Ask the Bear & Badger - The Bear and Badger

pantyfire

My wife's parents house is in several names. We saw a solicitor recently and he told us any one of the person's named on the deeds can ask for their share to be bought out, failing that they can force a sale of the house to get their share. It doesn't matter if their share is a majority or minority share.

[Deleted User]

Yeah, I was going to suggest speaking to a broker to see if buying her out of her half is possible based on your finances.

I'm not sure of the ins and outs but I imagine you will need to pay her the percentage she owns of the current value of the property rather than paying off her debt owed.

cockbeard

How long have you had the place? If it's not been that long there's every possibility that there's no equity actually tied up in the place yet. Or that it's relatively small and managable perhaps on a credit card without needing to remortgage etc. Though you should probably speak to your lender in the first instance, as the change in circumstances might affect their willingness to continue

M0stly harm13ss

What’s above there Nick. Also, to remove any arguments about the value, you’ll need 2-3 separate valuations from separate agents.

JonB

I couldn't log in to my Amazon account today and was told that my email address wasn't recognised. Went to my emails and noticed an email there from about a week ago from Amazon (I don't check often) saying that my email address had been changed. Sent Amazon an email asking them to put it back, but after that we realised we could still log in to the account from my wife's laptop.

We then noticed that the email address had somehow changed to the new one on her login screen, which is why she could log in. Obviously we could then change it back and also changed the password, so have control again.

So, I'm confused. Someone seems to have hacked in and changed the email address associated with the account, but not changed the password, and then somehow that new email address appeared on the login screen of my wife's computer. Nothing else seems to have been done. Any ideas what the deal is here? Could the hacker have got our card details, even though they're not actually written in full anywhere?

cockbeard

I'm not going to be definitive as I don't really use amazon but it's next to impossible to scrape your card details from any proper shop. It's all encrypted, however they might have been able to make purchases from Amazon while they had access to your account

JonB

Nothing's been bought, thankfully. Other than getting data I'm not sure what the point could have been.

poprock

Possibly hacking in, in order to sell access (or details) to someone else. By getting in quick and changing your details you should have put a stop to that.

Eric

I don't know about hacking but it sounds like it was changed on your wife's computer hence why it remembered the email address(?)

Could she have left it somewhere with the window open logged in for someone to change the email?

JonB

No, it's not been out of the house. Bit weird innit.

Lord_Griff

Technologically proficient ghoul.

regmcfly

So Lovefilm dies at the end of this month - never 4get. We've got a replacement lined up with Cinema Paradiso, but this has made me remember the glory days of Lovefilm doing games. Are there any games rental services still going? Things like Shadow of Mordor or AC Origins are things I would totally play but don't want to drop £40 on.

Yossarian

Shadow of Mordor or Shadow of War?

Mordor was a fiver on DwG a few months back, I expect that it will be again.

Kow

Game still do rentals here, don't know about there.

regmcfly

Yossarian wrote:

Shadow of Mordor or Shadow of War?

Mordor was a fiver on DwG a few months back, I expect that it will be again.

Sorry, meant the sequel - I 100%d the first

GooberTheHat

Is anyone a bit of an expert at virtual machines?

acemuzzy

acemuzzy

(Depends a bit on context, b8t ask away in case I can help... use them lots at work, vmware, openstack and virtualbox on my dev pc)

GooberTheHat

Is it possible to install a VM onto a USB stick? But not as a live cd type setup, but as a persistent drive? If that makes sense.

cockbeard

Pretty certain I used to have virtualbox on a toolkit USB stick I had, just had loads of tools that help out with installs and fixing broken stuff, bootable Ubuntu, windows disc image, system scanning tools that sort of thing

GooberTheHat

So I could have virtualbox on a computer, and use it to install a working distro VM onto a USB drive? And then run that VM from the USB, using the USB drive as a hard drive?

acemuzzy

Yes, I think that's fine.

There are various things that you need to think about with a VM:
- Hypervisor/host - i.e. what's getting the VM to run
- Compute function for the VM - i.e. the CPU
- OS information etc. for the VM
- Persistent storage for the VM (which can be a separate volume)
- Other stuff like network access etc.

It sounds like the first is VirtualBox, the second is your PC, the third and fourth are your USB stick, and the fifth is stuff via your PC again. That's all good. But there will be an overhead that e.g. virtualbox needs to pull data to and from the USB stick to not only read and write files, but also to read & write OS instructions etc., which will likely slow the VM down a chunk (though some will end up cached in your computers RAM and whatnot, which will speed it up again). Hard to judge how good/bad the overall experience will be, but with USB 3.0 I'd expect pretty viable for most non-intensive things.

Alternatively, you could have the VM image on your windows box (so that's fast), and the USB be additional storage. That would speed stuff up.

Or, going the other way, if you want this to be "plug and play", you may be able to have VirtualBox itself on the USB stick, and execute it from there. But that'll be slower again due to the round trip time between your CPU and VirtualBox.

cockbeard

Not sure what the end goal is here. Bear in mind that USB throughput is pretty small. I'd probably only want to be using it for recovery purposes. But you should be able to install a version of VirtualBox on the stick, then install whatever OSes you want on top of that. You might want to use GParted or something to partition the USB stick if you want persistent access to the files you save onto it, no matter what OS you have on the VirtualBox

cockbeard

Muzzy's knowledge is way superior to mine here, so yeah, go with that

edit: if it's for recovery purposes, I'd stick an Ubuntu live disc onto it instead, that will give you access to the existing machine's drives, and you could then plug in a proper USB HDD/SSD to copy files to

GooberTheHat

Thanks to you both. That's really helpful. I'm not sure what the end goal is either, more an experiment than anything else. If I could squeeze VirtualBox onto the USB too then I could theoretically have a portable Linux PC on a USB stick that I could plug into any windows PC and run. That was my thinking. For what end I'm not sure.

Yossarian

I have a friend at work who runs Linux at home whose weekends are now taken up with trying to fix a bug in the sleep function which was introduced in the last update.

cockbeard

If it's for a portable linux distro, I'd just use an Ubuntu live disc, going to be much leaner, and easier to use

https://tutorials.ubuntu.com/tutorial/tutorial-create-a-usb-stick-on-windows#0

Obviously PC must have ability to boot from USB but most anything in last ten years has that

FranticPea

Diluted Dante wrote:

Eric wrote:

Edit: @dante Yeah its a weird one, people like to identify themselves with an area like a badge of honour. I have a work colleague who is from Oldham but tells every one he is a manc. When I told him he wasn't, he got well arsey about it. I'm not really a manc either by the way as I live in Trafford (which is the same grief city fans give us about OT not really being in Manchester). Sorry Griff

I'm from Oldham. I'd call all of Greater Manchester, bar Bolton and Wigan, Manchester. I don't know why those feel separate. I guess they're the only ones that don't border Manchester.

They were all Lancashire until not that long ago when Manchester swallowed them up. I was born when it was Lancashire so I'm from there, not Manchester.

I'm in Cheshire now though so I'm well posh. (even though it's Wigan council and a Wigan phone number).

krs

I recently bought something online from a foreign land but have since returned the item to the foreign land for a refund. I know I can get the VAT and customs fees back as well, however the company I ordered from undervalued the item by $100 on the customs declaration which would be very clear to the Border Force chaps since I would need to send them a copy of the invoice and proof of the refund. So is it worth the potential bother? It's not a vast amount of money to lose but it is mine and I'm not the one at fault.

g.man

Hmmmmm, that's a conundrum. Have you not already saved a significant amount though because of the undervaluation on the original customs declaration?

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