Contractor UK Bulletin Board - https://forums.contractoruk.com/ en Fri, 05 Jun 2026 04:50:37 GMT vBulletin 60 images/misc/rss.png Contractor UK Bulletin Board - https://forums.contractoruk.com/ Built an AI job board for IT contractors - feedback welcome https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151250-built-an-ai-job-board-for-it-contractors-feedback-welcome.html Thu, 04 Jun 2026 12:12:08 GMT I'm a full stack contractor who got fed up with traditional job sites, so I built something.

ContractorGig - every job has AI-extracted IR35 status with a confidence score and evidence quote from the actual JD. Also includes AI matching, CV tailoring, rate intelligence showing live market rates by tech stack, and auto-apply for high-match roles.

UK IT contracts only for now. Live at https://contractorgig.com

Feedback welcome.
]]> General contractorgig https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151250-built-an-ai-job-board-for-it-contractors-feedback-welcome.html Nationwide Building Society House Price Index May 26 https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151246-nationwide-building-society-house-price-index-may-26-a.html Wed, 03 Jun 2026 12:11:20 GMT Key Points: UK annual house price growth slowed to 1.7% in May, from 3.0% in April House prices were down 0.6% month on month Full report here: https://www.nationwide.co.uk/media/hpi/resources/may-2026-2
  • UK annual house price growth slowed to 1.7% in May, from 3.0% in April
  • House prices were down 0.6% month on month

    • Full report here:

    https://www.nationwide.co.uk/media/h...ces/may-2026-2
    ]]>     General Martin@AS Financial https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151246-nationwide-building-society-house-price-index-may-26-a.html     What was going on, on 29 May? https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151243-what-was-going-on-on-29-may.html Mon, 01 Jun 2026 14:18:04 GMT
    Most users ever online was 111,197 at 13:30 on 29 May 2026.
    That's a lot of people spending their lunch break here ]]>     General ladymuck https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151243-what-was-going-on-on-29-may.html     Monday Links from the Gap Between Teams Meetings vol. DCCCLVII https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151242-monday-links-from-the-gap-between-teams-meetings-vol-dccclvii.html Mon, 01 Jun 2026 11:38:57 GMT Now the heatwave is over, we can carry on living life vicariously through the World Wide Web as we did during it :rolleyes: The Grate Cheese Robbery (https://longreads.com/2026/05/28/the-cheese-theft-food-crime/) - Organised crime is coming for your cheese: ”It wasn’t beyond the realms of...
    • The Grate Cheese Robbery - Organised crime is coming for your cheese: ”It wasn’t beyond the realms of belief when a big, fat order came in for artisanal cheddar in 2024. A French supermarket wanted to purchase 950 truckles of the stuff, an order worth around $400,000… On October 14, 2024, the cheese was collected, just like it was supposed to be. But neither the cheese nor the buyer was ever seen again. The 950 truckles—roughly the weight of a fully grown whale shark—disappeared without a trace.”
    • Key Chemistry Question Answered, No Quantum Computer Required - Chemists keeping it real: ”Do we need quantum computers to fully understand complex chemical reactions? A new result, decades in the making, shows the surprising power of ordinary ‘classical’ machines.”
    • The canary resuscitator - The Science and Industry Museum explains that canaries in coal mines weren’t sacrificial lambs: ”The circular door would be kept open and had a grill to prevent the canary escaping. Once the canary showed signs of carbon monoxide poisoning the door would be closed and a valve opened, allowing oxygen from the tank on top to be released and revive the canary.”
    • How The Heck Do Traffic Lights Work? - ”How Victorian railway semaphores evolved into modern traffic systems.” I once had occasion to dip into a 1970s book on Traffic Engineering, though I can’t remember now whether two of the key variables for traffic lights were “minimum green time” and “maximum red time” or the other way around
    • Current Rothko - Let this site use your location, or search for one, and it will show you a Rothko painting that reflects your current weather conditions. Where I am, right now is ”Untitled Brown and Gray” which sounds about right.
    • The 40 Most Rage-Inducing Problems in Tech - ”The bugs, broken apps, and nightmare customer-service bots we can’t escape, presented as a blessed and sacred addendum to Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical on AI.” Brian Phillips crowdsourced these annoyances on BlueSky last week, and there are plenty more in the thread and quote posts that didn’t make the cut
    • Fifty years ago, Hunter Davies discovered Beryl Cook. Now, on her centenary, he finds he owns her long-lost self-portrait - The retired journalist and editor on the artist who enjoyed huge popularity a few decades ago: ”The art editor flicked through them on his lightbox… I went back to my desk, furious. I had bowed to the art department’s visual wisdom for two years, as I know bugger all about photography and design. This time, though, I said, ‘Hard cheese. I am the editor of this mag. We are using them in the next edition.’”
    • Keywords - ”Discover today’s five connected words.” This simple game by Dave “Bagpuss” Forsey can be quite infuriating, so I don’t see why you shouldn’t suffer along with me
    • Microcode inside the Intel 8087 floating-point chip: register exchange - Ken Shirriff continues his exploration of the Intel floating point coprocessor: ”In this post, I take a close look at the microcode for one of the 8087's instructions—FXCH—and explain how the microcode works. The FXCH (Floating-point Exchange) instruction exchanges two floating-point registers. You might expect this instruction to be trivial, but there's more going on than you might expect; the microcode uses 14 micro-instructions to implement the exchange instruction.”
    • Budapest Courtyards - ”Between 2014 and 2016, we visited 400 of the more than 4,000 internal courtyards in Budapest. Their large number and variety of styles incorporating different facets of classicism and modernity make them a remarkable architectural phenomenon — a charming second city within the city.” Photos by Yves Marchand & Romain Meffre

