We find that ours won’t cope with a really hot day – it needs supplementing with ice packs.

I think ours will do 20 below ambient and we’ve never been camping with sustained hot temps where that’s not enough. Keeping it full helps too. On days like today, it would probably need a helping hand.

We have a 12v camping gaz cool box. It works well as a passive cool box as well as when it’s plugged in. So we’ve managed on several 2 week trips with a combination of ice packs (a lot of campsites abroad have freezers for swapping them out), ice and running it in the car when driving places.

Tbh, we survived fine in Tasmania with a cheapo cool box from Bunnings and topping up with ice every few days.

*Harwich to Hook of Holland on Stena

No pets in cabins allowed, dog kennels available (which you can watch on TV but presumably not much use for OP)

We used to have Apeel orange juice with Sunday lunch – I’d love to try it again now my tastebuds have grown up. We used to see it as a real treat

Coming back from the Netherlands yesterday we were giving a URL when checking in with Stena and told we had to complete an online form for coming back into the UK – no paper option. Lots of stupid questions, no idea whether they were actually checked. We weren’t asked, the car next to us was but they didn’t ask to see the proof.

Can’t advise on Belgium but we no checks coming into the Netherlands from the UK other than standard passport, no checks between the Netherlands and Germany. Stopped at Danish border but only asked about reason for visit, a flash of a Danish passport was enough to get us through there.

Mine has a pocket for a filter but in all honesty I’ve only made it to comply with the face covering rules for shopping and on a ferry journey. It doesn’t need to be ‘effective’.

@muttley109 – the OH bought one of the buff facemasks but it’s not really big enough for him (beard and big head!)

I’m currently upscaling a version of this for him

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Getting ready for new rules :-) :-( Knew the scraps of a #spoonflower colour chart would come in useful. Pattern from @thecraftyquilter

A post shared by Elizabeth Gomm (@ebygomm) on Jul 14, 2020 at 5:59am PDT

Not something i really wanted to be making but looks like it’s going to be necessary

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Getting ready for new rules :-) :-( Knew the scraps of a #spoonflower colour chart would come in useful. Pattern from @thecraftyquilter

A post shared by Elizabeth Gomm (@ebygomm) on Jul 14, 2020 at 5:59am PDT

The pool I used to swim at in the mornings was normally fairly quiet at the times i used to swim – I’d often have a 50m lane to myself – but not sure if it will be busier if people are not working or on furlough etc. They also often only have 3 lanes open in an 8 lane pool so plenty of opportunity to space people out even more.

Be interested to see how pools will work. No overtaking has the potential to be a bit of a nightmare. I’m not so fussed about the ban on butterfly.

The post office are providing insurance that covers the medical side for covid – but not cancellation. We’ll probably take out a single trip policy for the trip we’re doing as our annual policy won’t cover covid.

I’m not sure how much it covers, e.g. accommodation costs if you were stuck out there, we are staying with family so less relevant but it does cover repatriation.

Our local ice cream van used to play the good the bad and the ugly. Sadly been replaced now by the match of the day theme tune

Nesh – ‘unusually susceptible to cold weather’

The selling price is always much higher than the land + build/rebuild price.

Our insurance rebuild price is more than the value of our house, and that presumably doesn’t include any value attached to the land itself.

I’m not sure if it’s changed but a lot of Samsung phones don’t support adopted storage easily, i think there are ways around it but it’s not as simple as just choosing to use SD card as internal storage.

Can move apps to SD card, but if they get updated they get put back on internal storage.

I have to mess about moving apps, deleting caches etc. once a week at the moment. Half the apps are samsung crap that i don’t even want but those can’t even be moved from internal storage.

Pretty much everyone i know has claimed refunds back from accommodation providers and airlines, not via their insurance.

@whitestone I’ve already had fun this week playing spot the difference between spaces and non breaking spaces and the micro symbol and lowercase Greek mu

I’ve written some python to help me out now :-)

i can’t understand why they don’t make smaller phones, there’s so many articles looking at smaller phones (although the size they list as compact seems to get bigger all the time), i would have thought there was a market.

I have a Samsung A3 at the moment which is at my limit of being able to hold comfortably. Filled with bloatware and would never have been my first choice but was about the only android option available at the time that wasn’t huge. I’ve no idea what i’ll do if it dies.

Samsung S10e would probably be my first choice at the moment, but it is fractionally bigger. Probably not a budget option however

Yes, i don’t know quite why you would type them out instead of C&P. I stopped trying to understand some people’s thought processes a long time ago. I once had someone take a screen print, print it out and then use the photocopier to scan and email back to me!

