Retained cash goes to a divert bin, not back into the main cassettes. There used to be a paper audit roll, that’s now written to disk and retrieved remotely.

(I’m not totally up to date on this, it’s probably 10 years since I was last in an ATM test lab but I don’t think it’s changed much. I’ve worked on NCR, Diebold, Wincor Nixdorf and Triton ATMs)

Didn’t it happen in the 80s? Sir John Hackett wrote a book about it.

Compared to then I think the risk of an all out nuclear war ruining my day is lower.

In general, threads make poor locating features – there’s a small tolerance between a nut and a bolt to allow the nut to able threaded onto the bolt.

Another feature is usually used e.g. shoulder of a shaft, dowel pins. Using a facing tool ensures that both faces are parallel, as the BB is tightened down it should align against the face. Having said that, I can’t imagine it making a big difference as long as the paint’s removed.

It’s the landowner’s responsibility

Report it via the council website, the RoW officer will check it and instruct the landowner to clear it

Crucial have free cloning software

No idea why the drive isn’t being recognised, I’ve never had that problem before on W10

Bow saws are bobbins

They’re much better with a greenwood blade (if you’re cutting green wood)

I’ve been back since 27th December after having the week off before Xmas. Day one, I went through all the backed up emails and caught up on the all the actions. I shouldn’t have bothered. Since then nothing as although the team in India are in they’re working through a backlog defined in December. We’ve got a routine internal audit coming up so a bit of panic from the directors ensuring we’ve got the Ts crossed and the Is dotted but we’re in a pretty clean place. 

So for me, a restful time to stare out of the window and watch the rain and try not to anticipate the panic when everyone else gets in next week.

If I take payment with a stolen credit card , the victim is refunded by me. So I’ve lost stock and money.

1. Cardholder notices fraudulent payment on their statement or in app

2. Cardholder disputes the transaction with the card issuer (a chargeback)

3. Card issuer issues a chargeback to the merchant acquirer 

4. Acquirer asks the merchant for proof of the transaction or provides or decides not to challenge the chargeback.

5. If the acquirer doesn’t provide proof quickly enough, the chargeback stands. In that case the acquier charges the merchant.

6. If the acquirer provides proof, the issuer takes the hit. For example, when a South African bank was hacked and their cards cashed out in 7-11s in Japan, the issuer took the hit.

Someone always pays, it’s rarely the acquirer or the card scheme as they just “switch” the transactions. The rules were designed to increase card use, so the cardholder rarely pays. It’s usually the merchant or the issuer.

The amount of cash in circulation is flat rather than growing. It  usually goes up in a recession (which is what this feels like even if it’s technically not) as people switch from cards to cash to help manage their budgets. Card volumes are flat at the moment, values per transaction have dropped.

Long term cash use will decline but it will take a long time to die. Every clearing bank used to have their own cheque processing centres (several for the biggest banks), we’re down to one shared by all the banks in Northampton but cheques still haven’t died despite the cost of processing.

Sweden tried to phase out cash but even they’ve not gone the whole way.

Cash will have a long, slow death and will probably outlast me.

And for the rebuild, 1m of threaded rod fixed with resin into the new concrete foundation for the new wall. It might be worth redesigning with gaps between or under the glass panels to reduce the wind loading a bit.

make the bottom 3′ of the building (and the entrance doors) watertight

You also need to stop the drains backing up and water coming up from the floor, so fully tanked to 3′ and non-return valves in the drain pipes. The walls then need to be able to resist 3′ of water outside and none inside which a new build can be designed to do but an old house won’t have been designed to do. It might cope but I’d want a proper engineer’s report to be sure.

The barriers that the EA deploy are really clever, they use the weight of the floodwater to hold them down – see below from Ironbridge. Something like that may be possible if there’s enough land.

Tasting menu in Hotel Europa in St Petersburg in 1997. It’d just been refurbished, the chef was Finnish and it was absolutely lovely and not expensive. I was based in Moscow, I had colleagues based in St Petersburg. My experience was of Moscow was an ugly city with a prohibition era level of corruption and violence. My colleagues had a much nicer city and “get of jail free” cards from the gangsters they were working for.

(I lived in the Marriot and commuted on the tube from the Kievskya station. Shortly after I left the American manager of the business centre in the Marriot was killed in the tube station apparently for not paying protection.)

Thanks all, looks like I’ve got away with it. No bad smells this morning or stains, it was worth cleaning it last night / this morning.

Yep, felt down last night, drank too much, blubbed my eyes out. It’s been a hard couple of years, I’ve lost both my parents which brought up the death of my brother in 1980 when I was 15.

That’s the sort of Xmas present I like!

In contrast, when I used to race karts the best natural driver was my mate’s girlfriend Jane. Stunningly quick but with no mechanical sympathy. She used to ring every last ounce out of the engine and brakes, had no fear and had great control (she never crashed the same way twice).

Diesel as a soaking penetrant is totally awesome.

My dad was taught to use diesel mixed with paraffin when we worked on a farm back in the day. Not sure why but it works.