    Happy invoicing! ]]>     General NickFitz https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151242-monday-links-from-the-gap-between-teams-meetings-vol-dccclvii.html     <![CDATA[Why can't recruitment agents read?]]> https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151239-why-can-t-recruitment-agents-read.html Fri, 29 May 2026 15:57:32 GMT Just received the below via LinkedIn. The only thing they got correct was my name and my current client. My current role has nothing to do with those technologies and nothing in my historical experience mentions them either. I replied thanking them for the approach and highlighting I had none of...
    I replied thanking them for the approach and highlighting I had none of the required experience saying, "I'm not sure what search terms you used but they're not giving you very good results".



    I’m reaching out as your background at [CLIENT NAME REDACTED] really stood out to me. I’m currently supporting a large-scale, business-critical remote access programme with a leading UK retailer, and your experience looks highly aligned with what they need at this stage.

    This is a Business Analyst role focused on a major transformation across corporate, retail, and operational technology environments - working with technologies like Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD), Zscaler, and IoT/OT.

    Details:
    £700 P/D (Inside IR 35)
    Hybrid position (3 days P/W on-site)
    3-6 Month contract opportunity (initially)
    If anyone thinks this is a real gig and wants a crack at it, let me know, and you can see if the numpty who sent this is a real boy or an AI bot.]]>     General ladymuck https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151239-why-can-t-recruitment-agents-read.html     superlooper https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151237-superlooper.html Fri, 29 May 2026 08:55:37 GMT get your own personal supercomputer!! https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx211w5gwr7o
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx211w5gwr7o]]>     General sadkingbilly https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151237-superlooper.html     <![CDATA[Let's be careful up there]]> https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151232-let-s-be-careful-up-there.html Tue, 26 May 2026 09:34:59 GMT https://uk.news.yahoo.com/paraglider...092038760.html

    Woman has paraglider shredded by moron in Cesna.

    Isn't there some sort of Sail before Steam thing up there FFS?

