purplepatch

I’ve just got a pro subscription and the most useful upgrade for me are the scheduled tasks. I’ve got it doing a daily read of emails from my kid’s school and updating a shared calendar and todo list with all the endless school stuff. And for work I do some ad hoc stuff with a particular company and I’ve got it reading emails from them and automatically updating my calendar when I get a shift I’ve bid on allocated to me.

It genuinely feels like having a secretary, it’s great.

What’s everyone else using it for?

I own (as in it is on my deed) a unadopted lane which provides access to several properties in a cul de sac. The covenants on the deed state that maintenance of the road is shared with ours and the two adjoining neighbours (so 3 of the 7 properties in the cul de sac). Two of my neighbours who’s properties are adjacent to the road, but who are not in the cul de sac, are complaining about several mature trees on this lane which they consider to be threatening their properties with damage and causing shading to their gardens and windows. They want the trees cut right back (which will likely cost a few thousand) and some kind of annual maintenance plan. As far as I’m aware no actual damage has b

So I got hold of a 5600x recently, upgraded the bios on my MSI B450 Tomahawk Max to the latest (v39) version, installed the new chip...and I can’t get past the BIOS screen now. The chip is recognised, it just won’t boot windows, every time I try to exit BIOS it just reboots to back to the BIOS screen. Replacing my old 2700x makes everything work fine. Anyone know what I need to do?

I’m a huge coffee addict and have a nice burr grinder to grind my beans, however the control switch has broken so now the grinder just grinds continuously when I turn it on at the mains. I’ve just been switching it on and off from the mains to grind and I’ve worked that I need to grind for 12 seconds to have the right amount of ground coffee for my morning brew. I have an amazon smart speaker in my kitchen. Is there a smart plug solution that will allow me to say “Alexa, grind coffee” and it turn on the coffee grinder for exactly 12 seconds? It would save me spending £80 on a new grinder and also be pretty cool.

For some background - I am a very occasional smoker - maybe 2 or 3 a month with a beer or a coffee. I don’t really buy my own cigarettes, I normally only smoke if someone offers me one. On this day I happened to have a packet of 5 that someone had given me. It was a Saturday and we were in a pub with my wife and 12 month old baby and some of her friends having a lunchtime pint. My son was getting grumpy and tired so I had just pushed him round the block in his chair to get him off to sleep and had delivered him back to the pub. It was a nice day and I quite fancied a cigarette outside with my pint. I said as much to my wife. She got pretty cross, and banned me from going outside, grabbing my

Slightly complicated one his:

In April last year a cleaner I hired for my rented flat managed to pull my tap from the sink and caused a significant flood. She did nothing to stop the flow of water, passed a garbled message to the agency who contacted my wife to say that the cleaner couldn’t turn the tap off (my wife said it’s easy, it’s a tap, turn it, let me know if there’s any issue and didn’t hear back) and left the property with water spraying everywhere. The resulting flood caused a significant amount of damage to the floor and the kitchen, ultimately resulting in about 14k of damage. We weren’t insured so we chased the cleaning company for damages - as we had hired a company that had

So we have a cleaner arranged via an agency. Today was this particular cleaner's first day cleaning our flat, we had used a different cleaner through the same agency until recently. Both myself and my wife were at work but the agency have a key so she let herself in.

While she was cleaning the sink she knocked the kitchen tap out causing water to pour out of the pipe into the kitchen. I had noticed previously that the tap was slightly loose but it had never come off before. Evidently she was unable to turn the water off. My wife got a phone call from the agency saying that the cleaner was unable to turn the tap off, my wife explained that it was straightforward and that if they were still

So I upgraded my graphics card from a gtx 660 to 1060 expecting big gains but I've been massively disappointed. Getting 20-50 fps on battlefield 4 (interestingly no difference when I turned the settings to low) and battlefield 1 is unplayable on multiplayer and not great on single player. From benchmark tests I understand I should be getting much better performance than that. My CPU is running at 30-40%, memory at 70%, GPU is maxed out.

I've tried running Display Driver Uninstaller to clear any

I'm in the UK.

This is a minor thing, but I was wondering if anyone had an opinion. I bought a new road bike in August from an online distributor based in Germany. It didn't come with pedals so I bought some and had the shop I bought them from fit them (which they did for free and without recording the fact that they had fitted them). I decided last week to change the pedals to a different type but the right one was jammed on so I took it to another bike shop to be removed (the original shop is not local to me). They had to take extreme measures to get the right one off and in the process damaged the screw where the pedal mounts (they did warn me verbally that this might happen). Now I have

Boiler's broken since last night, no hot water or heating. Landlord says she has to use the same plumber as usual for "continuity reasons" and they won't be able to come until Monday (3 days). Do I have the right to insist on an emergency plumber or do I have to suck up a cold house with no showers for the weekend.

Thanks in advance

Water seems to make things like asphalt and concrete slippy but when I get sweaty taking my t-shirt off takes 5 min. ELIF.