exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

So anyone know how you're supposed to renew your driving licence these days ?!

Being on the stupid website ended up signing up for something else again.. Then want to me to type in all my information which it then rejected.. So then tried again I downloaded a stupid app and taking pictures of stuff etc.. Then put me back on the website where then it says exactly the same...


Everything is just so ridiculous these days. Why can't we just put our driving licence ID into the payment page and just pay the bloody thing ?! So far two hours of my time have been wasted :roll: :mad:

Indeed, renewing without changing details and just updating the photo shouldn't require affirmation of ID as it will be sent to the address held on file, which is effectively as secure as any other authentication. Still, they'll want you to create a Government ID to rule them all now, even if Andy has canned the digital ID card bit.

Finally got logged in. What a faff. I did nothing but log back in again, confirmed all the details I put in already...


Not sure how I feel about this question though !


Are the pre-empting a smash up and death or what ! If i'm going to have a fatal smash up, i'm going to be doing it in style, nothing left and no witnesses !

Only went outside to get a bottle out of my Van.. Decided to drain the bottom of the fuel filter off as it can build up water in there.. Then noticed the air filter hanging off ! This was just a few days after having its MOT as well. I guess they didn't care ! :roll: One thing lead to another :roll:

Looked like the plastic C-shaped on the filter box had snapped and it just "dropped off" the bracket :roll:


Went hunting in our garage and found a new filter box ! As who doesn't just happen to have the right part sitting in the garage for decades unused ?


The bracket seemed to have the bolt welded on :( Notice the flat head on the thing.. this turned out to be important later.. :lol: :roll:


Some metal editing later...


A bit of gentle persuasion with a hacksaw and a hammer works wonders !


Trying to get a waster and nut on the thing while its all wobbling about was though. Had to get mother to hold the top of the bolt as I couldn't be under the van and under the bonnet at the same time !


Turns out the bracket doesn't line up how you think. It was sticking outwards, but when putting it all back together, the top mount (near the battery) was miles out! So I turned the bracket around to shift the whole assembly to the right, only to fit out, that new bolt I put on , now makes the bracket impossible to bolt back up as its right up to the van chassis . So physically impossible to screw the top bolt in the brack to the chassis :roll:

After some head scratching, I decided through force and ignorance was the answer !


So now the top bracket aligns where it should be !


Slightly puzzled where the two bolts are supposed to go on the new filter. The old one had them but it looked like they were either cut off or fell off.. Where I think they should go in the chassis seem to be flat metal and is physically impossible to see there is not holding that on or not so I just ignored it. The other two bolts sticking out the chassis I have no idea what they are for either !


So all back together now.. Because there was nothing physically holding the bottom end of the filter it was just banging about. So I just cable tied it up and call the job done is I've been out there three hours now !


It may not be fitted correctly. But as I had no reference to how it was supposed to fited in the first place. Its secure. Its not going to fall off. Went for a drive around the block and seems fine. So I will take that as a win!

:dizzy:

Well this got confusing fast ! :lol: Problem is, couldn't get to the tap on the back one, so had to do some hacking about.


Well its connected up at least now !


So the back water butt now has a bottom feed pipe linking it to the one next to it. That tank had to be anagled to get at the tap. Then daisy changed the tops of the tanks like they was before.

So tank 1 fills first. The overflow for tank 1 goes into tank 2. The overflow from tank 2 fills up tank 3 and 4 in parallel... I think.. :lol: Well it makes sense in my head anyway !:hide:

The bottom pipe, as it's going to be under pressure, had silicon and hose clamps on it. So *hopefully* it won't leak or blow apart anytime soon !


The waterbutt connections on B&Q site looks a bit suspicious, like the fence !


So asked Grok to fix those 2 things !

Surely you don't believe B&Q's AI generated garden photos?

rubber_jonnie wrote: 07 Aug 2026 14:05 Surely you don't believe B&Q's AI generated garden photos?

There's videos as well !

exxos wrote: 07 Aug 2026 14:11

rubber_jonnie wrote: 07 Aug 2026 14:05 Surely you don't believe B&Q's AI generated garden photos?

There's videos as well !

I guess you fell for that too 🤣

:yay: :yay:

In my context of me saying everything is way more effort than it needs to be all the time..

The whole Lloyds bank change meant I had to have a new credit card.. In one respect that is a good thing as I accidentally cut it up instead of the old one last time :lol: :roll: What annoys me about this as I have to go through every site I use an update my credit card information which just wastes hours of time!

