Re: Never mind tinned fruit, defund the BBC, NOW...
Bloody hell, that'll give me nightmares
314 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Sep 2012
Our neighbours get many, many people turning round and going back the other way on Fridays because that's when the chalet site takes in new guests every week. The misguided tourists go right past a big sign at the chalets' road because their satnav guides them to the centre of the postcode at our neighbours' about half a mile further on. The satnav must be right, what I can actually see must be wrong.
Some tourists demand the keys to their chalet, which is nowhere in sight. Once our neighbours were startled to see a bunch of Japanese tourists staring into their window. Some of them don't even know what the site's called - they think it's Hoseasons, the booking agent.
The pilot kept putting it to sleep instead of turning off every night because it took so long to start in the morning. On the next flight the wifi wouldn't work, then explorer seized up, and then it opened the canopy, ejected him, and set autopilot on itself before whizzing off into the distance.
Some American gov't person was moaning on (according to the Times) about how someone should've been able to track it. Well, stealth plane, durrrr.
One source of official action against non-compliance in self-certified goods comes from competitors who may be peeved by another company getting away with breaking the rules and gaining an advantage. In this case Apple may claim better radio performance in weak signal areas. And if an iPhone 12 transgresses, later ones might do too.
Mobiles vary their power output depending on received signal gain, so a software fix isn't a problem. Bad publicity is.
"a fault to earth is essentially close to a fault to neutral"
I have an old clothes iron in the museum that has a 'heating' indicator composed of a torch bulb in the handle. It connects across neutral to earth, usually about 4V in the UK. Try it now and it always trips the RCD; they only had fuses when it was made.
This works because the resistance of the filament while cold is very low, but increases sharply as it heats up. That's why bulbs fail when you first turn them on - the inrush current is far higher than the steady-state current when hot. Weak (thinner bits form from crystallisation during use) points in the filament when turned on get overloaded and melt.
Incidentally we have a Edward VII Coronation commemerative light bulb from 1901. Never dared try it, but it tests ok!
Once, just once, I had the deep-fat fryer on the hob so the cooker sucker sucked all the steam away. All went well until I accidentally turned the ring underneath it on.
In seconds the kitchen was full of burned plastic fumes. What an idiot I am.
(I have an engineering degree, so if you put it down to a vital experiment I suppose I could say I learned something)
My old power lecturer (whose stories, as I've mentioned previously, always started with 'When I used to work for the SWEB') used to say that if you didn't know where the root 3 goes, you shouldn't be doing power engineering.
So I didn't, and concentrated on digital electronics. The world of power engineering was safe as a result.
According to my 10-minute bout of research into the Terrorism Act 2000, the plod might be in contravention of section 58 (1) (a) concerning making a record of information which may be useful to terrorists.
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/11/section/58
Perhaps the CPS might take a view on that as making a record must include publishing information on a website.
"higher-level brains"
I'm pretty sure security guards often have these, but are forced to work in dull, poorly paid jobs because there's nothing else. You could say the same about people studying for qualifications while flipping burgers, serving beer, cleaning floors, and so on.
Never diss people doing lowly jobs, they're still people and they deserve respect. If your life was to become difficult, it could be you.
In the heat of a situation like that it's sometimes difficult to think your way out of it, because you're so busy trying not to die.
My whale-like Rover 820 stalled on a hairpin bend once, which meant the power steering failed and it nearly threw me off a cliff. I couldn't change down a gear to keep the steering on because I was grappling with the wheel saying 'ohfuckohfuckohfuck'.
"illegal to snoop on Tetra comms"
That reminds me of emergency services comms in the UK circa the 1970's. They transmitted on unused FM frequencies, different ones for officers in the field and control. Using the gift of any FM radio you could hear one side of the conversation, presumably with another one you could hear both.
But no-one ever did, ever, not even me (promise!) because there was a law against it.
"No more scotch eggs"
On the surface this might seem to be a disaster, but my experience of Scotch Eggs from factories is that of a spheroid with something resembling a gobstopper inside with a coating made of lard and sawdust, coated in yet more sawdust.
Make em yourself, they'll be far far better.
"swinging in the wind"
I had that too. When I phoned BT several times over the course of 18 months I always told them the line always fails when it's windy, so send someone out while it's still windy.
Did they? Did they bollocks. They always waited a few days then came out when the wind had died down, and amazingly the line worked again! They never arrived with a cherry picker either, despite it being an overhead line.
Eventually a very persistent pair of engineers tracked it down to a dodgy connection up the nearest pole which only failed in the wind.
The problem here is that openreach never keeps records of previous conversations and frequently doesn't tell it's own staff what the problem is.
According to my power lecturer, whose stories always started with "when I worked for the SWEB...", someone he visited to collect the coin meter contents did exactly that. No coins in the box (which was unexpectedly rusty) and a damp saucer underneath. He only worked out what was happening years later.
The worst bit, he said, was that they were stealing the electricity they used to freeze the 50p's.
This should be taught in school
My brother-in-law keeled over with a heart attack a few years ago. A lorry driver who was with him lost several minutes because his phone had no service and he thought he couldn't dial for an ambulance. In fact he could have, because there was service from other providers. The driver eventually found a neighbour and an ambulance and first responders arrived to help my brother-in-law, but he was dead on arrival at hospital.
I don't blame the driver, I blame the mobile providers for not telling people, all the time, that you can call 999 even if it seems like there's no mobile coverage where you are.
I have a "smart meter" at my workshop which has never worked. I suspect it's because Octopus doesn't have a transceiver in the area and it works on something other than the mobile network.
So it gives them the ability to get a government bung for installing it, while making me take the bloody readings. Even then, they only use the readings I send if I do it on the last 4 days of the month. If not, they wildly overestimate the power use and rob money from my account.
It would seem some people think he still believes he's the president, so wants to keep the papers to prove it and show off to everyone. That's why he reckons he can still declassify them (just by thinking about it), which is something he could only do while still in office.
Apparently some papers he's mentioned in recordings and transcripts are still missing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/10/us/politics/trump-documents-charges-motive.html
[and before the True Believers start gibbering to refute this the story is available from several sources, not just the NYT]