Technofrood

Another thing to blame Thatcher for

How are these people able to function in society with literally zero brain matter?

Over here (UK) it's pretty common for doors to be multi point locking, so you shut the door and lift the handle which engages a series of extra bolts between the door and frame, most commonly one at the handle then one at the top and bottom of the frame. The early PVC doors that introduced multi point locking did have an issue (poor construction) where people could kick out the middle panel leaving the frame in place, newer ones have improved it, and there are more expensive doors which are made of different materials, but will almost always feature multi point locking.

I mean ethernet has a range of 100 meters in one run (including with POE), which is probably going to be longer than the WiFi range assuming the WiFi access point is at the switch and it's a relatively straight run. If you need more range a small 4 port POE switch is hardly likely to break the bank if you have a property big enough to need over 100 meters of ethernet in one run.

The installed correctly part is part of the problem. Heat pump based heating systems run at a much lower temperature so usually you need to have new bigger radiators installed, which would add to the cost, and adds chance of needing to have all your floors ripped up to replace the heating pipework (although I suppose that's also possible when replacing a gas boiler with a new gas boiler). You will potentially need to make sure your house's insulation is actually doing a reasonable job which to be fair something that you'll really want to sort regardless of heating system, but is a bit more critical with heat pumps. So can be pretty costly to get installed in an existing property (especially if you've got a house built with solid walls which to add insulation might have to be done internally), but hopefully they continue to install them as standard in new builds. I know down here in Cornwall the local council had banned new builds with gas heating (not sure if that got reversed or not).

I would be pretty tempted to switch mine over to a heat pump from gas, but the big issue for me is where to put the external unit, I think to meet the spacing requirements I'd need to pave over more of my garden or move my back gate further along the brick wall it's in.

I can see some similarities with the EV hate as well, where a lot of people have complaints based on the early generations ignoring the fact that technology has improved in the years since. There was and I assumed still is a relatively small amount of plumbers who fully understand heat pump systems, and how they should be installed, configured and used. Someone at work has a reasonably new build has heat pump and they weren't able to find anyone local who could service them, so basically the whole street clubbed together to get someone from further away, but other than that they have loved it. I think I remember reading somewhere one of the common problems was people running the boost electrical heater pretty much constantly which of course costs a fortune to run and is normally designed to only be used when it's too cold outside for the system to work normally.

I'd consider a ground source one, but don't really have enough space to install the horizontal one, and given the old mine shafts in the area I'd be a bit worried about getting someone to drill some bore holes for the vertical ones.

The price makes a little more sense if you factor in it also includes YouTube music, which puts it more on par with a premium Spotify subscription, with the benefit of no ads on YouTube. Which is basically how I got YouTube premium, I was already paying a monthly fee for Google Play music as it was at the time, and the upgrade to add YouTube premium was only £2 extra a month.

Do have to wonder (well not really it's going to be horrendous) what these people's response to a transman using a woman's toilet would be.

Yes for a while now, also has tab support.

You'd think it would be Surf.

Is that a Red Dwarf reference (or maybe Red Dwarf is referencecing something else)? https://youtu.be/GQlaRpdWIGM

Unfortunately most (bigger) services that require a phone number will almost certainly want to validate the phone number so you will need to receive a text or phone call.