Does it matter much that I’m not directly wired to the router

Yes, you’re measuring the slowest part of the chain, in this case probably the Tenda WIFI

Definitely should be 4th utility. I’ve been WFH at least part of the week since the days of dial up modems (remember the Psion Goldcard? Lovely!). Doing terminal access via dial up was fine. ADSL was a gamechanger. I’ve now got 30-40 Mbps which is good enough for most purposes. I should get fibre in the next month not that my neighbour has agreed access for Gigaclear.

I’d not buy a house without fibre now unless it was truly compelling. Then I’d splash for Starlink.

“wear the same clothes you would wear in the office”
I totally agree, which is why I’m typing this wearing jeans and a t-shirt

Will there really be a lot of downforce? I’d have though that without careful design of the whole underbody it won’t do much

People who use screws outside that aren’t rust resistant. I really love removing 10 screws above my head from rotten fibreboard with heads that have rusted out.

Even the better ones like the Supra500 are just zinc alloy so hit it hard with a hammer or crowbar it off the fence and throw it away. The Supra500 is designed to be hard to decode or bypass, the idea is that someone would still have to break it to get the key so it’s equivalent to someone breaking a window to get in as far as insurance is concerned.

Definitely worth getting rid of it, if it’s got a key to your house and someone uses it for a break in (perhaps after crowbaring it off and taking it home to smash) the insurance may not pay out (no signs of forced entry).

“For a non-tech person I assume that they can compare a list of MAC codes, IMEI numbers, whatever, for equipment supplied; 123456789012345 was supplied to a Mr al-Assad in Syria and active in Ukraine, hmmm”

Agreed, but it was probably sold to a random person in a non-sanctioned country using money provided by an intermediary. They hand it over to the intermediary to get their $50, the intermediary puts it in a container filled with “machine parts”, puts it on a ship to another country where it’s then forwarded on to Russia, perhaps via Iran. All Starlink knows is that Mr Nobody in an unremarkable country bought a Starlink with full roaming licence. Finding Mr Nobody might not be too hard (provided the country where he lives co-operates and that he’s not using a stolen identity) but there are loads of people like Mr Nobody to take his place for $50. You need to go up the chain of intermediaries and break it near the top as you can. This isn’t easy otherwise drug smuggling and money laundering wouldn’t be a problem.

One of the brightest people I knew at university (hi Doug!) was like that. Couldn’t answer simple questions at speed but had great insight into complex problems. He got a first and went on to be a very successful engineer getting to a very senior level.

How is Starlink meant to tell the difference between a Ukrainian base station near the front line and a Russian one? Are they meant to have fine grained location info (in an area with GPS jamming) and an up to date map of the front line?

Stopping Russians getting technology of all sorts is the way to sort this. Chinese and UAE banks closing Russian accounts is part of this but there needs to be renewed effort to stop the intermediaries involved. This isn’t a new problem, the USSR had a massive program during the cold war to acquire western technology.

Another happy Guide RE user (and a former Avid user and therefore hater).

Surely its not in our interest to disclose any such failure

The test is declared in advance – the sea downrange needs to be clear just like for a SpaceX launch.

The Russians and Chinese would have been monitoring the launch – the UK and USA had the capability to monitor Soviet launches in the 1960s with radar pulses sent from Japan and received in the UK – a friend of mine worked on it from the UK end at the time.

So the Russians and Chinese already knew it hadn’t launched. The stupid thing is not being more open – the USN are more open about disclosing what’s going on. As long as there are no details it’s best to get  the news out early and in the way you want rather than reacting to a leak.

I found and threw out 2 boxes of Nesquik yesterday with best by date of 2014. I threw them out because I hate Nesquik, not because of the date.

We used to have database access ourselves. Then updated IT systems and something that would’ve taken a couple of clicks is now a ticket

You work for the Post Office and I claim my £10

I enjoyed it, the scenery was amazing. It’s a bit like an old school Bond movie – a vehicle to hang a travelogue on.

The Ohme app records both cost and kWh per charging session.

The anti-monarchist part of me thinks this is good, for too long I’ve been forced to use lines and stations named after kings and queens and even one commemorating a queen’s anniversary. :-)

Another Octopus Ohme Home Pro with 8m charging cable (so that I can park the car facing in or out in either space in front of the garage).

Fuse box is inside the double garage, cable runs to the back wall, across the back wall, outside then along the outside wall to the front, so a long cable run. Cost was the normal £1079. I called UK Power to get the main fuse upgraded for free, they came out a couple of weeks later. I believe there’s now an agreement where Octopus can do this at install time.

I did try to get a local quote but the only people interested were a solar company who were roughly double the cost.

I love the look of the Kaweco Sport – I might try to make one using a Fisher Space Pen refill.

I’ve got my dad’s Accutron. It’s a nice watch but servicing is a pain. Last repair I used this guy in the US https://mybob.net/ Repair was good but he did manage to send the wrong watch back – all sorted at his expense in the end

I’d sort out surface prep – angle grinder with a flapper wheel will get that nice and shiny. Once you’ve got a good looking joint, cut it in half and see how much it’s penetrated- probably not as much as you think.

Before applying any any super sticky tape, shave the surrounding parts of your leg – I’m wincing thinking about removing such a dressing when I was 16, gravel rash due to my dad dropping my new motorbike with me as pillion.

Could it be the central heating pump coming on overnight? That turned out to be my problem.

