damole

Skype Out is what  I use for calling home (UK).

https://www.skype.com/en/international-calls/Australia

I bought my Z250SL in July 2018, it has done 8500 km.  I am only in Chiang Mai 4-6  months per year, when I am not here it is store inside my friend's guest house under a roof.

The only report I could find online is here.

Is it something to be concerned about as the replacement unit isn't cheap?

In India where there are daily short blackouts <10s or up to 2 mins and common hour plus blackouts I have a 150 AH tubular inverter battery connected to an inverter fed by a voltage stabilizer.  It will power my laptops and monitors for days but it's also connected to all of my AV gear and will still give a day's power.  The battery itself weight 59 kg.  Before the stabilizer I had anything up tp 260 V AC and as low as 120 V.

In Chiang Mai I use a Zircon Smooth-i : 1200VA/720W as power is quite stable here and it only powers my gaming desktop.

I have a friend here with her 18 year old daughter who came for medical treatmement.  The daughter arrived on a 45 day visa exemption and has extended at immigration for 30 days.  Her mother is not comfortable with her doing the crossing by herself so I would happily go with her, I arrived on the 14th May visa exemption.  Her stay expires on the 29th May and her flight back to the UK is 12th June.

Is there any reason we would be denied entry and could obviously ask at the immmigration post once we are there to be sure?

Is this border crossing good for back to back visa exemption like the old days and consecutive VE entries but separated by months.

Some more interesting info here:

https://www.ecowater-softeners.co.uk/for-your-family/drinking-softened-water/

I am from England and live both in Chiang Mai, and in Dharamsala in the low Himalayas where the water comes from snow melt.  As a proper tea drinker I love the water here and there, and always notice the poorer flavour when I am back in England visiting family who all live in the south with hard water.

Boiling will remove the calcium from temporary hard water but not permanent hard water.  In our chemisty lab at school many years ago we had an ion exchange filter for that.

https://byjus.com/jee/hardness-of-water-types-and-removal/

Water Hardness Factsheet for teachers.pdf

Hello

Some friends of mine are coming to Chiang Mai tomorrow and staying in my condo,  they will be extending their stay at immigration.  As I am not in Thailand will they be able with my blue book or title deed and a signed copy of my passport be able to do their TM30s at immigration?

I awlays partition my drive and so all data is on D plus I have other folders apart from Users on D too so I need to change the default options.  Plus I think it's just a good idea to know where Windows is searching anyway but sure the defaul options work for most cases.

Have you checked Indexing Options in Control Panel?  I always set the folders I want searched each time I install Windows.

Card arrived today, 13 days after I ordered it.

Thanks for the advice/suggestion.  As this build is not about ultimate performance and as I have already been shamed on these forums for my untidy cable management and survived I'll take you advice and just buy a regular SMPS.

I have used all the PC components from my old gaming PC desktops to build another PC but I need a new PSU with an 8 pin VGA connector.  I am not sure I really need a modular PSU as I am going to build a Linux Apache webserver for use on my LAN instead of using XAMPP on my development machine but semi-modular seems like a good middle way.

Any suiggestions that are available from Advice/Jib/Shopee or Lazada?  I think 2500 Bt should be my budget.

Wise have sent the card to my address in Thailand.  I contacted them first to ask if it was possible.  My registered address is in the UK.

I ordered a new Wise to a friend's house in the UK who recently arrived in Thailand but it didn't arrive in time so I cancelled it and ordered one to my condo in Chiang Mai on the 23rd Dec.

Has anyone any experience ordering a card from Europe?

I orignally started the thread as a minor grumble about accessing a website without using a VPN and I've been using one for almost 15 years.  I know that companies have their reasons to want to block traffic from troublesome IPs though it's interesting how other retailers in the UK like Argos are not blocking Thailand but Currys are.

Yesterday I had to buy new insurance for my house in London if all the sites blocked Thailand which none of them did and If I hadn't known that one of the uses of a VPN was to get around that then it would have made things difficult.

As most companies are not using geo-blocking it would be interesting to know what causes some to implment it.

https://www.raymond.cc/blog/easily-block-visitors-from-a-country-using-htaccess/

https://searchengineland.com/should-you-ban-a-country-from-visiting-your-website-71667

https://www.currys.co.uk/techtalk/computing/connectivity/how-to-use-a-vpn-virtual-private-network.html

From the above:

"You can access content available in other countries. Fancy seeing the different types of content that your favourite TV and movie streaming service offers overseas? Well, with a VPN you might just be able to do this. Because your location is hidden, you can get around geographic restrictions to stream content from around the world."

I just wanted to check the UK price of something and found currys.co.uk is blocked from Thailand or at least from 3BB fibre and DTAC.

Last month I was in India and aseasnow.com was blocking my IP address.  Blocking whole countries seems counter productive as people without VPNs might still want to shop whilst they are on holiday for example.

Windows 10 and 11 often advertise features during installs and upgrades that have nothing to do with where you are in the install.

I don't think the Windows Hello message has anything to do with the install/upgrade.  It just seems to be asking you whether you want to keep you files or now which you would get during a "reset my PC".

I've only upgraded on of my computers to Windows 111 so far and I don't remember being asked that but you don't state how you got to this situation.

select keep storing my data and then click next

I normally buy these products in the Vegetarian Society shop near Airport Plaza but they are shut until the 10th of Jan.  Does anyone know another place to buy them.  I even heard there is a refill shop somewhere.

I used the same number as I've had it for 20 years so I can't say for sure what would have happened if I'd tried with a different number.

I arrived in BKK this morning.  Opened the app, message saying I had changed devices, entered my debit card number and passport number and boom, I'm in.

Click the gear settings icon, open all settings and change your location.

It's a not so sensible Google feature to force the local date format.

Yes I probably should have described it as not very fair rather not sensible. 

The weird thing is that once I've connected with the VPN and opened the site I can then disconnect and continue to use it.  This is great of course because always being connected to my VPN's Thai server causes issues with other things I am doing on my computer.