u/yellow_barchetta

First up, readily admit that this is a guerrilla setup. No-name rims, gorilla tape. Tyres are decent Schwalbe tubeless ones.

I've run these rims and the gorilla tape option previously, but had to swap to tubes a few months ago when the tyres I owned got wrecked and would no longer seal.

I've come back to fresh tyres but now I'm constantly getting leaks via the valve. I've tried putting a rubber seal inside to help the seal, but still getting the issue. New tape also applied, and I made sure that the hole the valve pushes through is as small and tight as it can be, but still getting leaks. Nothing coming out of the spoke holes (tested under water) so my assumption is that the tape is sealing fine.

I suppose it could be that the old valves I'm using have hardened the plastic so they still aren't sealing well. Any other things I should be looking at before I drop £15 on new valves?

Maybe it's just me, but two quirks really annoy me in the last 3 weeks of ownership.

First one is the cover over the EV charging port. Firstly, why do we even need a cover over it, when the normal "fuel tank" cover is there (not had this on any previous EV). But more importantly, why doesn't the inner cover close naturally with the outer cover being closed at the same time? If I unplug the charger and then just push the outer "fuel tank" flap, the inner cover gets caught on a bulge inside, so instead I have to close one flap then the other. An enormously minor point, but a daily irritation with the thoughtlessness of the design.

And the second is the bloody key. Why the hell does a key need to be so freaking enormous, and yet simultaneously have appalling ergonomics and design? The bar for attaching to keyrings is incredibly awkward to use as it is too narrow / badly angled to get a normal loop of a keyring through it (mine is already scratched to buggery because we add / remove these keys all the time as we swap between the family, and the fact that there is a different button to lock vs unlock seems to me at least to be completely and utterly unnecessary. And if you are going to have personalised keys, maybe just put some small colour indicator on each key to distinguish one from another when they are around the house. But my main grip is the sheer size. Utterly unnecessary for something that is a couple of buttons and a simple small battery setup!!

Just looking for a usable rule of thumb to compare our family position in my head with others in here.

We're lucky as we have a mix of DB, DC and state pension entitlements plus savings, but it's hard to compare (for the purposes of thinking about risk level when we do take the plunge and stop working) with this mix.

A standard rule of thumb for DC / savings pots is the 4% concept, and for DB pots the 20x multiplier. But if I had (say) 35k annual DB payout age 67 (in today's money, not including future accrual) plus state pension plus £400k in pension / ISAs today, what sort of pot "value" might that feel like for someone who has only DC pot available? Plenty of website seems to only want to factor in DC and savings, hence my question.

I am pretty confident we as a couple are in a good position, we just need to make the right choices as we get closer to 60.

My wife has worked part time over most of her working life so is exposed if I die either in the bridge period or in the earlier parts of our retirement as a) we would use most of our savings and my DC pot (broadly 50% of my pension) in the bridge and b) my DB pensions once in payment would reduce to about 35-37% as spousal benefit. The annual gap post 67 between what we would get jointly and what she would get on her own is about £37k, including the absence of my state pension, and whilst our joint expected income is about £15k over what we think we "need" to fund a decent retirement lifestyle that still leaves her with a gap of c. £20k pa.

Later in life we don't foresee the same sort of issue as we should still be bringing in more than we spend through to our late 70s, so should accumulate a new pot of savings which can protect her.

Working through the various options one thought did occur to me that if aged 60 (when we plan to retire) instead of using my DC pot and our savings entirely to fund our bridge, if I took the 30%-ish reduction in annual payments from my LGPS pensions we would be able to bring in about £25k of pensions, and just supplement this with cash from savings / DC pot in a way which ensures that if I die aged 67 (say) she would still have c.£300k of my DC pot retained which she can then use to fund the gap between her pension and her lifestyle needs. Is that sort of thinking common, or is the better approach to fund some sort of reducing term family income protection say up to the age of 75?

Ok, I have only had the car for 48hrs but I can't for the life of me work out how on earth the parking assistance works. I'll probably never use it anyway, but the thought that the car can park itself is intriguing and not something I've tried before.

All that seems to happen when I engage it is the car drives backwards and occasionally makes small steering wheel adjustments and if I touch the steering wheel it cancels itself.

What am missing?

My wife is the appointee for our son with disability for whom a motability car is provided. She is the registered keeper and owner of our main family vehicle, and before we had the motability car in the family I was the owner / registered keeper / main user of a small additional car on which I'd built up 20+ years NCB. I've just realised that after 6 years of us having a motability car, I've not had insurance provided in my name as the lead for that time. Does that mean I've lost any NCB "entitlement" for when our son moves into care and the car (properly) moves with him?

I have received a request as above and advised the requestor that I am strongly recommending that we provide this in electronic pdf format only.

The length of the pdf is 1,600 pages due to the parent's long history with the college.

