Potential riots and equipment budgeting – freelancers chat on 7th August 2024
Posted by Paul Silver
Having missed two Farm meet ups due to holiday and illness (they went fine, but no notes from them), I was delighted to make it his week although with a riot rumoured to be happening nearby, the starting of meeting was a little anxious.
Happily, the riot did not happen, and an anti-fascist protest against the potential rioters was many, many times larger and passed completely peacefully, with Brighton Police doing a good job of mediating and keeping people safe.
Nine of us made it to the meet up, this is some of what we talked about:
- Riots?
- Refocussing what you do as a business
- Dealing with the hot weather
- Pride experiences
- Recent holidays
- Moving from iPhone to Android was remarkably easy
- New Samsung Fold 6 is brilliant
- Assessing how much you will pay for new equipment by breaking it down per week over three years – will you use it enough?
- Using Rokid AR glasses, a foldable keyboard and high end phone for mobile working
- Rebuilding a personal project for new APIs
- Tiktok and ADHD
- Getting too into personal projects as a form of procrastination
- Stock market swings – do not check your pension every day
- Hale and Pace
- Attempting to motivate your children
- Brian Blessed’s attempts on Everest
- Making sure you have IDs on data
- Job hunting and referrals
Highlights
Advice from two people at the meeting:
Stock market swings
If the stock market is showing swings, do not check your pension every day, especially if you’ve got a lot of money in it. Seeing it drop will cause you to worry all day, and even if it bounces back a few days later, you’re still handling the worries in the meantime. Pensions work out in the long term, let it sit there and do its thing.
Equipment budgeting over years
This was advice from Hazlitt. If you’re looking at buying a piece of equipment for your business, it’s often better to go for the higher spec item as that gives you better speed over the lifetime of the equipment. If you consider you’ll have the computer for three years, work out how much it will cost for each week of use (roughly, divide the cost by 156, if we ignore holidays.)
Does it now seem worth it to you? Does getting a larger SSD or RAM add much to that weekly cost, do you think it’ll help you get work done faster or more smoothly, is that worth the difference? The same goes for extended warrantees (which can be well worth it.)
I think this is probably a good way to look at whether your purchases are worth it or not, or maybe that’s because it makes upgrades look more affordable. It certainly makes my old laptop which lasted for seven years of hard use feel like an absolute bargain.