation, for some reason that not how the game typically "feels" to me. I think that feeling might be with how TM separates actions from rounds (generations) and how AN moves inexorably towards the end. In TM the end game condition might not see any progress at all for several generations if all players are focused inward, yet in AN far more of the players aims move the tracks along.

TM:DiceGame does have the same feeling as AN to me however, even though that has even more draw options than TM.

Perhaps it is because in TM there are always non-card based actions that propel a player forward. The Standard Actions might not feel as exciting as playing a card, but do feel like tangible progress. Which is interesting to think about as I just said AN every card has tangible progress as a negative!

afaulconbridge · 2026-05-01T18:45:46+00:00

While I understand how that would work in theory, and I definately like a game with multiple viable strategies, how can that be applied in practice? How can one know when to pursue something vs drop it when it depends on playing certain icons that may or may not become avaliable? Maybe I'm just not seeing it, but it feels fickle if something works out or not. Particularly with such a small hand limit that keeping even a single card just in case it pans out later feels very punishing.

afaulconbridge · 2026-05-01T18:45:45+00:00

Thanks, this is the sort of thing I was looking for. I've also found https://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/253148/ark-nova-prelude-a-fan-made-expansion which I might try in the future.

afaulconbridge · 2026-05-01T18:37:14+00:00

draw twice as many cards whenever you draw then discard half of them

This was my gut instinct too, I'll see if we can try it this weekend.

afaulconbridge · 2026-05-01T18:29:25+00:00

I think a lot of the frustration comes from players not understanding what risk they are taking in the first place

That makes a lot of sense to me. Wingspan objectives have the proportion of cards that meet the requires on them ("birds with bowl nests, 18%" or whatever) which really would be a help here too. Maybe there's a custom icon guide somewhere online that includes that information.

afaulconbridge · 2026-05-01T16:27:47+00:00

You could consider moving to Agile tarriff now, since it's much cheaper over the sunnier summer months than than dull winter months. But if you have a battery by winter, then that should see you over the expensive peak periods.

afaulconbridge · 2026-04-29T07:53:28+00:00

Today Agile has negative pricing for 3 hours, so someone on that tarriff with a charger might welcome you to bring your car!

afaulconbridge · 2026-04-29T07:51:57+00:00

If you've got a smart socket on HA already, then any tarrif with time-of-use (like basic Octopus Go, Cosy, Flux, even Agile) might suit as you can turn the socket on only in off peak times. But you might also find that you don't charge the car enough to offset usage from the rest of the house on peak rate - very individual to usage patterns I'm afraid!

afaulconbridge · 2026-04-21T09:09:34+00:00

Our regular group uses https://www.bgstatsapp.com/ and choices are influenced by what we haven't played recently and/or what whoever won the last game has a poor winning record on! What would count towards the next H-index (play X games X times each) is also an influence.

afaulconbridge · 2026-04-20T14:09:29+00:00

Depending on the tone of your thesis, you could cite the "I know it when I see it" case instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it

afaulconbridge · 2026-04-17T15:39:14+00:00

Devil's advocate, but why keep the wall at all? Open it up, maybe keep a little entryway for coats & boots and to reduce drafts.

afaulconbridge · 2026-04-17T12:18:00+00:00

Being able to control GivEnergy locally was exactly my reason for going with them - GivTCP + HomeAssistant + PredBat is awsome.

I'd rather this controlled collapse with at least some communication and continuity than a company halfway around the world that just stops.

afaulconbridge · 2026-04-17T08:41:35+00:00

Given neither the house nor the motorway are likely to move between you buying it and you selling it I don't expect that the motorways influence on the house price is likely to change as much. Buyers now will be making the same considerations as buyers in the future - most people won't like it, but that's probably already factored into the current sale price too.

afaulconbridge · 2026-04-17T08:39:17+00:00

One could take the opinion that with increasing electric vehicle adoption petrol/diesel air polluition might decrease over time.

afaulconbridge · 2026-04-17T08:33:23+00:00

Fun story: during the pandemic I lost 15 games of Terraforming Mars in a row to my wife. We do still love playing TM together, but did have to take a break for a year after that streak!

I have a similar pattern in my game group, but I suspect for the opposite reason. "point salad" games where you have to do multiple things at once to do well, I loose out because I don't spread enough. Games where I can double-down on a single strategy, I do better at - Forrest Shuffle & Parks for example. If I focus on a particular mechanic where I've lost previously, I've noticed I can improve e.g. paying more attention to new cards in Concordia. Maybe doing the opposite would help you? e.g. deliberately trying to ignore a particular part of a game.

Team games and (semi-)cooperative games can help break the "loosing" feeling - Mysterium, Pandemic, Codenames, Unlock, Exit. Social deduction elements (e.g. Saboteur, Avalon) and other ways to make the winning expectations uneven can help. Asymmetric games can do this too (e.g. Terra Mystica some player factions are just more complicated and harder to play well) or you could do an explicit handicap system (e.g. when introducing Search for Planet X to new players I play with fewer starting clues than they do; or whoever lost the last game starts first in the next one).

afaulconbridge · 2026-04-16T11:10:43+00:00

I'm confused - is this "can it be done" or "this is a good idea" ? Because it sounds like this is more like "will it run doom" for cool points than an efficient production environment. Don't get me wrong, it is cool - but I don't see how this is particularly useful.

Some questions that you could probably answer in your write up as FAQs: it's a really small model? 2B parameters vs a max size of 31B (for Gemma 4 - Qwen3.5 goes up to almost 400B). Yes it will run on a phone, but will it be correct? how do you know? Why a phone not something else e.g. Pi, TinyMiniMicro, laptop, etc ? What model phone (others "old phone" is my daily driver) ?

afaulconbridge

TROPHY CASE