Am I being reasonable or unreasonable in refusing to print this, and suggesting that if the parent wants the printed copies we would outsource this at a charge of £160 (I've been quoted this by a provider).

Having verbatim emails is not what UK data protection / GDPR envisages, but in a spirit of transparency I am content to export the emails like this to demonstrate the organisations commitment to transparency. But I don't want to fall foul of short-changing the requestor by imposing a charge.

Any thoughts?

As per title really. Installed the sub mini last night. Sounds great, but I wasn't turning things up too far!

Which way around should the sub be? Open section facing into the room, or sideways (sideways makes sense as the Sonos logo on top seems to be aligned that way, but Sonos site seems to suggest facing out is "correct", so I'll need to change when I get home).

I don't have an iPhone so can't do any autotune stuff just yet. But any hints / tips on good starting points for the various balance / eq settings gratefully received!

Just a word of absolute honest praise for Octopus in handling my niche query as if the whole company's future depended on it.

All I wanted was my gas meter to talk to the electricity meter, which it hadn't done since the last gas smart meter was installed (pre Octopus I think).

I dropped a query to Octopus, and their customer service agent dealt with me personally and consistently all the way through the process, through guiding me through some "flowchart" stuff, then arranging for an additional Octopus Home Mini (so that two of them could expand the HAN), arranging the engineer to come out to commission and all the way through keeping in touch and checking that everything was working.

They could have said this was a minor thing which I'd lived with for 5-6 years, so I shouldn't care. Or they could have just pointed me to a help sheet.

But they didn't. Genuinely impressed. Now I've got full gas and elecricity data in my HomeAssistant server, as well as a nagging wife who can objectively tell me that my long morning showers are costing us a fortune!! ;-)

I'm on IOG with my Ohme charger and it's been fine for the last 2.5 years.

This weekend despite plugging in overnight and checking that the unit has a scheduled charge pattern confirmed for throughout the night, there's been zero charge delivered.

This morning I've rebooted the charger, so will see what happens tonight, but has anyone else had issues? I wondered if there was something weird going on with lots of nocturnal use on the grid, but if that was the case then it wouldn't just be me...

Does HR cashflow ever make into the pension fund?

If I set up AVCs from my current employment to an LGPS AVC provider, I would sacrifice £2000 gross, end up net £1200 poorer in my pay packet, but £2000 would end up in the pension fund at the end of the day.

If I pay £1600 cash from my post-tax into a SIPP that becomes £2000 in my pension, but I have to wait to get the other £400 "back" from HMRC.

Is that the basic sum - it is a cashflow thing?

As the info officer for our company, we get the occasional SAR via the usual routes - disgruntled customers, employees in various "processes" etc.

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The most common request is "I want all info you hold including all emails".

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Curious how high quality organsations deal with this after spending about 3 days on one customer with a reasonably common name extrractjng all emails, pdf'ing them and then sitting with Acrobat painstakingly redacting everyone else's personal info from a few thousand emails.

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Could I have just replied with "the company holds correspondence with you in relation to the services from our company in which your name appears." It just feels like I've wasted 3 days on a customer being a pain in the arse.

...just made me think how insane ticket availability would be if, in a few years time, we could get an "all stars" team of Lewis, Max and Fernando, just doing Lemans for shits and giggles (and the category win, obvs!)

I mean, they would end up an Hypercar, wouldn't they, but equally entertaining in something like a Lexus.

Nothing to prove, no big sponsorship needed etc. I know we shouldn't pine for F1 drivers in WEC, but the reality is these guys can drive anything quickly.

I'm playing with the coach concept ahead of a race later this year.

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Yesterday I executed with a 95% accuracy a steady run, and for the past few days it has shown a Monday night run of 10x40s at a rapid pace (but achievable).

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Woke up this morning and it had changed it to an hour's steady running.

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This is just one example recently

My sleep wasn't great, but nothing out of the ordinary, and the change was synced to my watch by the time I'd got into the shower.

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I've got a "vibe coded" template in HomeAssistant to calculate a value for me when the Ohme has decided that a smart charge (which will then be an Octopus Go cheap slot) should be applied. Would appreciate anyone commenting about whether this will / should work "correctly" for a combo of Octopus Intelligent Go plus an Ohme Home Pro. I had to manually edit this to look at the sensor.ohme_home_pro_status but I'm not 100% convinced this is correct. It certainly works when the status changes to "charging", but I don't want to give myself a false positive.