    Then again, it ain't known as Indian Country for nothing.]]>     General DoctorStrangelove https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151232-let-s-be-careful-up-there.html     Monday Links from the Bank Holiday Deckchair vol. DCCCLVI https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151229-monday-links-from-the-bank-holiday-deckchair-vol-dccclvi.html Mon, 25 May 2026 12:15:52 GMT It’s far too warm out, but it’s always cool on the Internet :) The Wrong Stalker (https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2026/the-wrong-stalker/) - ”He was locked up for a dangerous infatuation. Nothing was as it seemed.” The strange case of a man accused of being a stalker who was actually the...
    • The Wrong Stalker - ”He was locked up for a dangerous infatuation. Nothing was as it seemed.” The strange case of a man accused of being a stalker who was actually the one being stalked
    • Two Researchers Are Rebuilding Mathematics From the Ground Up - ”By replacing the most fundamental concept in topology, Peter Scholze and Dustin Clausen are taking the first step in a far bigger program to understand why numbers behave the way they do.” It'd be nice if they made it understandable this time
    • Newton's Law of Gravity Just Passed Its Biggest Test Ever - ”The motion of galaxy clusters in the distant Universe has just yielded the largest-scale test yet of the laws of gravity.” These findings suggest dark matter may actually be a thing.
    • Ordinary WiFi can now identify people with near perfect accuracy - Nowhere to hide: ”Scientists in Germany have demonstrated a startling new form of surveillance: identifying people using nothing more than ordinary WiFi signals. By analyzing how radio waves bounce around a room, researchers can effectively ‘see’ and recognize individuals — even if they are not carrying a device and even if their phone is turned off.”
    • Canada Is Building a Surveillance Network in Space - Satellite tracking with an abandoned radio telescope: ”The planet’s most valuable real estate no longer sits on the ground but moves above the atmosphere—an orbital economy that must be protected. And the first step is knowing who else shares the neighbourhood.”
    • The Sexy Sci-Fi Origins of the Chupacabra Legend - Not all legends are ancient: ”Odds are you’ve heard of the chupacabra, the mysterious South American vampire… It’s easy to assume the chupacabra is an old folktale, one passed down over the generations like Sasquatch or the Yeti, but it actually dates from as recently as 1995. It’s the same age as Season Two of Friends.”
    • Additive Synthesis 101 - ”Let’s talk about harmonics!” This webcomic about sound synthesis includes interactive elements that let you explore the concepts being explained
    • Year Clock - Time in Concentric Rings - ”Time visualized as 10 concentric rings, each representing a different temporal scale. From the innermost ring (seconds, rotating 60 times per minute) to the outermost (year progress), watch how different time scales move simultaneously.” It’s one way to pass the time
    • Reverse engineering circuitry in a Spacelab computer from 1980 - Ken Shirriff delves into some space junk: ”Spacelab was a reusable laboratory that could be carried in the cargo bay of the Space Shuttle… Spacelab was controlled by a French-built minicomputer, called the Mitra 125 MS. Unlike modern computers, this computer didn't contain a microprocessor chip. Instead, its 16-bit processor was constructed from several boards of chips. In this article, I reverse-engineer one of the processor boards, shown below, part of the computer's Arithmetic/Logic Unit (ALU).”
    • Seesaws for giants - Twice a year, the boat owners of Chicago migrate to Lake Michigan and back. Marcin Wichary went to watch: ”Every spring, a few times a week, twenty-seven bridges open in sequence to allow the boats to get to the lake… and every fall that sequence is reversed. I flew to Chicago for the weekend so that my local friend Jen and I could chase those bridges as they opened and closed.”

    Happy invoicing! ]]>     General NickFitz https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151229-monday-links-from-the-bank-holiday-deckchair-vol-dccclvi.html     Who needs foreign climes? https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151228-who-needs-foreign-climes.html Sun, 24 May 2026 13:04:50 GMT Taken this morning on a walk around the local lanes, no tourists, no queues, quiet and peaceful and not yet too hot, but the home office aircon has just gone for the first time this year :happy

    Click image for larger version Name: PXL_20260524_102221990.jpg Views: 72 Size: 3.44 MB ID: 4324430


    Click image for larger version Name: PXL_20260524_103220401.jpg Views: 0 Size: 3.24 MB ID: 4324427]]>     General tazdevil https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151228-who-needs-foreign-climes.html     Project Managers cribsheet https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151225-project-managers-cribsheet.html Thu, 21 May 2026 11:56:53 GMT
    Rebuses wry pip
    Superb wire spy
    wiry pubes reps
    Bye spurs wiper.

