Contractor UK Bulletin Board

Nationwide AGM voting

mudskipper — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 10:13:26 GMT

Nothing to do with contracting

Most of us ignore elections for directors for financial organisations, but if you're a Nationwide member, pay a little more attention. For the first time in over 20 years a member has been nominated to the board. The board have recommended to vote against his appointment and provided a quick "accept board's recommendations" box for the lazy. Anyway I reckon he deserves a crack, so if you're a member, do have a look at the voting papers and perhaps make the effort to support a member being on the board of what is supposed to be a membership organisation. You can scan the QR code in your pack and do it with a couple of clicks.

https://www.theguardian.com/business...fair-treatment

Teams interview for local on-site contract

Contreras — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 10:49:41 GMT

Client has my CV and wants a meet.

As yet I know nothing about the project other than it is a defined project, and the required tech/skills - Linux kernel dev.

It's a decently large and established company with modern offices on a business park.

They are literally < 10 minutes from my door.

Contract will be 6-months fully on-site.

Contract was billed by the agent as "30 minutes Teams call, then starting shortly after".

I hate video calls, also currently lack a working Windows machine.

I told the agent I think an on-site meet would be best and they concurred.

Nonetheless they have come back with a suggested time for a Teams call.

I have mixed feelings about this. I'm going to push back for an on-site meet.

Any thoughts, please?

Amazon Prime Video Performance Problem

Protagoras — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 09:38:02 GMT

Amazon video streaming is not working reliably for me. Video playback stalls, and sometimes there are error messages such as device not connected to internet or insufficient bandwidth. Turning the video quality down to 'good' doesn't fix this.

During these stalls and error messages, the internet connection (e.g. to 1.1.1.1) still pings in around 17 to 20 ms and speed tests show bandwidth of 60Mb/s download. Connection usage graphs show no other significant network traffic.

No other video streaming service exhibits any problems. All the usual re-starts etc don't help. It does seem to be worse in the evening than durning the day though. I've got no network QoS or bandwidth management enabled. End devices are Safari on Apple.

Any thoughts as to how to diagnose this?

Hello, it's been a while

alreadypacked — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 21:17:45 GMT

How is everyone? After many projects I have decided to create my own SAAS tool. If there are any Devs or testers who would half an hour to give me some honest feedback let me know.

Modest Alphabet Shares for Son

chavvy — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 18:45:26 GMT

I am considering allocating B share to my son and giving him money whilst at University.

We are talking about £4000/annum in dividends.

I have read some of the posts on this forum about Alphabet shares, but this do not seem to fit into my specific case. Mainly because the sums in this case are much smaller.

Any advice welcome.

P.s. I am already getting advice from my accountant and AI.

Home weather station

sadkingbilly — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 11:51:34 GMT

Can anyone recommend a home station that can be linked to from PC and has no mains power reqs???

LLM Advice please

courtg9000 — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 20:37:46 GMT

I'm after a good quality LLM to bung on a webserver. Needs to be lightweight ish. Under 30GB is ideal. Can anyone advise please?

Monday Links from the Gap Between Teams Meetings vol. DCCCLVIII

NickFitz — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 13:02:31 GMT

Late today because I’ve had an extremely busy morning chasing an urgent bug. Weird thing is, I can’t see how it never happened before because if my theory is correct, the function in question has been wrong for over two years

