Don’t know about being towed by bike, but I ended up making my own, up to 5 bikes for a car.

Just reading this has prompted me to open the storage box that has sat under the desk in my office for the last 10 years, at least. There’s my old Minolta SRT101 and lenses and a Zenit slr, can’t remember when they were last used. Daren’t think about opening the box of slides…

@johndoh

Best of luck with the new placement. We’ve been fostering for about 12 years now. Currently have three 15yr olds, twins plus one unrelated. Can be hard work. We’ve always had older children, don’t expect them to recognise what you do for them. Sometimes it seems like we’re just running a hotel and taxi service.

Important to make time for yourselves. Our council is good at providing support group meetings. Some support workers are very good, some less so. The council register us with The Fostering Network which can be useful.

I can try to help with any questions you may have.

@matt_outandabout where are you? That’s good to know.

@matt_outandabout

clip in line’ readout of energy use – can you recommend one?

I’d be interested in how much power our various units are using.

@lister

We have a local swift group in Huntly who sell the boxes and have loaned us the sound system. Unfortunately I don’t know where they resource these from.

You could try https://www.swift-conservation.org/Local_Swift_Groups.htm

There might be a group local to you

Just put up two swift nest boxes on our barn. Call system about to go in to try to attract them.

No swallows yet (Aberdeenshire).

Apparently, here in rural Aberdeenshire we’re programmed to get in 2025. Scotland’s Rural 100% scheme.

Roads blocked in Aberdeenshire, A90, A96. Jacknifed lorries, accidents. Still snowing.

Amazing to think, that some people look at Nadine and think “there is a formidable and intelligent woman” but no doubt they do

Surely, you only have to watch the interview with Charlie Stayt?

I read somewhere that of the 7 types of plastic only types 1 and 2 can readily be recycled, polyurethane can’t and the remaining types can, technically, be recycled but there is no market for the product so are likely to be landfilled. I haven’t been able to confirm or substantiate this.

Reported by the Good Law Project:

The Government has wasted more than £9.9 billion on PPE, which is more than it would cost to give every nurse in the NHS a 100 per cent bonus on their salary.

The figure comes from the Department of Health’s Annual Report, which reveals it spent:

<li aria-level=”1″>£673 million on PPE “not suitable for any use”
<li aria-level=”1″>£2,581 million on PPE “not suitable for use in the NHS”
<li aria-level=”1″>£4.7 billion paying inflated pandemic prices for PPE we didn’t need to buy
<li aria-level=”1″>£750 million buying PPE which will pass its expiry date before we can use it.

It has also “written down” the value of £1.231 billion in PPE, which is still yet to be delivered.

The Department also reports that some of the PPE will need to be recycled and it’s now contracting “waste providers”. Some of it is too complex to be recycled and so will need to be burned.

Thanks to an FOI response, Good Law Project can also reveal that, between April 2020 and August 2021, the Government spent £677.6 million storing excess PPE. It continues to spend £500,000 a day on this.

Civil servants complained at the time that the need to service VIPs, the majority of which were introduced by Government Ministers, was interfering with good procurement. It is unlikely we will ever know the true cost of this taxpayer-funded feeding frenzy for the friends and associates of Ministers.

Downloaded Bridlewayz app. Claims to cover UK. North of Scottish border – zilch. I know there are technically no bridleways in Scotland. open access, etc.

Arrived today, £420 for 4days. Nice little bonus for Christmas.

For those who can’t remember/didn’t know, it started snowing on Boxing Day, and the snow didn’t start to melt until March

That brings back memories. I was 13, just moved from London to Kent, A20 blocked by 10′ drifts…

Also not tainted by being in this Cabinet

Still can’t work this out so I’ve been trying alternative browser. Either Opera or Chrome with the menubar extension added look good. Don’t get the same problem so I’ll just change my default browser. Thanks for all help.

I am not aware of having altered any default or installed/uninstalled any fonts. Just did a straight upgrade of Opensuse.

From my knowledge of CSS I would say that a margin or padding is set on a class somewhere. But trying to find where using the developer tools is impossible, there are so many class names I can’t work out which one is the problem.

@sirromj – KDE on Opensuse 15.3 recently upgraded. Don’t notice it on other websites or STW on other browsers

@bigginge – usually 90% but issue still noticeable at 100%

I don’t think I have any extensions installed. I don’t remember ever installing any and none are listed if I check my add-ons.

Not sure the problem is very clear in the screenshot, probably too small.

Rural Aberdeenshire here. Broadband via overhead copper phone cables from the village a mile away. Currently we get speeds up to 11Mbs at best, more often 2 or 3Mbs. I tried to get a Community Broadband scheme set up for 14 properties and was told that was not appropriate as we qualify for the Reach100% scheme. This was supposed to be completed by end 2021 but haggling over the award of the contract delayed that. Apparently, according to the website our postcode is “scoped for 2025”. What this seems to mean is that it might get completed by end 2027. I fully expect that that will inevitably be subject to further delays in the work due to unforeseen circumstances so perhaps we should expect something by 2030?

