This is a real bother if you touch type! I learned to always check what you've typed! Eventually my brain became bilingual - a bit like driving in Europe/Britain, it takes a little while to get used to it.

After teaching myself dvorak some years back, I found that I could only touch-type qwerty while I constantly glanced at the keyboard, and dvorak while I didn't. It didn't matter what (if anything) was printed on the keys, just the direction my eyes were pointing.

I had similar problems with a French laptop years ago. I'd set up Linux full disk encryption successfully, but upon reboot couldn't get into the computer. It kept rejecting my password. Finally the penny dropped that it was defaulting to US keyboard layout until further into the boot sequence when it switched to French.

Similar issue years ago with a French keyboard (numbers are shifted, as I recall) which read as a US keyboard at bios level until the OS woke up and notice it was French. So the bios password worked but the keys weren't where you thought they ought to be.

Speaking of unresponsive brain cells...

Take a few more of (icon) --->

Will kill all the unresponsive braincells quite effectively.

A friend was living in a student house with an aggressive landlord who would deduct from the deposit over so much as a drawing pin in the wall. To make matters worse, the walls somehow were able to block WiFi signals quite effectively. As this Victorian building had fireplaces in every significant room, they were able to use plumb bobs to fish for Cat 5, taking each run from the router in the living room up to the chimney pots and looping over back into the bedrooms. No (visible) damage was caused because the same aggressive landlord had cheaped out on closing the fireplaces and just used screws to secure plywood over the fireplaces. It did take a few attempts of swinging the bob to reach some fireplaces because of oddly shaped flues but they got there in the end.

If there is even the slightest possibility that your landlord won't return your deposit (hint: duh), then remember that not only is it really just a month or so paid in advance but that it can take many more months than that to kick out a non-paying tenant.

I don't know their specifics but, when I was renting accommodation at the same time as a student, I had a guarantor (my parents). I can see that being a viable strategy if your credit history is already a train wreck but, if not, it does open you up to more costly issues (in total) over time. Personally, I'd go with good documentation (much easier these days to record a quick 4k walk through of the property) and the threat of the Housing Ombudsman.

It's worth remembering that for student lets, they are usually for a fixed term - so you are out at the end of the academic year regardless. Not paying the rent would be a bad move, as mentioned, liable to cause "annoyance" to your guarantor(s), and probably getting you a bad credit record into the bargain.

My work laptop is Windows officially-the-last. I prefer my OS in English, so I set the default language to English.

Of course, I work in Luxembourg and live in France, so I set my location to France.

When I call up the Borkzilla Store, it is systematically in French. When I install a program, often the setup process is in French.

Guys, it's the location that is France, not the language.

Get your shit in order.

I have similar problems with some over-zealous location detecting websites. I'm in the UK now, but sometimes like to see various French news sites etc and go directly to the French version of the site, only for it to detect I'm in the UK and auto switch to the English version. With some sites it is impossible to wrestle it back to see the original French version.

"I have similar problems with some over-zealous location detecting websites. I'm in the UK now, but sometimes like to see various French news sites etc and go directly to the French version of the site, only for it to detect I'm in the UK and auto switch to the English version. With some sites it is impossible to wrestle it back to see the original French version."

I have quit reading ign.com in large part due to that. No, I don't want the french version, some people in France read english, or czech, or whatever. Why do some websites admins think locations are hard linked to languages ?

Although UK based I'm often remoted on to systems on other continents, Australasia isn't too much of a problem as at least web sites come up in a form of English but my Asian language knowledge is sadly lacking which is a pain when searching for a driver or similar and the website insists on being in the local language.

Same shit, different country. Even though my laptop language is English, I still get Spanish crap being installed evwn after farting around with language packs etc.

The other problem is the American software sales dept mentality. I hate those forms that make you specify the country you are in because you get deluged by crap from the local sales bit of turf even though the client I'm working for is in a different country. I use it as a test now to see how "international" a company mentality actually is... Snowflake take note.

There's a world of a difference between finding a clever solution to a problem, and ignoring rules or instructions just to save money.

I used to work in a large R&D block where all the partition walls were part of the fireproofing, and made of asbestos cement.

It was made very clear to everyone that anyone who tried to be clever and route ordinary (non-fire-retardant) cable through any gaps, or (far worse) attempt to make a new hole in a wall, would be in very deep shit indeed.

It's not always clever to find short cuts, and insurance companies take a very dim view of it when expected to pay for the consequences.

~2000 Luxembourg. I found a IBM Model M[?] keyboard in the spares and decided to use it.

It had a large, vertical enter key and Swiss-French or other keycaps. I used it with a US code page and touch-typed.

One day one of the other developers had to use my workstation, I found him copy/pasting a character, a semi-colon or quote maybe, as that was the only way he could generate the character.

Worked on a product which was localised into something like 14 (!) languages. The reality was that it was comprehensively tested on US/UK English, minimally on French + German, and untested on the others. We had a release where one Korean string was missing. The result was an instant crash when accessing a menu when running in Korean. Cue an emergency hotfix for Korean users only.

I think the most absurd long distance network cable I've been involved with went across a factory roof. It was well over 100m, so we added a small switch (PoE powered) somewhere near the middle, wrapped in a plastic bag to keep it dry.