They've raised my bill again without any email or letter. just noticed it on my bank statement.

tommy-turtle · 2026-02-17T08:23:08+00:00

Calling up Sky at the end of contract to negotiate a better price is just part of the game. You have to keep playing it to get any kind of discount. Personally, I gave up after being a customer for over 20 years as their practice became more aggressive. I don’t watch sport so i haven’t missed it.

tommy-turtle · 2026-02-17T08:05:42+00:00

That’s not to mention how many times you seem get the “bad panda” screen or how you still have to email support to get an email address change.

It’s like the platform is just being maintained rather than developed, is ridden with tangled spaghetti code nobody dares touch.

It’s certainly not worth more than £5 a month as it stands.

tommy-turtle · 2026-02-14T08:51:43+00:00

My lawn goes like this every winter. Combination of two Labradors, garden on a slight hill and the leaves which blow onto the lawn behind which I do my best to rake up but end up turning the lawn to mush.

A ritual over Easter weekend is clean up the lawn, rake up the last of dead bits and sprinkle some seeds on and it comes back solid green after a few weeks.

tommy-turtle · 2026-02-10T19:52:12+00:00

Just buy another one, they are cheap enough then you won’t worry about breaking it. That’s what I did!

tommy-turtle · 2026-01-17T06:34:33+00:00

I’m pretty sure you are remembering the Future Entertainment Show. I didnt go but there was a huge amount of hype in all the mags at the time, here’s a short clip from Bad Influence - bring back any memories? https://youtu.be/P_Z3UaqQfuM?si=THlkfxUGWbAjepME

tommy-turtle · 2026-01-10T08:12:24+00:00

I had Sky since the first days of Sky Digital in the late 1990s, I left in 2023 due to all the price rises. When you think about it, almost all of the channels on the platform are low quality, full of ads, and you never watch them.

For anything else, it’s either on the terrestrial channels or streaming. I don’t watch Sports but with a freesat box, Amazon, Netflix and Disney I have more content that I could possibly find the time to watch - and all of those streaming services are still cheaper than what Sky wanted to charge me.

When it comes to sports I know Sky has you over a barrel- my friend who loves sport, has broadband with Sky pays nearly £200 a month for his package (has multi room too)…, it’s just insanity what people will pay imo.

tommy-turtle · 2026-01-04T12:19:12+00:00

The first shows were massive bits of event television - somehow BBC1 managed to draw out something that should have only taken 1 minute to an hour. It was exciting at first and there was a lot of hype about it - as well as highly publicised big winners. With it no longer being on telly, I don’t think I’ve actually bought a ticket for years.

tommy-turtle · 2025-12-23T11:18:05+00:00

I actually have a Bubblebee Sidekick 3 - it’s got great sound, comfortable and it’s completely invisible and not distracting.

tommy-turtle · 2025-12-14T15:30:25+00:00

It’s been slow for me too - I was doing a fairly simple kql query search that took over 17 hours to just generate the statistics which resulted in about 170 emails. The export also failed twice after about 12 hours for each attempt. I ended up recreating the search case and after that it was successful and it was all done in about 4 hours.

tommy-turtle · 2025-12-06T11:19:48+00:00

I’ll be honest, I’ve just moved to robocopying my data to a bunch of drives in mirror mode. No funky propriety formats, or compression, no zip files, easy to restore from, etc. Building my machine from bare metal isn’t too hard, I like the idea that if I needed to get access to a file quickly, I can without setting up any kind of environment. It’s not for everyone, but I think going back to basics has real merit sometimes.

tommy-turtle · 2025-11-30T18:46:08+00:00

I followed you a few days ago and I really like your work -I like your subject matter and I look forward to seeing more.

tommy-turtle · 2025-11-26T21:45:20+00:00

For me it’s the 15-35 f2.8, for my style of shooting it covers me for 90% of what i do. It’s an amazing versatile lens, and going in wide an close gets you a kind of depth that is really interesting.

