u/samcornwell

Feels almost impossible

I was wondering about the £2 coin. It only became a normal circulating coin in 1998 before that £2 coins were basically commemoratives. I imagine the majority of us oldies here remember it quite well.

That got me thinking: are we getting to the point where a normal £5 coin would make sense?

Inflation has roughly doubled prices since 1998, so the £2 coin when it was introduced had about the same spending power as £4 does now. We already have £5 commemorative coins, of course, but they're huge and nobody actually uses them. I mean a proper everyday £5 coin, designed for circulation, in the same way the £2 was.

Interestingly, Britain has actually had a circulating £5 coin before. In 1887, under Queen Victoria, a £5 gold coin was issued for circulation. It was nearly 40g of 22 carat gold, so obviously a very different beast to what we'd be talking about today, but technically the idea isn't new.

I had a look and can't find any evidence that the Royal Mint or Treasury has seriously proposed a modern circulating £5 recently. I suppose the decline in cash use probably makes introducing a new denomination less likely, even though inflation makes a £5 coin more logical than ever.

Perhaps £5 is simply better as a note. But I think I'd love them as coins. We can dream.

(Picture is admittedly AI generated slop, for reference/attention grabbing only.)

Looks different from the C64 I’ve been familiar with so sharing here in case of interest.

The randomly placed CD drives says to me the shop keeper didn’t have a clue what they were doing.

Pawns become a knight
knights become a bishop
bishops become a rook
rooks become a queen
queens become a gold king tile!

Blew my mind to see someone had actually completed both the Boxxy.io originals AND The Jigsaw. Sent them out a pair of posters to New York.

Play at boxxy.io

Money laundering, tax evasion, a fool and their money, theft, fraud, just a joke bro.

There’s dozens of reasons and it keeps happening. I really hope nobody is actually parting with this sort of money.

This is a little bit of a fun personal project for no other reason than why not, and nostalgia!

Link to spychat : https://quornsam.github.io/spychat/ - requires min 2 people ideally.

I have used the Commodore 64 screen to build a secret chat, accessible by anyone. It uses WEBRTC to send and receive data and there is no funny business.

How to use:

Type $HOST and you'll get a code.

Someone else, type $JOIN + the code the host gives you.

Any number of people can join as long as the host stays active.

Type "?" for a list of commands.

The whole thing is intentionally obtuse and simple and hackable (to a degree.) It works as well as the chatting users want it to work. If one user decides to be a dick and spam the page then it ruins. Just don't invite them next time.

If you need a secret text space to go and chat - this is it. It's fun and feels very nostalgic as well.

Enjoy - let me know what you think. Happy for people to fork and improve. Would love to see it.

PS. moderators, we need a "just for fun" flair please :)

4 coins that group well together. People power: women get the vote, pride, diversity and 1918 reformation act.

I just played a minor chess celebrity and I think it might have been the game of my life!

Over the next 6 days I'll be competing over the board in Sputh Lanarkshire at the Scottish Fide U1800 event. It's a long, gruelling tournament and I'll be making the 2.5 hour drive here and back every day to compete.

My first opponent is a celebrity surgeon who happens to play chess very well. Vipin Zamvar has been featured in a BBC documentary and has had his stories told many times.
Last night I spent a while studying his games and how he responds to d4. As expected when we played he defended with nf6.

I played a solid London, castling on move 8, early for me and concentrating on a king side attack.

My breakthrough move was 11.ne5. I don't know and I'm scared to check what the engine will say, but it felt very powerful entering a fork. He had several routes he could take with but he had to be careful. (NB. I wrote this prior to seeing the engine review)

I was surprised at his 16.kd7 and capitalised with
17.f4, expecting my doubled pawns to be compensated with an open rook file.

I think the pressure of playing an opponent 500elo below his own rating got to him and he blundered, allowing a fork to capture his bishop.

Vipin promptly resigned and thankfully we were able to chat after the game. He believes his mistake was 9.nh5 - we’ll have to see what the engine says.

Wow!

Hello, I'm a newbie, please go easy on me.

I ran over 60 successful deploys of a site I have been building and today it started failing.

I have tried a few tricks like uploading a tiny change and deployed. Also tried changing from root to docs back to root again.

The website is a fairly(?) small 2mb html site.

I imagine this is a fairly common issue. Would appreciate if some stalwarts could help or offer advice on what the normal tricks are from here.

Thanks.