    HTH all the PM's out there.
    ]]>     General sadkingbilly https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151225-project-managers-cribsheet.html     I came to the island by https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151224-i-came-to-the-island-by.html Thu, 21 May 2026 09:52:45 GMT car this time and the car has very little in the way of suspension and the roads on the island these days are in a very very poor state what the heck is going on Milan.
    and the car has very little in the way of suspension

    and the roads on the island these days are in a very very poor state

    what the heck is going on

    Milan.]]>     General milanbenes https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151224-i-came-to-the-island-by.html     Monday Links from the Gap Between Teams Meetings vol. DCCCLV https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151219-monday-links-from-the-gap-between-teams-meetings-vol-dccclv.html Mon, 18 May 2026 11:25:38 GMT Take a break from the non-stop fun of politics and read this lot instead :) A Hollywood Ending (https://magazine.atavist.com/2026/a-hollywood-ending) - Maccabee Montandon on the family tragedy that shaped his life: ”After my brother, Asher, was shot and killed on June 17, 1992, friends and...
    • A Hollywood Ending - Maccabee Montandon on the family tragedy that shaped his life: ”After my brother, Asher, was shot and killed on June 17, 1992, friends and family told me I had to deal with the tragedy or it would eat me alive… About two decades after Asher’s murder, I began to understand: I had unanswered questions, untended feelings, a mysterious, painful hole in my life. It was time to deal.”
    • How the Bird Eye Was Pushed to an Evolutionary Extreme - There's more to birds' eyes than fish fingers: ”The bird retina is one of the most energetically expensive tissues in the animal kingdom, yet it doesn’t use the energy advantage of oxygen. New research finally explains how this is possible.”
    • Nearly Half of Italy’s Wolves Are Part Dog Now. Is That a Problem? - ”Wolf-dog hybrids are taking over Italy, raising scientists’ concerns for the future of the country’s wolves.” Probably better than the dogs becoming wolves
    • The discovery of an atmosphere on a tiny Kuiper belt world - ”A relatively tiny world in the Kuiper belt, just 500 km in diameter, has an atmosphere after all, joining Pluto.” Maybe we can send Elon Musk to live there
    • Brain scans reveal how people with autistic traits connect differently - Neurodivergents attract: ”People with similar levels of autistic traits show greater social attraction to one another, and their brains synchronize in unique ways during active conversation. A recent experiment published in Biological Psychiatry suggests that social difficulties related to autism might be a problem of mismatched communication styles rather than an inherent social deficit.”
    • Tokyo’s 'Sagrada Familia' stands defiant after 20 years of building - Keisuke Oka's wife casually suggested he build them a house. Over twenty years on, it's nearly finished: ”He did not build the 12-meter-tall structure with a fleet of heavy machinery or a large construction crew. Instead, he built it with his own hands, a pickaxe and a radical philosophy of ‘self-building,’ which challenges the ephemeral nature of Japanese urban architecture.”
    • catfishing - the Wikipedia guessing game - Another Wikipedia game: ”On Wikipedia, each article is in a number of categories. Guess the article title from its categories.”
    • Types of Fun - Daniel Lavery offers a taxonomy of fun: ”Type IV Fun: An activity that is neither fun while it is happening nor in recollection, often involving tremendous suffering and great risk, but might later bring joy to many if a documentary is made on the subject; if, for example, you died in a highly preventable accident while cave diving.”
    • Go for the Gold – “Your name up there in lights” - Computer game historian Iain Mew uncovers the remarkable career of Michael Crick, whose Go for the Gold topped the UK games charts in 1986: ”He wrote his first computer game in 1966, worked on the precursor to the internet, and invented two games series which remain ongoing household names, as well as the first version of a utility which a vast number of people use every day… His father was Francis Crick, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962 for his work on documenting the structure of DNA.”
    • The Sun like you’ve never seen it before - astounding pictures and 4K timelapse videos of our nearest star - ”Miguel Claro’s solar images capture a side of the Sun that can’t be seen by human eyes alone.” This is the chromosphere and corona

    Happy invoicing! ]]>     General NickFitz https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151219-monday-links-from-the-gap-between-teams-meetings-vol-dccclv.html     summer holiday plans https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151214-summer-holiday-plans.html Wed, 13 May 2026 09:31:58 GMT
    what are the summer holiday plans this year ?

    all we have at the moment is Mrs Benes and my good self going to a very quiet island which people who don't know how to behave on holiday haven't heard of and wouldn't be able to get and wouldn't even like anyway in the HR adriatic for a relaxing week