Excellent thread, I really enjoyed the soft boiled egg with my dal for lunch

Met a nice South African

That’s a shame, I’ve met a few including one who’d had to leave in the 80s due to her support of the anti-apartheid movement. I must admit the Spitting Image song was going round my head but was completely unjustified.

Drain blocked with hair.? 

Me and my cat Paws are the only males in our house. My hair’s a Number 3 buzz cut. Wife and two teenage daughters with long hair but it’s still my job to pull all the hair out of the bath drain.

Offer to sell them to Greece for the price the British Museum paid – £35,000. Sunak can claim he’s a deal maker, the marbles go back to their home and the £35k can be spent across infrastructure projects in the North or potholes or tax cuts or whatever.

Window after the shower – if a quick changeover, leave the window and door open at the same time for a couple of minutes. Most of the warm, humid air will leave the house. The air isn’t the expensive bit to heat, it’s the solid stuff so you won’t lose that much energy.

Must have got a lot better since my Model 3 was built then (2020).

Yep, built in China in a brand new factory instead of California in an old factory.

I’ve got a Model Y. It’s giant inside. I went for the bottom of the range 242 mile version. I commute 110 miles roundtrip 2 days a week so that’s fine. Build quality is as good as the Audi I had before and I’ve had no problems adjusting to the touchscreen controls and speedo (I use cruise control pretty much all the time including 30 limits, same as I did with the Audi).

And if you’re adding water, ideally use deionised water – Tesco sell it for irons.

Definitely look at the tank – the difference between the 2 lines is probably less than 500ml.

I keep reading the title as ‘Gay Squirrel Population’. Might be a solution?

It’d certainly reduce their fertility but the vaccine being developed to reduce grey squirrel fertility sounds more practical.

Won’t an ultrasonic cleaner take the anodising off a cassette carrier?

I use a very small crockpot with no problems – took it whilst clearing my mum’s house.

I’m not a huge fan of Unions but if they are in a sector where you can’t just switch company that’s not bad advice.

My wife worked for a small company that made her redundant but thought they could get away with paying her a month’s notice. Luckily she was a union member. The regional rep met the company owner, explained employment law to him calmly. My wife got the money she was owed.

Union membership is “insurance” for when companies don’t follow the rules.

First past the post requires voting for the least crap party. Candidates don’t matter, parties that won’t get an MP don’t matter. Vote tactically to stop whatever you don’t like.

I might throw an election party for my daughter and her friends – free booze as long as you voted. I’d have taken that at 18.

Tell them not to vote so that they vote to spite you? (not a serious suggestion)

Let them make up their own minds, let them know that you’re voting and leave it at that.

The kids named our cats Paws and Lightning. Paws became Paws Meister then PM. He’s the best PM this country has had since 2010.

If you’re going to glue the map to the board use 3m spray mount, that’s what it’s designed for. You get a little while to adjust before it sets off. Iron the map first to get rid of any creases. 

Pictures when it’s done please!

Whatever you do, thoroughly degrease it first.
Welding 100 links is going to be a pain. Soldering sounds better, the chain will still need to be thoroughly clean. I assume you’ve going to fix to a backboard? If so you could use hot melt glue or superglue and accelerant spray.
Please post a picture when it’s done, sounds like a great idea.
Left field idea – get someone to cnc router the backplane to the profile you want to hold the shape whilst you solder or glue it.

Thanks to US law defining the receiver as the gun in law and allowing (broadly) anyone to make a gun there are very high quality descriptions of how to make them online. If you’re in the US you can even buy a cheap, single purpose CNC mills to make a lower.

If you’ve ever seen a video of a Sten gun being disassembled on YouTube (see Forgotten Weapons or Royal Armouries for instance) you have enough info to make a 9mm submachine gun. It’s about the simplest automatic weapon possible, optimised for production with minimal knowledge and tooling. You won’t have dimensions but you’ve probably got leeway on e.g. the mass of the bolt. Ironically, the magazine would probably the hardest thing to get right.

Of course you then need to get ammo which is not as easy as popping down to your local Walmart in the UK.

I’ve gone from Gillette Fusion to a safety razor this year. I find it’s a closer shave. I’m using a very cheap handle – King Gillette, usually about £10 – Chinese handle with a German head. I’m trying a variety of blades (avoiding the P&G ones including Gillette made in Russia) from Executive Shaving. I’m using normal Gillette shaving gel.

The advantage to me is that the blades are so cheap that I change them every week rather than every month with Fusion blades.

Cheap generic ones for me, the battery cover used to fall off sometimes until I put some tape over it. The cheap ones also don’t auto shut off so I keep a spare battery. Best thing is I don’t mind abusing it for scribing lengths on parts before turning them into piles of swarf.

Clough42 did a video on fake Mitutoyo calipers. The fakes were still pretty accurate as were the no-names but the real ones were better built and had auto shut off. I took from that for my purposes the generic ones from Screwfix /  Ebay /  Amazon etc. were good enough for me.

Re shipping – my father-in-law helped set up the random testing for oil tankers. It’s expensive to helicopter out a testing kit but much cheaper than another Exxon Valdez.