Outlook is the culprit not word! Why organisations create filepaths that include ‘word – word’ type structures is perhaps the real question! When the unwary then put them in emails they then become invalid filepaths :-)

I was looking at a logfile in notepad and couldn’t understand why something wasn’t working when the filepath looked exactly right.

It’s MS Office that’s the root cause of me needing to be able to spot the differences, ‘helpfully’ changing hyphens to en-dashes

Perhaps better not to mention who I’m currently working for :-)

No, my work laptop is windows 7 (!!! less said about that the better) so perhaps that’s the crucial difference

It’s interesting actually, because on my home laptop i can see the difference between the different dashes using Courier New but on my work laptop hyphens and en-dashes are not distinguishable from one another, but this is also set to Courier New – hmmm

Is that v7.8.8?

I’m on v7.8.3 which I didn’t think was that old, but I’ll try an update first then

And what font are you using?

If the list of 1000 +300 has values that have additional characters but will still contain the string of the list your are matching against you can do this with wildcards and vlookups

So if your original list says

Study1
Study2
Study3

And your new one says

Study1,
Study2::
Study3 .,
Study4:

Vlookups will allow you to identify Study4

Thankful every day that i don’t have to do this sort of rubbish in Excel :-)

Have you considered using roofing shingles instead?

We are going through this at the moment. We are going to go Ikea. They have a good planning service and will be around for a long time for spare parts etc. Also, and this is a big thing for me, you can actually budget for what you want, as the prices are transparent. None of the to and fro bs with salesman from wren, or having to go through a builder with Howdens

Yep, being able to cost things up with drawers versus cupboards was one of the attractions of Ikea for us and no 60% off if you buy this week only type rubbish that we found with other suppliers. They also do taller wall cabinets across all their range, a lot of other places only offered those sizes on their more expensive ranges. We had one door warp early on, and simply took it to the shop and swapped it there and then.

The only slightly annoying part for us was we got our Ikea kitchen just before they changed from Faktum to Metod which means getting interior fittings and replacements is not as straightforward. But that shouldn’t be an issue now.

Not arriving pre-built was an advantage for us as we could store it all in the lounge ahead of time :-)

Our worktops were also worktop express (Ikea didn’t do 3m solid wood lengths at the time)

Anyone know what the insurance rules are if HO keeps the no travel guidance? What happens to validity of travel, car and breakdown policies?

We have an annual policy but they have an FAQ and it clearly states there is no coverage whilst the FCO advice remains essential travel only. All these news articles about various countries opening up and not a single mention about lack of insurance.

If you can afford the house without selling, and the estate agent wants a purchaser who doesn’t have to sell I’m failing to see the dilemma

Reminds me, I’d been meaning to build a lego one

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#legotensegrity

A post shared by Elizabeth Gomm (@ebygomm) on Jun 11, 2020 at 1:24pm PDT

We have an annual policy already in place but until the Foreign & Commonwealth Office change their advice it won’t provide any cover.

We want to go to Iceland which if I’ve read correctly are willing to let us in if we pay to take a test at the airport, but no insurance cover means it’s a no go.

As a teenager we had an Amiga 4000, it was a bit temperamental and sometimes you had to physically get hold of the hard drive and gently rotate it to get it to start spinning, but it meant the concept of closing things down completely passed me by – I like multi tasking

eca96smm@sheffield.co.uk

Ooh, numbers, our years had a letter assigned – y in my case, x was year above, z year below

plyseg
P = faculty of science
L = life sciences
Y = 1998
S = can’t remember
EG = initials

I have absolutely no idea about usernames at uni, but our email addresses were made up of 6/7 characters before the @ which identified the subject you studied, the year you were in and you (initials). I often wonder how long they spent coming up with the system and how long it persisted for.

Just watched it go over, it’s not everyday you get to see a dragon in the sky

We made a wildlife puddle pond last weekend

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Today we made a wildlife pond #upcycled some jeans to line under the pond liner. The robin has visited already, can't do anything in the garden without his supervision #wildlifepond

A post shared by Elizabeth Gomm (@ebygomm) on May 24, 2020 at 9:55am PDT

I only dabble in open water, I’m normally a pool swimmer but in the absence of other options open water will have to do.

One of our local open water venues has opened up (pre-book only) so I’ve swum a couple of times now. Ditched the wetsuit last time as I realise how much I hate swimming in it. Hopefully this should keep me sane until pools open again. Only issue now is swimmer’s itch

A rather rustic hexagonal planter – limited by the wood and screws that i had available. The bottom is chicken wire and a compost bag with some drainage holes

Orange tents can look warm and inviting from the outside looking in too :-)