I'm just using this to double check against my IHD as it freaks me out that it shows 7kw draw in the day time, and whilst checking back on my Octopus bills does show that they apply the night rate during the day time at periods of high usage, it would be nice to see "real time" which might encourage some better value use of power around the home. The meter doesn't change the tariff in this scenario so I have to rely on the Ohme to give me this info.

template:

- sensor:

- name: "True Current Electricity Rate"

unit_of_measurement: "p/kWh"

state: >

{# Map the primary Octopus current rate sensor #}

{% set rate_sensor = 'sensor.octopus_energy_electricity_[MyMeter]_current_rate' %}

{# Extract the base tariff rates from the sensor attributes #}

{# We multiply by 100 because the integration presents attributes in pounds (e.g., 0.24) #}

{% set peak_rate = state_attr(rate_sensor, 'current_day_max_rate') * 100 %}

{% set off_peak_rate = state_attr(rate_sensor, 'current_day_min_rate') * 100 %}

{# Determine time windows and Ohme state #}

{% set hour = now().hour %}

{% set minute = now().minute %}

{% set is_fixed_off_peak = (hour == 23 and minute >= 30) or (hour < 5) or (hour == 5 and minute < 30) %}

{% set is_ohme_smart_charging = is_state('sensor.ohme_home_pro_status', 'charging') %}

{# Evaluate the true current rate #}

{% if is_fixed_off_peak or is_ohme_smart_charging %}

{{ off_peak_rate | round(2) }}

{% else %}

{{ peak_rate | round(2) }}

{% endif %}

Just opened t212 to have a look and put £10 in to have a little play with a cheap stock, lured in by reading about the cash ISA rate.

But now I'm in the app the rate is 3.8% only?

How do I access the 4.75% rate?

I'm in the local LGPS scheme and for the first time have the financial opportunity to add AVC contributions at a rate of about £2k (gross) per month, and as a HR taxpayer this will cost me £1200 net in my pay packet.

This appears to make complete sense to me, as I'll be able to put aside £24k a year at a cost of £14.4k a year, and then extract it at the £24k value as part of the lump sum extraction when I trigger the DB payout.

With that in mind, what sort of fund would seem to be a reasonable pitch? The provider is Standard Life and although I am aware they will not be the cheapest provider, I'm not going to race to the bottom for fees as the difference is marginal.

Equities are clearly currently "high" and I'm a little nervous that with only a 6 year window a big correction now might not be fully recovered by 2030, so perhaps something a little less volatile might be a better pick.

Any thoughts?

When was the last time we saw two cars of similar pace in the hands of drivers of similar stature have a non-mistake inflected overtake on a racing lap, then both pit at similar stages in the race, and then have a subsequence non-mistake inflected overtake on a racing lap later in the race?

I appreciate that in F1 there are always "reasons", but ultimately this was two cars / drivers who had meaningful pace advantages over the other at different stages in the race, despite actually having pretty much identical race strategies and no issues / damage.

Felt like a blast from the past in the world when teams knew tyre A was faster than tyre B but couldn't put the sort of precise numbers on it that most teams can seem to do these days.

Quite refreshing!

At a recent car service it was identified that there was damage to the car which hadn't previously been detected to the underfloor. As the car is provided via Motability the dealer advised that although Motability themselves would not approve repair, they would expect it to be considered and potentially funded by the Motability insurers.

However, there are three named drivers on the car, and none of us have any recollection of an incident where the damage occurred.

Assuming for a minute that the insurers did agree to stand up to the cost (I'm aware this isn't a given), how would this get handled from a perspective of private insurance that the three of us have on other vehicles? We can't answer yes or no to a question which asks whether we have had an accident or specifically a claim. Or will we be forced to make the claim in one name (most likely the leaseholder / appointee from a Motability perspective).

I've got Cloudfared up and running on HomeAssistant and my access to my HA subdomain is working fine. But I've not added any additional security layers on top of that.

However, I want to get the GarminHomeAssistant app up and running on my watch, and due to Garmin restrictions I need to apply some levels of security.

The instructions for configuring this are here https://github.com/house-of-abbey/GarminHomeAssistant/blob/ed89d1da74fcb65b8b023b45bd581d84e1e13f48/HTTP_Headers.md but this I think primarily assumes that some of the stuff is already set up, and I'm getting confused about what I need to do.

I think what needs to happen is that I need to implement some form of security over my whole subdomain using the Security Tokens and / or some other WAF rules so that when the Garmin app operates it can benefit from the security of custom headers to access the various things. But for normal day to day use I don't want (or don't think) that using Security Tokens and Custom Headers is the way to go.

Currently I have a self hosted application defined, but for the time being it is limited to just one folder on the domain. This has a policy in place which is Service Auth / Service Token set up.

That appears to work with the app, but there are other folders it needs to apply to, and when I set up a similar application / rule and apply it to the whole subdomain I lose access through my browser / companion app too.

Is there a way to have the Custom Header route just one of several routes through to the server? And do I need to write a rule which matches the format on the page linked above? (i.e. (any(http.request.headers["your-header-name"][*] eq "your-header-key")) ) - and if so, would that be (any(http.request.headers["CF-Access-Client-ID: sdasdasda.access"][*] eq "CF-Access-Client-Secret: sdfasdfasdfadsf"))