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I have a decorative gravel front garden. Weeds everywhere, plastic liner under gravel is shredded, soil mixed with gravel.

What is the most stress free way to make it nicer? Thanks

Tonbridge, Kent.

These roofers serve SE London though.

https://www.toprankroofing.co.uk/

I am thinking if I were a tradesperson with no track record yet, I'd love a platform where I could just pick off some small jobs if I were just starting out, to build a reputation. Getting work done on your house hasn't been revolutionised by the internet yet - sites like MyBuilder are still just quotation/review sites. To be able to select a specific job from a dropdown and get an instant price based on the going rate, then lock it in, would be amazing.

Has anyone else struggled just to get the simplest fucking thing done with their home or is it just me?

Since I bought a house, I have been charged above the odds, wasted time getting quotes from people who then disappeared, never known how much things are supposed to cost. I was fully willing to pay someone to get stuff done but DIYed so much just because dealing with trades is so fucking stressful.

Does anyone else wish there was an app like Uber where you just put in your simple fucking job (e.g. add a socket, here are the photos), given a typical price which gets locked in, tradesperson agrees to do it, and you directly pay the app company who deal with the tradesperson. I mean taxis used to feel like signing a deal with the devil before Uber...

There are occasional great tradespeople who I have stuck with e.g. my roofer who is honest and fantastic if I ever have a storm that takes off a tile. But I am sure there are frustrated tradespeople who lose out on a lot of work because people like me decide it is less faff just to do it myself after the stress of trying to get someone who isn't going to try to rip me off/play me for a fool.

Thanks. I just read the con that it is very heavy which is probably a deal breaker for me. I am looking for something a bit lighter. Sorry about that.

Hmm, I wonder whether this would suit me. I am 6'2" but need to check my leg length.

I bought a SMAKSAK fan oven from IKEA (half price in bargain corner, but still new). Makes great pizza at 350°C.

Has a 500°C pyrolytic function. Am tempted to hack the safety lock and use that feature to make better pizzas.

https://youtu.be/9mmSOyhkK6I

I feel your pain. It sounds possible, but actually coping with this level of change is extremely hard.

We bought a fixer upper house. We are a childless couple with one small dog.

We stripped out the kitchen entirely, including all the plumbing. I had a temporary length of pipe to bring fresh water to the rest of the house. We cooked with a microwave and an egg steamer in the stripped and dirty dining room for a few weeks with all the downstairs stuff in piles in our unrenovated bedroom.

It was miserable.

Neighbour is doing a dormer loft conversion as a DIY job. Tempted to do mine myself as a relatively practical person. Insane?

Ah I thought you were drilling smaller holes, not cores. Yeah don't hammer with core bits/diamond as it wrecks the bit (I am sure you know this already as an SDS user)

You need a hammer drill. SDS. Invest in something like the Evolution SDS hammer drills - about £60 on Amazon.

Lidl Park side drill drivers are actually fantastic for the price.

Bought one three years ago for £13 (30% off) with a 12V 2ah battery, used it to renovate my entire house and to build a log cabin, and a separate tool shed from scratch, hang radiators, fit a whole kitchen, fix all sorts to walls etc, and it is still going strong. It has taken a beating. Used for things like screwing 150mm concrete screws etc. Attaching things to masonry also. I use a separate Evolution SDS hammer drill for serious masonry holes though.

Bought another of the Lidl Parksides last week with two 2AH 20V batteries (4AH were sold out) for about £37 total. Highly recommended. Great quality cordless drill drivers.

This is a bit of a false dichotomy though. It is not a black and white, mutually exclusive choice between saving the children and everyone enjoying privacy.

As always, the actual bad people will just use another device/operating system. When have previous snooping measures ever led to a reduction in crime?

The double glazing business is a pressure sales market with massively inflated prices IMO. Double glazed windows look like some sort of wizardry, but the hardest bit is the frame, that is squared in the brick opening using packers then screwed into the brick using masonry screws. There are Youtube guides that show how quick and simple it is.

I once paid £6k for 13 windows when I didn't know better. Took the guy less than a day (house was not yet plastered so he didn't need to do any finishing).

I went with Danish oil from Toolstation. Dries pretty much similar to polyurethane if you build up the layers.

How does everyone feel about the offline phone scanning that will probably become part of iOS in a future update?

I also played with Cyanogen years ago and agree that it was flaky. Lineage on the Xiaomi Mi 8 feels very finished. It runs well, everything appears to be working fine. I made sure I only flashed signature verified files and was very careful.

Installed Aurora store which is an open source front end to Google Play which means you don't need Google analytics all over your system to install popular apps. You can use login with Google or use their temporary throwaway Google accounts to grab .apks.

No way am I going back to the stock version.

Pretty good rappers

Update on the log cabin. They said it wasn't an issue. Waiting for the adrenaline to wear off.

Quite well actually. Got a nice marbled brown extraction and a tasty coffee.

Obviously not as fresh as straight from bean but an OK compromise.

If you could find a trustless way to do it that would probably work. The problem is the only workable use cases for cryptocurrencies to date are money and digital collectables. Digital scarcity is useful. The moment you tag anything onto it you start removing the core point of it - to be a virtually unhackable, uncensorable, decentralised record of who has what.

I have played around with concepts for chat and forums on blockchain and in every case it makes more sense to just have a database.

Observing how proof of x causes x to become a scarce resource, we need to start creating consensus mechanisms that require proof of things we want to get rid of.

"Proof of plastic recycling" or something!

I think it was the one you recommended to me! Raw Bean Definitely Decaf!

I bought some of this (Definitely Decaf Medium roast) from Waitrose the other day and ran the coarse grind through my burr grinder to make it an espresso grind. Shame Waitrose don't do the beans

Really delicious with a bit of Oatley Barista.