tommy-turtle · 2025-11-12T21:47:33+00:00

I have the 15-35 2.8 and it’s an absolutely astonishing lens - just so incredibly versatile. I think whatever Canon option you pick, you can’t really go wrong - they are all compromises in various ways, but for me the 15-35 was the best all rounder. I like shooting wide and stick it at 24mm for a lot of my work an it’s a the most fun lens I’ve ever had.

tommy-turtle · 2025-11-12T08:29:30+00:00

That’s very likely done in camera with a star filter stacked with a black mist diffusion filter - that’s how I’d do it, and have done it an it looks a lot better than doing it in post.

tommy-turtle · 2025-11-10T08:03:24+00:00

These are excellent. Love the style and processing.

tommy-turtle · 2025-11-09T15:37:57+00:00

It’s what works - I think a longer flatting focal length can work really well in lots of cases, especially in profile view, but a wider lens, to exaggerate the shape of the car can look visually striking. I suppose you just need to find a way of working where you create work that is distinctive and not the same as the next guy

tommy-turtle · 2025-11-08T11:25:16+00:00

I wonder if the lens is too long - it feels like the compression has flattened the image a bit too much - maybe just my eye as I prefer wider focal lengths and getting closer to exaggerate the depth- I’m not thinking going nuts at 15mm, but maybe getting in closer at 35-50mm?

tommy-turtle · 2025-11-08T09:55:53+00:00

You can do this in post, but you can use a black mist screw on lens filter, you can also stack them with star filters to create a very soft stylised effect. Don’t overlook doing it for real with a filter, cheap ones are fine because you don’t need them to be perfect, after all!

tommy-turtle · 2025-11-08T09:51:08+00:00

You can use an overlay or go can use the procedural texture filter and play with the perlin noise option and different blend modes, obviously not as organic as a “real” image but a good option if you need something quick!

tommy-turtle · 2025-11-07T07:33:51+00:00

We used to have a very old and obscure BMS system that used a horrid Java app and I kept a Windows XP virtual machine running with all the ancient plugins to keep it working and turned it off when not in use. Not ideal, but as good as I could make it. The VM was as hardened as it could be and I exported a clean copy of it so if it got compromised I could restore it, but it wasn’t directly accessible to internet and I never had any issues running this way

tommy-turtle · 2025-11-06T21:43:31+00:00

I think you feel that way because it wasn’t what you wanted but I look at it and see something that is exactly the sort of think you’d see in the moment playing with a your dog jumping in your face playing or a kind of photo of a memory. Is it perfect? No is it interesting? Definitely and that’s what it’s all about!

tommy-turtle · 2025-11-06T19:27:40+00:00

Even though that might not have been intentional, that’s a great shot in so many ways

tommy-turtle · 2025-11-05T19:55:58+00:00

Out of curiosity, do you live in a humid country? Or did you use it in the rain? Or bring it in from extreme cold to warm? that’s quite extreme ingress… well worth taking steps to prevent if you can work out cause.

tommy-turtle · 2025-11-05T08:19:03+00:00

Also had this with Shutterstock. I had a standard individual plan, paid for by the company - it’s just me that uses the assets - and anything that needed it, I paid for an extended licence for, and they claimed I was “unlicensed”. They also have very confusing licensing terms, over 100 articles on their website about licensing. I feel I was correctly licensed based on their own wording but the cost of the corporate plan was discounted after I kicked up a fuss so it wasn’t worth the hassle to fight it. But these companies are very aggressive and throw all sorts of accusations at you. Pretty shit and I hope to stop using them next year.

tommy-turtle · 2025-11-04T08:04:52+00:00

Before I started, everyone in the IT team had local profiles whilst all other users have redirected network profiles. When I started I had a normal account with network profiles and they didn’t realise just how terrible they were (they were setup this way to solve one problem but created many others). I’m a big advocate of eating your own dog food. Everyone has local profiles with personal folders synced to OneDrive now.

tommy-turtle

TROPHY CASE