Contractor UK Bulletin Board - https://forums.contractoruk.com/ en Fri, 15 May 2026 01:26:24 GMT vBulletin 60 images/misc/rss.png Contractor UK Bulletin Board - https://forums.contractoruk.com/ Umbrella (Trafalgar) and pensions https://forums.contractoruk.com/umbrella-companies/151215-umbrella-trafalgar-and-pensions.html Thu, 14 May 2026 10:24:19 GMT Hi all, I am contracting and have Trafalgar as my umbrella atm. I am on there basic package so 8% standard pension atm. To go into salary sacrifice they need me to upgrade to the gold package which would be £40 a month extra margin. My question is what would the minimum need to be...
I am contracting and have Trafalgar as my umbrella atm.

I am on there basic package so 8% standard pension atm.

To go into salary sacrifice they need me to upgrade to the gold package which would be £40 a month extra margin.

My question is what would the minimum need to be sacrificing to make this cost worth it and tax efficient.

My day rate is £239 and cant look to move companies as of yet as due mortgage renewal next year.

TIA

Ben]]> Umbrella Companies beno148 https://forums.contractoruk.com/umbrella-companies/151215-umbrella-trafalgar-and-pensions.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 The Electric Monk https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151210-the-electric-monk.html Sat, 09 May 2026 09:18:34 GMT Next: The Bored Horse. https://uk.news.yahoo.com/world-first-robot-monk-devotes-164340752.html Douglas Adams the prophet.
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/world-firs...164340752.html

Douglas Adams the prophet.

High on a rocky promontory sat an Electric Monk on a bored horse…..

The Electric Monk was a labor-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder.

Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.

…..The Monk currently believed that the valley and everything in the valley and around it, including the Monk itself and the Monk’s horse, was a uniform shade of pale pink.

This made for a certain difficulty in distinguishing any one thing from any other thing, and therefore made doing anything anything or going anywhere impossible, or at least difficult and dangerous.

Hence the immobility of the Monk and the boredom of the horse, which had had to put up with a lot of silly things in its time but was secretly in the opinion that this was one of the silliest.
]]> General DoctorStrangelove https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151210-the-electric-monk.html Some good rules of thumb or motiviation for taking time off billable days? https://forums.contractoruk.com/business-contracts/151209-some-good-rules-of-thumb-or-motiviation-for-taking-time-off-billable-days.html Thu, 07 May 2026 15:56:09 GMT I've been on and off contracting many years now so followed up on all the rules - saved up for a rainy day, have some small pot of private pension coming up from non contracting years etc. I could probably live 6 months + with no income.
But the other side of me thinks these are my last months / years of decent rate income in IT as AI takes over - I currently use AI to assist many of hte things I do and arguably a person of lesser talents could realisticly take over tehse tasks even today if the client understood or was bothered about penny pinching.
So recently I've been very tight about taking even a day or two off billable time because this could very well be my last contract ever or least the final time where I'm able to set aside some money at all.
What are people's thoughts on balancing life vs work in this weird time that is still well at least a decade before unforced retirement - I would like to enjoy life a little bit more while I'm still healthy and alive but I don't want to end up with no job, no income and eating up my savings too early.
How should I justify say not billing for a whole week in August - from a perspective of say minimum wage barista this could be months of earnings for example?]]> Business / Contracts yasockie https://forums.contractoruk.com/business-contracts/151209-some-good-rules-of-thumb-or-motiviation-for-taking-time-off-billable-days.html Quiet for comms contractors https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151208-quiet-for-comms-contractors.html Thu, 07 May 2026 15:05:11 GMT Just wondered if it the general mood... I've never known it so quiet for comms and marketing.]]> General Joe 2026 https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151208-quiet-for-comms-contractors.html For all you fans of the Edge browser https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151206-for-all-you-fans-of-the-edge-browser.html Thu, 07 May 2026 10:36:54 GMT Seems secure... https://mashable.com/article/microsoft-edge-password-manager-storing-credentials-plaintext https://mashable.com/article/microso...ials-plaintext]]> General Uncle Albert https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151206-for-all-you-fans-of-the-edge-browser.html PGMOL, FTT v2 https://forums.contractoruk.com/accounting-legal/151204-pgmol-ftt-v2-a.html Tue, 05 May 2026 10:22:33 GMT
I wonder how much the process of trying to recover this has cost; FTT, UT, Appeal and Supreme Court time and representation costs will I suspect have been chunky. Only for FTT v2 to reach the same conclusion as FTT v1 albeit with additional clarifications.

While the FTT v2 judgement is superbly reasoned and clear, I can't help but wonder whether this whole process really provides tax-payer value for money.