    Milan.]]>     General milanbenes https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151214-summer-holiday-plans.html     the pool https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151213-the-pool.html Wed, 13 May 2026 09:23:42 GMT
    how cool is that

    we are currently consuming about 35kwh per day and of that 0.5kwh is coming from the grid

    you gotta be in it to win it


    Milan in "going green" mode.]]>     General milanbenes https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151213-the-pool.html     Monday Links from the Gap Between Teams Meetings vol. DCCCLIV https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151211-monday-links-from-the-gap-between-teams-meetings-vol-dcccliv.html Mon, 11 May 2026 11:17:38 GMT
    • Big Game - ”Colorado’s San Luis Valley was a wildlife poacher’s paradise. Then an undercover federal agent arrived.” A cunning plan to catch poachers in 1980s Colorado: rather than track them down, a special agent with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service posed as a taxidermist and sausage maker, so the poachers brought their kills to him!
    • Cosmic Cannibalism: When Stars Eat Their Planets - ”When a star consumes planetary material, the planet’s elements get mixed into the star’s outer layers, which leaves behind a chemical fingerprint… Roughly one in twelve Sun-like stars shows evidence of having eaten a planet.” So that’s where all the aliens went
    • MIT’s virtual violin offers luthiers a new design tool - ”Violin makers, aka luthiers, traditionally learn from hands-on experience how to craft parts and select materials to shape an instrument’s final sound. MIT engineers hope to streamline that painstaking process with their new virtual violin. It’s a computer simulation tool that can capture the precise physics of the instrument and even reproduce a realistic sound of a plucked string.” More details in the paper Exploring the behavior of a strung computational Stradivarius violin at npj Acoustics.
    • The hypercurious mind - Neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff suggests that ADHD involves a difference in attentiveness, not a deficit: ”What if the question isn’t what constrains attention, but what captures it?… The delay aversion, the executive struggles, the altered reward-processing – they can all be seen as downstream expressions of a brain that has fundamentally different priorities about what deserves attention, priorities that may have served early human societies in certain environments long before modern medicine defined them as a disorder.”
    • Can a Wood Heat Shield Really Work? - HT to DoctorStrangelove for this account of an unusual approach to reentry from the early days of China’s space programme: ”Ed Lu, a three-time astronaut… told me about the strangest technological innovation I’d ever heard of: China’s wooden heat shield.”
    • Tower Bridge: The Most Outrageous Stunts - ”Tower Bridge has attracted all kinds of attention over the decades, including some spectacular stunts.” Planes, helicopters, skydivers, and of course a double-decker bus have all made unusual visits to the London landmark
    • Where's Putin? How The Kremlin Hides His Location With Three Nearly Identical Offices - “Nearly” isn’t good enough, and various tiny discrepancies can reveal Putin’s real location: ”While the handle Putin reaches for as he leaves the office looks the same, it is set slightly higher… Among other details that reveal discrepancies between the location announced by the Kremlin and the actual location of numerous meetings purportedly held at Novo-Ogaryovo: the patterns on Putin's neckties, the shape of a TV stand, the hue of a tabletop, and the grain of a wooden document tray on the desk.”
    • Violet Club - The first high yield weapon deployed by the British - HT to Protagoras for this account of Britain’s early nuclear devices. Frankly, nobody seemed to feel very comfortable around them: ”’AWRE were almost completely sure that a nuclear explosion would not occur… but in the absence of trial-proof he could not guarantee it.’ It is hardly surprising that his qualification of 'almost' did not instill confidence in the Service users.”
    • ConstituencyClick - The local elections may be over, but you can sustain that politics high with this game: ”You'll be shown the name of a UK parliamentary constituency. Click where you think it is on the map. 65 points per round — minus 1 for every km you are from the boundary.”
    • The 2026 Milky Way Photographer of the Year - From Capture the Atlas’s annual competition: ”Now in its 9th edition, our Milky Way Photographer of the Year brings together 25 inspiring images captured under some of the most remarkable dark skies on Earth. Each photograph in this collection represents a unique moment where planning, patience, creativity, and technical skill came together beneath the stars.” This fisheye shot of the Milky Way above a field of lupins was taken in Twizel, New Zealand, by Alvin Wu

    Happy invoicing!

    ]]>     General NickFitz https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151211-monday-links-from-the-gap-between-teams-meetings-vol-dcccliv.html