You Can Run - ”When their parents ripped two young sisters from their privileged lives, gave them fake names, and took them on the lam, they thought it was because their father was in trouble with the IRS. It would be years before they learned the truth about his life of crime.” Being a fugitive was much easier before we had all this technology
Study Shows Octopuses’ Impressive Ability to Navigate Space - ”Researchers demonstrate invertebrates can solve a spatial problem using a mirror.” Clever people, those cephalopods. The full paper is online: Octopus bimaculoides can learn to utilize a mirror to localize a reward outside the line of sight
Singularities inside black holes are truly unavoidable - Ethan Siegel explains why the impossible has to happen inside a black hole: ”Yes, ‘the laws of physics break down’ at singularities. But relativity itself would have to be wrong for black holes to not possess them.”
‘Your brain isn’t fully formed until you’re 25’: A neuroscientist demolishes the greatest mind myth - Turns out the popular belief is just as wrong as the “only use 10%” thing: ”This logic has now formed the basis of official government advice, sentencing, and more. The only problem with this fact is… it’s not a fact. Never has been. No matter how many TikTokers insist otherwise.”
A Zipper Patent Sat in a Garage for 40 Years. Now It’s Real. - ”Back in 1985, an electrical engineer at Polaroid named Bill Freeman had an idea for a three-sided zipper. Not a novelty item, not a quirky art piece, but a genuinely functional fastener capable of switching objects between soft, floppy states and rigid, load-bearing structures.” This looks like a rather clever and useful thing
Queen Mary – California - An account of a stay aboard the retired ocean liner: ”By the mid 1960’s the Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth were being left behind in the shadow of the new jet age… As soon as we stepped on board it was like we had travelled back in time.”
the ice supply, the thank-you note, and other small things that almost took down a company - People do extremely stupid things: ”They lost out on literally millions of dollars in legal fees and a partner was disbarred over an unjustified $5,000 bill to the client… all the lawyers on the file, including the partner in charge of her case, billed her 15 minutes of their regular hourly rate to read her thank-you note that she sent after getting the final bill.”
The Detective Who Investigated Shakespeare's Grave Robbery - ”A Scotland Yard spycatcher investigates Shakespeare's skull theft AND the Whitechapel Murders.” The life of Edwin Thomas Woodhall, who also served in Military Intelligence in the Great War
Powering up a module from the IBM 604: an electronic calculator from 1948 - Ken Shirriff investigates another piece of computing history: ”Since it used vacuum tubes, it was much more powerful than electromechanical equipment; it could do 60 operations in under a second, including multiplication and division. As a result, the IBM 604 became very popular, with over 5600 units produced. Moreover, IBM's experience with electronics in the 604 led to the success of its vacuum-tube computers in the 1950s.”
Courtroom Sketches of Ida Libby Dengrove - ”Collection of 6224 sketches, mainly courtroom sketches of criminal and civil trials around New York City, drawn by Ida Libby Dengrove.” Dengrove worked on many of the most high profile cases of the 1970s onwards, including Son of Sam, and John Hinckley’s trial for shooting Reagan, shown here.

Happy invoicing!

Built an AI job board for IT contractors - feedback welcome

contractorgig — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 12:12:08 GMT

Fellow contractors,
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.

MVL Online

Maslins — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 10:21:27 GMT

Lots of Contractor UKers have used MVL Online to liquidate their companies, which I'm hugely grateful for. It's a business I (Chris Maslin) owned jointly with licensed insolvency practitioner David Thorniley.

David's older than me, and has been discussing retirement for a while. I'm not an insolvency practitioner (IP), hence couldn't run it without another IP involved. So we've been looking at options to secure the business's future.

As of Monday 1 June, the business has legally been sold to liquidator firm BTG. The underlying brand/business "MVL Online" will continue largely as is. The new structure will still involve the same client facing team (myself and some of the staff at Maslins), but a different IP legally taking on the appointments, and some other tweaks behind the scenes. The client experience should remain the same.

Software Security Specialist

m0n1k3r — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 09:31:26 GMT

I received a request from a client in the EU for a software security specialist. I don't have everything that's required, but perhaps somebody else has everything that they're asking for.

It's about supporting advanced software development within an innovative industrial technology environment. This is a consulting assignment within a forward-thinking Intelligent Manufacturing IT department, working with modern CAD/CAM software solutions.

Act as a key advisor and hands-on expert in product cybersecurity, guiding development teams in building secure, compliant, and resilient software products.

Implement a Secure Software Development Lifecycle (SSDL) aligned with international standards and regulatory requirements.

Must haves:

Experience in software security and product cyber security
IEC 62443-4-1 and the EU Cyber Resilience Act
Experience working with agile dev teams

CSSLP certification is a strong nice to have.

This can be worked fully remote, 35 hours/week.

Nationwide Building Society House Price Index May 26

Martin@AS Financial — 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/h...ces/may-2026-2

New contract. need a new umbrella

passerby — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 13:26:46 GMT

Hi,

On the market for a new umbrella as I was outside IR35 for my latest gig.

I need one that allows salary sacrifice into a SIPP (interactive investors), preferably, with no delay.

was leaning for Clarity but now that I see Lucy has left, not sure.

Thanks all

What was going on, on 29 May?

ladymuck — 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

Monday Links from the Gap Between Teams Meetings vol. DCCCLVII

NickFitz — 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

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!