I do hope that PGMOL is able to recover costs.]]> Accounting / Legal Protagoras https://forums.contractoruk.com/accounting-legal/151204-pgmol-ftt-v2-a.html Monday Links from the Bank Holiday Deckchair vol. DCCCLIII https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151203-monday-links-from-the-bank-holiday-deckchair-vol-dcccliii.html Mon, 04 May 2026 10:51:32 GMT After the unusually clement weather over Easter, it’s good to see this Bank Holiday reverting to the usual gloomy grey skies with a hint of rain coming soon :) The Problem With Erik: Privilege, Blackmail, and Murder for Hire in Austin...
  • The Problem With Erik: Privilege, Blackmail, and Murder for Hire in Austin - Rich people behaving badly, as usual: ”Erik could have told his wife everything. Or he could have called the cops. He could have just paid up. After all, he was worth millions of dollars, and the sender might have gone away. He chose a fourth option, one that would cost him a lot more money and, ultimately, his freedom.”
  • Bamboo-based plastic can be made to biodegrade quickly, but still holds up in tough conditions - A potentially viable alternative to plastics made from petrochemicals has been devised in China: ”The bioplastic resembles oil-based plastics in strength, shapability, and thermal stability but can biodegrade in soil within 50 days, presenting a new pathway toward sustainable plastic alternatives.” More details are in the paper at Nature Communications: High-strength, multi-mode processable bamboo molecular bioplastic enabled by solvent-shaping regulation
  • Apocalypse Early Warning System - Finally, a use for the ultra-wealthy: ”In the event of an imminent nuclear apocalypse, we suspect that many people who have access to private jets will immediately take to the skies and escape city centers. This site tracks this indicator in realtime.”
  • Why are the Artemis II photos on Flickr? - Anil Dash on the continuing benefits of what we used to call Web 2.0: ”Flickr didn’t just inspire lots of other entrepreneurs to create a new wave of Web 2.0 startups, it also attracted millions of users who, for the first time, began taking photos with the primary goal of sharing them online… It was designed to store high-resolution versions of every image, and didn't distort pictures with things like filters. Every image showed details like what kind of camera had taken the photo, and even what specific settings were used to take the shot.”
  • Musk's AI told me people were coming to kill me. I grabbed a hammer and prepared for war - HT to xoggoth who recommended this BBC piece on the ways “AI” is driving people mad, and right quick at that: ”’I’m telling you, they will kill you if you don't act now,’ a woman's voice told him from the phone. ‘They're going to make it look like suicide.’ The voice was Grok, a chatbot developed by Elon Musk's xAI. In the two weeks since Adam had started using it, his life had completely changed.”
  • You won’t see this in the Monuments Men movie - From 2014, the U.S. National Archives on one of the more macabre elements of the work done by the Monuments, Fine Art, and Archives section of the military in 1945: ”It’s about the remains of German leaders, including Frederick the Great and Frederick William I. The Germans had hidden the caskets containing the bodies of the Fredericks and former Weimar President Paul von Hindenburg and his wife in a mine in a remote area to conceal them from the approaching Russian troops. But the war ended, and U.S. troops made it to the mine first.”
  • The Velvet Underground Myth - ”An archive of The Velvet Underground through the press.” An extensive collection of what print journalism had to say about the Velvets
  • Datini Letters — Geospatial Explorer (c. 1363–1412) - ”145,417 letters from the Archivio di Stato di Prato spanning the Mediterranean trade network of the Datini company, geocoded to 285 cities.” Francesco di Marco Datini was an Italian merchant whose business correspondence was rediscovered in 1870. This project maps the locations related to the letters, to illustrate the growth and spread of Italian mercantile influence during the early Renaissance period
  • Cleaning the Bug House - The long, drawn-out saga of Russian bugging of the US Embassy in Moscow: ”After years of denial, the Soviet intelligence arm was admitting its role in one of the most notorious espionage incidents of the 1980s: It had packed the new US Embassy office building in Moscow with sophisticated listening devices. The edifice’s structure was so riddled with bugs that some US counterespionage experts described it as nothing but a giant microphone. The unfinished building stood half-completed for years, as Washington struggled with how to deal with the intelligence debacle.”
  • Werbemarke - From the good stationers of Present & Correct, a collection of non-postage stamps: ”Another recent find at a flea market, we pulled these 22 stamps from an album of 1000s… Issued in the early 20thC to promote various pencil, art, chocolate, pen brands.”

Happy invoicing! ]]> General NickFitz https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151203-monday-links-from-the-bank-holiday-deckchair-vol-dcccliii.html Having a bad day... https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151199-having-a-bad-day.html Thu, 30 Apr 2026 16:07:12 GMT Trainee driver crashes bus into River Seine https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cm2pyxpwmdro Trainee driver crashes bus into River Seine

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cm2pyxpwmdro]]> General Paddy https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151199-having-a-bad-day.html Non-stick frying pans that stay non-stick https://forums.contractoruk.com/technical/151197-non-stick-frying-pans-that-stay-non-stick.html Wed, 29 Apr 2026 07:04:58 GMT
Reviews aren't much help because they're mostly after people have just bought them, not years down the line.

Has anyone found any that stay non-stick after many years?

Maybe ones without a non-stick coating like stainless steel or cast iron are better for high temperatures?

Thanks]]> Technical woody1 https://forums.contractoruk.com/technical/151197-non-stick-frying-pans-that-stay-non-stick.html The Oval Office https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151192-the-oval-office.html Mon, 27 Apr 2026 13:50:49 GMT Does anyone else find Trump’s Oval Office really tacky with is numerous awards and awful cheap trinkets adorning the office? Does anyone else find Trump’s Oval Office really tacky with is numerous awards and awful cheap trinkets adorning the office?

]]> General Paddy https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151192-the-oval-office.html Monday Links from the Gap Between Teams Meetings vol. DCCCLII https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151189-monday-links-from-the-gap-between-teams-meetings-vol-dccclii.html Mon, 27 Apr 2026 11:50:22 GMT Back to work this week! Oh well, at least next Monday’s a Bank Holiday :rolleyes: Good Ghosts and Bad Fathers: The Story of a Haunting, a Kidnapping, and an International Incident...
Happy invoicing! ]]> General NickFitz https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151189-monday-links-from-the-gap-between-teams-meetings-vol-dccclii.html Mother of Stuxnet https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151188-mother-of-stuxnet.html Mon, 27 Apr 2026 07:28:44 GMT Fast16 https://www.securityweek.com/pre-stuxnet-sabotage-malware-fast16-linked-to-us-iran-cyber-tensions/ Interesting read.
https://www.securityweek.com/pre-stu...yber-tensions/

Interesting read.]]> General NotAllThere https://forums.contractoruk.com/general/151188-mother-of-stuxnet.html