If it’s the fridge I’d expect it to trip every time the compressor turns on. You can trigger it by turning down that fridge thermostat.

If you’ve got a table saw or a track saw you could cut the channel with that. If you need to buy a router the Katsu palm router is good (and cheap), it’s a clone of a Makita

Do you have a drawing of the channel? Is it square bottomed?

I’d buy some Delrin sheet from Ebay, cut and file / sand to exact size then use a router in a table to machine out the channel. If you don’t have a router table it’s easy to make a simple one from MDF and pine offcuts. Or for this application you could build a one off jig out of MDF or plywood.

This turned up on my Twitter feed on the wrist of @ChowdahHill – he’s got a large boat with a lot of aircraft on it so this chunky watch is definitely appropriate.

Having worked for US companies for over 25 years and met hundreds in person and thousands in webex/zoom meetings, they display an outstanding level of political illiteracy even people with high educational attainment.

I agree in the main, the exception seems to be those who served overseas in the military who seemed better informed than most Brits.

It would ring loads of AML /  FinCrime bells unless you had an established legitimate reason to deposit lots of cash. If you’ve got a decent explanation fine – e.g. your ancient aunt didn’t trust banks, kept all her savings under the bed and has sadly passed, probate’s gone through with you as the recipient, you have paperwork to back it all up.

St Paul’s tour – up into the space between the inner and outer domes.

O2 walk over the dome – great views and a chance to see the construction close up.

Tower Bridge tour – there’s a pricy version where you get to go into the machine spaces etc

I’ve got (non-cut) Dartington crystal glasses because they were one of my father-in-law’s first customers when he moved into sales for Shell. Nice glasses and an interesting company – set up as a social enterprise to bring jobs to Devon.

India’s been moving towards domestic production for a while now, I’d expect they’ll prioritise growing their domestic industry at the expense of imports

Definitively middle class, my dad was a dentist, my mum was a social worker. I went to grammar school and then university and ended up doing computer stuff for banks. My parents used to have dinner parties, a favourite starter was avocadoes which you could only buy from Marks and Spencers at the time.

We did have ice on the insides of the windows and had to pour kettles out of the window to defrost the sink pipes – the joys of a 1930s house that still had the original coal boiler and silk and rubber wiring in the 1970s.

There was a very strong ethos of service at my school. Lots of us ended up in the forces or police. At the time the majority of officers were still from public schools and very much looked down on anyone who wasn’t. Might have changed by now, it was worse in my dad’s time. When he was doing national service as a dentist his last posting was to a Guards regiment. He was quietly taken to one side and told that they understood he wouldn’t be able to fully participate in mess life as he didn’t have the background and wouldn’t be able to afford the mess fees. They had a special scheme for doctors, dentists, engineers etc – not proper guards officers – where they’d top up the fees as long as you didn’t try to pretend you were meant to be there.

I had a cambelt let go on a Citroen Xantia years ago. Citroen ended up paying for the rebuild as they had halved the service life but not sent out a recall – the car was bought from a Citroen dealer and serviced by Citroen dealers so they should have picked it up.

I’ve not got a Seat Mii at 50k – I’m tempted to get it changed for peace of mind even though.

Tradition = rules made by dead people.

Some things are better resigned to history.

The village where I Iive in has a road called “Bullbaiters Lane”. Nothing more traditional than torturing a bull before killing it, people used to see it as fun and believed it improved the flavour of the meat. Luckily that tradition has been banned and has died out.

I’ve got a black car, replaced a red car which replaced a blue car. All look crap in winter but OK when the road filth stops. Winter washing consists of cleaning lights and plates and once a month through the car wash.

Posh skin cream, the cheapest does the same 

Champagne – horrible stuff ruining a decent wine with CO2 making it really acidic 

L’Oréal (except No More Tears shampoo which was really good when the kids were small)

I was 5 minutes late last night picking my daughter up from swimming. The pool is at the end of a single track lane. A tree had blown down blocking the road, all the people’s cars that arrived on time were trapped. School will be shut today until the tree’s cleared – 26 buses according to the caretaker.

This is in the rolling Chiltern hills.

Probably not relevant but in Spain the vehicle needs to be re-registered. 

I enjoyed it. The finale even made my eyes leak but a lot does these days,

https://www.gwr-fasteners.co.uk/ for me via their ebay shop. I’ve needed lots of weird fasteners for different projects (e.g. M4 x 80mm cap head) and they have a good selection.

I’ve used Accu too for other weird stuff e.g. M3 grub screws

@reluctantjumper is spot on. There used to be / is a fraud where a cardholder requests 10 notes, takes the middle few and lets the machine retract the notes. To get around this, the ATM will go offline and the count of the purge bin will be used to prove what happened.

The logging in ATMs is really fine grained. The log will show what commands and responses were sent from/to the host, what statuses all of the sensors in the ATM had all along the cash path, all timestamped. What they can’t show is the amounts in the cassettes and purge bin when they’re next changed. That’s done with note counters at the cash distribution centre.

If you’re going to challenge it, ask for all the details. I suspect First Direct just sent a standard query to Nationwide and got a “it’s all OK reply back”.

BTW, some ATMs in convenience stores are (or were in my day at least) emptied and refilled by shop managers – the idea was to allow stores to recycle cash from the shop into the ATM. The degree of scrutiny in those ATMs was considerably lower. Personally I wouldn’t use them.