Following with interest.

We have several worktops like this which I have been planning to refinish.

Factory reset?

Speaking as someone who has both an air source and a ground source heat pump I think that a lot of the talk about this initiative is disingenuous. It sounds as though it is a straight replacement of a gas boiler by a heat pump. There is no mention of the fact that the heat pump really needs an underfloor heat distribution to work best. It can use radiators but they would need to be 50% larger. It also really needs a well-insulated house as it operates at a lower temperature.

We installed the ground source pump as part of a complete renovation of an old cottage – fully insulated and underfloor heating system, in 2007. The air source was added in 2014 in a newbuild extension. We are in a rural location so the alternative was either oil or LPG, so different economics.

A couple of things I would like clarification on:

1. Of the 7 types of plastic shown on the recycling symbol, One (polystyrene) can’t be recycled. Only types 1 and 2 have a ready market as recycled materials. All the rest can be recycled but are difficult, if not impossible, to sell for reuse, so probably end up in landfill.

2. Items which have different plastics bonded together can contaminate bales collected for recycling. So what happens to drinks bottles which are mainly recyclable plastic but have a sleeve of another plastic shrunk on? I’m sure most people don’t remove the sleeve.

Enjoyed the mag, particularly the Classic Route. However I have a small quibble. Barney talks about a lot of places in the article but none of these appear on the route map. I realise the article is in association with Komoot so you are bound to use their mapping, but it is difficult to follow the route when you can’t see where you are.

Well, yes, but the OP was (1) annoyed at being held up, (2) by an ‘illegal’ bike.

1+2 are not directly related, yet OP appears to justify his anti-(motor?)cyclist pro-car rant (lol) by telling us that the bike is not legal therefore any criticism is justified.

My principle objection would be to illegal riding and dangerous overtaking playing into the hands of anti-cyclist car drivers.

Going to fast no one could overtake him?

A97 can be difficult to overtake at the best of times, quite narrow and bends.

Been with Octopus for a couple of years now. No complaints. Not sure how their prices compare. Get a reminder every month to upload meter reading and invoice appears within 48 hours.

There’s no u in Iranian itch, or c in humanitarian. Sorry to be pedantic

As worthy as I find their cause, what ‘practical good’ are the Good Law Project actually achieving? By which I mean how are they actually changing the Government’s behaviours? It feels a bit like they’re scoring ‘technical’ victories, which whilst of note are of little actual consequence.

I’ve been thinking much the same. I do support GLP, and have donated. They have been successful in bringing actions to court and achieving judgements against the Government. But I don’t see that there is any consequence to either the Government or individuals following this.

If you are going to have a borehole there is no reason to worry about depth to rock. Ours is 110m deep and the rockhead was about 8m. Easy to install the circulation pipe in the rock and grout it in. With hindsight my only question might be whether it would have been better to have two 55m boreholes.

I was trying to confirm that there is a way to connect between two other tracks. I found a rough path on the ground and looking at the heat map showed that others had been that way, so job done.  I could see a few lines passing through so not well used, just curious as to how many it might represent. All probably walkers not bikes.

Thanks for the replies guys. I guess only Strava could provide a definitive answer. I’m just trying to get some idea of how much any given track has been used judging from the heat map. As it only represents those who use Strava, it’s only ever going to be a sample, but it would show me whether or not a track is/has been used, which is pretty much what I’m looking for.

When you zoom right in it does appear to show individual passes but I guess this may just be a quirk of the algorithm.

Can I drive through Moray (without stopping) on say the A96 to get to the shire from highland?

I hope so, I have to take friends to Dalcross from Huntly on Friday.

As Trail_rat says, you need to look at the house and heating as a whole system. You need good insulation and ideally underfloor heating. We totally renovated a cottage in Scotland 14 years ago. We stripped out the inside completely back to stone walls, then dry lined with full insulation, new double glazed windows and doors and new concrete floor with underfloor heat pipes installed. The ground loop is a borehole 110m deep.

We run the heating full time, relying on individual room thermostats to switch the heat pump on and off to maintain the floor temperature; the concrete floor is effectively a large heat store. It has been working well but I suspect is quite expensive to run – I don’t have anything to compare it to. The alternative where we are would be oil or LPG which are also expensive.

Later, 7 years ago we also installed an air-source heat pump in a new extension. This is also working well, although it is not as efficient as the ground source.

@scotroutes

Can you give me a link to that graphic above please. Cheers

@b33k34

Cottage totally renovated 12 yrs ago. Inside ripped out back to stone walls and dry lined and insulated. New double glazed windows and doors. Pretty draught free. Flat is new timber frame building. 4 kW PV panels.

Rural location meant alternative heating was LPG or oil which were looking expensive cf electricity.