So couple days ago I got a text from Lloyds saying my Internet payment had failed. To be expected as I had a new card! So yesterday I logged into the control panel and updated my card details.. Did not have any indication the payment was retried successful or failed again, total silence. Not even a email from IDNET customer support saying the payment failed !

So I emailed them earlier and asked the payment is automatic what has to be done manual etc. they replied back and said it was automatic and the payment had failed.. I replied back and said yes I know it had failed and I updated my card already.. So it failed again... They told me to re-enter my credit card information.. So I did that for a second time... And then a third time.. All I going through all stupid verification loops...

Turns out they had actually given me new accounting nation about a year ago and seemingly never even told me about it! So I had been updating the information in my old account which was completely obsolete. My credit card information was already somehow in that new account and had been running fine for about a year until card expired a few weeks ago. They gave me my account information and I logged in and updated it and now it all work! man what a faff !!

In other news we had a new fridge other things. Now it's all LCD screens and buttons everywhere and it can connect to Wi-Fi for whatever reason I really don't know. Currently I'm just waiting for the milk to unfreeze as we don't know how to use the thing now. Told mother she needs to go and read the manual because I can't be bothered :roll:

But again, case in point, I just think things are just so overengineered these days, to the point of just adding in technology just for the sake of adding in technology. There is no way that little computer environment is going to last 40 years like the simple knob we had in our old fridge. The 3.5 and you're good to go.. Now we need an afternoon,a manual, and Wi-Fi, just to make a cup of tea now !!

In other news, girlfriends mum ended up in a banking scam.. Again... Some random person contacted her on whatsapp about someone trying to take £7,000 out of her bank account and they need to verify her bank details to put it back.. So of course within that three hours of conversation, yet somehow managed to give the guy remote access to her tablet and bank account where he did actually take out £7,000. The problem is, in a way this reinforces what the guy on whatsapp was saying as her bank now shows someone trying to take out £7,000 her bank account !

Long story short, what a mess, the bank managed to get her money back thankfully and she had to go to a Lloyds bank to have the account unsuspended.. Which is rather hard to do since the local one closed down a few years ago. So she had to travel miles to get to the closest Lloyds bank, when she can barely even walk these days.

The course Lloyds frauds team were totally perplexed by why she did all that in the first place. My girlfriend had a pretty good telling off to her as well. If her mom had not mentioned it a couple of hours actually actually did it, she would have almost certainly lost that money and a lot more. She is also been looking through a bank account and found somehow people on Google wallet have been spending her money in ASDA cafe.

I even spoke to her mum myself and just basically gave up because she just has so many different problems and so many conceptions and bad ideas about everything that there literally is no point saying anything at all. It would take an entire day displaying everything to her but she just would not understand anyway. Lloyds bank even said to her that they have 40 people every day in that branch because of fraud..

One thing basically goes like this.. She installed the same security oft where I use because she used to have that on my PC originally.. She went totally premium and installed the whole thing. She then somehow ended up with her banking app not letting her login.. Now there could be any number of reasons why she could not login.. Like wrong views name wrong pass word.. Site not working.. Internet crapping out.. All sorts.. But she blamed the antivirus software, while that is certainly possible it could have been white listed, but she uninstalled the whole thing and then her banking started working correctly again.. But that's a bad connection to make between the two things.. Maybe she simply mistyped her password uninstalled the antivirus that are password correct and then it worked correctly.. But trying to explain this.. My God... I mean if the site was simply down or running slow for half an hour, by the time she had uninstalled everything the site would have sorted itself out anyway... Mix in about 20 other similar sorts of problems on top..

Then there is the girlfriend layer where she did not understand that claim can actually pop-up that your password needs to be changed.. I am glad that because when MySpace got hacked it leaked one of my old passwords that password is still used repeatedly trying to hack my email and such on my server and million other variations of it.. And sure people he will know the pop-up I mean... But of course then there is the malware aspect where you end up with pop-ups saying change your password click here... How to explain the difference......geese....

It really paints a stark picture that these older generations should simply not do online banking and bills and payments and such online they need the physical brands to go into to do this stuff because a lot of them are clearly getting into a mess !

We get scam calls all the time over the phone. I could write a book on the amount of them we get ! I mean these start out with "can we speak to the owner of the business" , but they upped their game now and say "can I speak to Chris" , my mum has already had specific instructions to put the phone down if anyone says that anyway :lol: can I speak to Chris please, who's calling?, it is about your direct debit payments to BT... Sky.. severn trent.. and everything else you can think of as well..

:sigh: :dizzy: