Accuracy should be -20 to +40 seconds a day for a Seiko 5. There’s no real point in servicing a cheap watch, a new movement will be cheaper. If you send it away for a service that’s what they’ll do.

I think that’s a SNK361K1 with a 7S26 caliber. You could upgrade it to a NH36, movements on ebayt are about £35.

The user interface on my mill DRO.

Say I want to drill a hole 1/5 way down a plate. I edge find both ends. I now need to subtract the diameter of the edge finder to get the length and divide by 5. Easy – it’s got a built in calculator. First give the calculator the length. Easy – if it’s the x axis press x. Now do the calculation. Easy again just use like a normal calculator. But how to transfer back to the x reading? Press the up arrow then the press x. Because up arrow obviously means “upload” I guess, if you’ve read the badly translated manual.

Go with the NHS advice

https://www.fitfortravel.nhs.uk/destinations/africa/egypt

It says typhoid is optional, given that you’re in a good resort there’s probably good water and sanitation. If you’re planning on going on trips and eating street food I’d get the vaccination.

My 16 year old daughter spent a week volunteering / being trained on the Ffestiniog mountain railway this summer. She was fine with power tools and ladders, there was a sensible level of supervision but it didn’t prevent one of the youngsters badly cutting their hand with a hand saw, cutting their hand holding the piece of wood. Minor injuries visit required.

I’m not sure how they managed to do it – most people would stop when it starts to hurt!

I’ve polished a scratch out of a rear screen using cerium oxide polish. It didn’t heat the glass up much but I was doing it by hand.

I wouldn’t want to do a windscreen, I care far more about the visual accuracy looking forward.

Loose confused with lose

I grew up in Loose in Kent, it’s definitely pronounced /luːz/

I’ve got Dartington glasses. I like the back story, it was set up as a social enterprise to bring jobs to North Devon in 1967. That and my father in law sold them gas when he worked for Shell.

Just had the misfortune of using E.on Drive. Instructions on the charger say you must plug in first but if you do it marks the charger in use. Phone support useless.

What you actually need to do is select the charger in the app, use the hidden swipe and then plug in.

Why can’t all chargers be as easy as Tesla?

No need to season stainless steel. If you’re e.g. going to brown off meat get the oil reasonably hot before the meat goes in. Don’t move it around too much and you’ll get a good fond without sticking or burning. The fond will come off the pan easily if you deglaze with something acidic e.g. a can of tomatoes. In the unlikely event of there still being marks they’ll come off in the dishwasher.

(user of stainless steel pans from John Lewis for the last 20 years)

I worry sometimes, I had to work away from home a lot when they were young, I sometimes drink too much, I don’t shout at them enough (according to a Finish friend of my wife’s parents) but my job is to get them through to independence as well as possible.

They’re now 16 and 18 and doing fine. They didn’t sleep as babies and the schadenfreude of one of the perfect parents having a first baby that slept and a second who didn’t still makes me smile.

My parents were OK, my mum lost her mum very young, was educated in a convent boarding school in India from age 6 and came to Scotland age 19 on the last troop ship out of India at Independence.  She spent her whole life apologising and not knowing how to cook – not her fault.

My dad was lucky, he spent his teenage years bunking off school to spend his time on Croydon golf course watching the anti aircraft guns. Where he lived wasn’t a bombing target but was where a lot of bombers in the blitz dropped their bombs on the way to or from so odd houses disappeared every night – see the film “Hope and Glory”, typical south London.

Neither of my parents were perfect but they did their best. I think they were actually quite good. My mum went completely mad when I was 17/18 when my older brother took his own life (I use this phrasing as I feel that it’s unfair to remove his agency from what happened). They divorced a few years later but I have no rancour for either, the pain was too much for them both.

Nobody is perfect, the good people are those who did their best or tried to.

You can request for the house fuse to be upgraded to 100 amps yourself – it’s free. e.g. for the South East the DNO is UK Power Networks.
https://www.ukpowernetworks.co.uk/i-already-have-electricity-domestic/adding-more-power/fuse-upgrade

When I was looking at EVs last year I priced up a variety of cars including the VW iD3 and Tesla Model Y standard range. Once I’d added all the options to bring the iD3 up to the same spec as the Model Y it was more expensive. The iD3 is cheaper now but at the time it made no sense to buy it especially with the awful software.

Re low range – I bought the lowest range base Model Y, range 242 miles. My office is 110 miles round trip away so that works fine. I’ve been to north Wales and back in a day, about 450 miles, with no trouble and stopped the same amount of time as I’d do in a diesel car i.e. after about 3 hours. In my youth I’d have done north Wales to London in one hit but my bladder won’t allow that anymore. I wouldn’t pay extra for range over 250 miles now.

And whilst semi auto weapons can be converted to full auto, they have to be designed to make it very hard to do – so not just block off the switch position for full auto. Generally they’ll have a different fire control group (trigger and gubbins) that can’t be swapped or easily modified to make it full auto. A full auto trigger group is considered to be a machine gun in itself with big penalties for manufacture or possession.

Although recently very simple devices for Glock pistols have appeared that make them full auto and presumably uncontrollable.

As i understand it(and could be wrong) but arent assault rifles capable of being fully automatic

In the American context, no. Broadly, fully automatic weapons were banned in 1986, so a normal civilian Ar15 / AK47 / AK74 will be semi auto i.e. self loading, one bullet per trigger pull
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearm_Owners_Protection_Act

There are exceptions for military, police, gun manufacturers and dealers for samples for sale to police or military. Existing full auto (aka machine) guns were grandfathered in and are still transferrable to a new owner if you fill in the right forms and pay the tax stamp.

The dealer exemption has been abused most famously by Larry Vickers who had a large personal collection of “samples”. Probably a mistake to then make lots of very popular YouTube videos with said samples!

One system. One record. All information.

Sounds good, I suspect it may be impossible. Different requirements for different purposes. A federation of systems that can share information may be more deliverable.

As an example from the banking world, “One customer” was once a thing. A single system that holds all the info about a customer in their many possible roles e.g. personal account, named person on a business account, insurance policy, MD of a plc that the bank has loaned money to. All require some of the same data but all have vastly different and changing needs for data depending on the persona. Having one system that has to implement the changes for all the different areas at the time they need it becomes really hard, to the extent that e.g. if a law comes in saying that you need to hold extra info for say MDs of a plc and the central system can’t add it in time, you need to add it outside of the central system. Do that a few times and the central system falls apart.

A federated system works much better, the common data can be mastered in one place and the area specific data can be local to the area that needs it. Indeed the local may keep a copy of the central data so that it can work independently as necessary.

I’ve just gone from Oral B to Suri. Suri is so much better at cleaning and battery lasts for weeks.

You can get clove oil over the counter at a chemist. You can also take paracetamol for the pain.

If it’s so painful that you can’t sleep I’d give the dentist a call, my wisdom tooth extraction hurt but not that bad.

My turn today, my 18 year old daughter passed her test on Friday.

Seat Mii 1.0 insured for £1300 with Hastings Direct with daughter as main driver, me and my wife as named drivers, car still owned by and registered keeper as me and kept at my house (it’ll be used by second daughter to learn in April). I’m pleasantly surprised, I was expecting about £1000 more.

And she’s just texted to say she’s made it to work at the swimming pool – first solo drive!

We’ve moved over to using Confluence for almost everything. Word design documents still live on a network share but with a link back to Confluence.

As soon as a piece of work starts, we create a Confluence page with all the high level information – description of what we’re doing, order book number it’s billed to etc. Sub pages get added as necessary.

The other great use of Confluence for me is an architecture wiki. Every time someone asks me a question or I need to find out something I record it in the wiki. It’s a much better way of holding information on a system that dates back to 2001 than trying to read every design document since then!

 “those objects which by their nature, location, purpose or use make an effective contribution to military action”

Oil refineries and depots, armament and armament component factories, rail and road infrastructure used to transport troops and armaments are all fair game under that definition. Ukraine has a very broad range of legal targets without having to stoop to Russia’s level.

Age 14 I took a bus to the station, a train to London, the tube to a different station, a train to Salisbury and a bus to Larkhill. I then spent a week learning how to  fire a 25 pounder howitzer then came home on my own. Totally unremarkable.

 There’s also the argument that his paranoia and repeated sacking and reshuffling of advisers and senior officers

Putin’s hero Stalin did the same in WW2, I had a tour of the Russian Air Force museum just outside Moscow in about 1997, the old guy showing us round pointed out all the Marshalls that were sacked until Stalin found a “lucky” one. The other interesting thing was the exhibits showing that the Soviets had invented everything…

The Russians have tried to assassinate all the top Ukrainian officials, they’ve just not got lucky yet. If Putin dies for whatever reason it’s a chance for his successor to blame everything on his predecessor – see Khrushchev. That might mean an end to the war.

Contact Jonny Smith and get him to do a Barn Find episode

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScBEyrwfoTEvGLlcjtBSetJtEJbhi2rkxJ5YviJh4pzCEY1yg/viewform?pli=1

If doing it yourself, jumper leads / booster battery, clean fuel, new spark plugs, condenser and points, all the tools you can carry, big hammer.

Seriously, watch one of Jonny’s barn find episodes on YouTube, lots of good tips. Assume the fuel is rubbish. Spark plugs out, oil down the bores and crank it over before trying to start it. Check for sparks before putting the plugs back in, if in doubt about fuel put a little directly in the mouth of the carb.

Cool looking lathe – I’ve messaged you, I can put them in the post tonight

Are you sure they’re M5? That’s very small, my mini lathe’s chuck is held on by M8 bolts and looking online they’re usually M6 or M8. Or is it a watchmakers type lathe?

What size do you need? I could turn them up in my lathe and pop them in the post to you. Otherwise, electric drill and bench grinder but it won’t be very accurate.

I bought a cheap Makita 18v drill driver with battery and charger a few years ago. It’s great. I’ve added a genuine spare battery after trying a cheap knockoff which was rubbish. I’ve also got cheap Katsu knockoff impact driver, sander and multi tool. I don’t use them often enough to justify the real things, if they break I’ll get real Makita.

I’ve also got a real Makita reciprocating saw – it’s a beast, I dismantled a 10ft x 10 ft shed on my own in a day, the debris filled a skip.

 it will be using stand-off weapons so the aircraft can stay 100 miles away from Russian air defenses

Which is probably what we’d do too until the air defences have been supressed. Shame we don’t have a shed load of Storm Shadow to donate, we should have built a bigger stockpile.

Gloves. I once tried drying out some wet ski gloves. Only once.

Other way round, they’re great as cheap metal smelters – lots of YouTube videos of people using them to melt aluminium. Probably best done outside with a microwave you don’t value though.

I’ve had a Seiko 5 since 2011
https://www.creationwatches.com/products/seiko-mens-watches-208/seiko-5-military-automatic-sports-japan-made-snzg09-snzg09j1-snzg09j-mens-watch-2110.html?currency=GBP&zenid=d8962d0f1754ad7834533e0d5fda2e31

It’s reliable and is around 20s a day off. I changed the crystal for saphire and bought a new strap last year. It now alternates with the Tudor Black Bay Pro that I bought with inheritance from my mum. It’s thinner and lighter so a good choice for hot weather.

That’s an unusually bad experience. For Tesla at a Tesla supercharger, it’s as simple as plug cable into car and that’s it, everything happens automatically and your registered card gets billed when done.

Last non-Tesla charger I used was Instavolt fast charger at Tremadog on Saturday. I didn’t have the app so used a card (contact not contactless, for some reason that didn’t work). Very straightforward.

Before my home charger was installed I used the Shell fast chargers in the local Waitrose via the app and the BP fast chargers at the local petrol station via that app. No problems other than sometimes having to wait to use them.

First real road trip in my base Model Y (range 242 miles) taking my daughter for a week at the Ffestiniog railway. Amersham to Porthmadog and back in a day. 425 miles in 10 hours 11 minutes driving. Charged at Telford whilst having a burger for lunch, arrived early so topped up at Tremadog over a cup of tea (the cafe’s changed since the 90s, who’d have guessed? The crag looks the same though). Back in the day in the 90s I’d have stopped at Cannock or Shrewsbury for food and petrol, so no real difference. Return trip, charged at M5 Frankley. In the 90s I’d probably have just carried on all the way to London in one hit but I was a bit younger then.

I’m really impressed. Very, very comfortable to do that distance in a day despite my bad back, knackered left knee and right ankle. I was slightly worried about finding a charger in North Wales but I had a choice in Porthmadog – Tescos or Tremadog Cow Shed cafe. The Cow Shed is a much nicer place to spend 15 minutes – they even have a cheese vending machine!

My 55 mile each way commute is a mixture of A roads and dual carriageway (A5) or motorway (M1). Sticking to 70mph doesn’t seem to adversely affected the range. Same with a trip up the M40 to Birmingham, range used was pretty much the same as the distance.

People who park one wheel on the pavement. A wheelchair or pushchair can’t get past on the pavement and cars still need to wait for a gap to pass the van. I’m looking at you https://www.bucksgardenrooms.co.uk/ – 3 vans in Hyde Heath today

Yep – cheap too!

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/285743484980?var=0&mkevt=1&mkcid=1&mkrid=710-53481-19255-0&campid=5338268676&toolid=10044&customid=Cj0KCQjwkdO0BhDxARIsANkNcrfj8wOn5TI_2a9-WNmYb2Yob4zs7QvPVdh9nNIZSLkkzRrYhjmIFfYaAsPYEALw_wcB

Is that true for the UK too?

There’s one at our local Shell in town, very convenient

In contrast to the Guardian release of information from Snowden, Wikileaks made little meaningful effort to sanitise the published information. As a result, people were almost certainly killed.

I have no sympathy for Assange, what he did wasn’t journalism.

Strangely, he never leaked Russian information (except the US 2016 information that Russia provided).

I took an Animal watch to 6m in 2007

I took a Swatch about that deep in 1990, it didn’t end well

Re the 12v batteries, Tesla have gone over to Lithium for the 12v battery. There are lots of aftermarket Lithium 12v batteries available too but the teardown videos of the non brand name ones are pretty shocking. I’d stick with a brand name lead acid battery if you need to replace.

Thanks all, I went for the cheapest rail saw, R185CCSX Multi-Material Circular Saw, £89.99 on Amazon with a 3 piece 1.2m rail – Makita compatible. Just used it to cut the excess length off the deck – so easy and accurate!

@tillydog, I’ll be painting all the cut surfaces with end grain sealer. I had to cut one bit of decking lengthways anyway as the veranda isn’t a multiple of decking boards. The original deck was father boards turned upside down, no wonder it always felt shonky.