Craig Sawyers

Have a truly awesome day mate! Happy birthday!!

The London box junction zero tolerance is not automatic. There is a control room with real people looking at monitors. Even if your rear wheels are an inch inside the box - they click a button and bish bash bosh - you're done, matey. It is not rigorously policed anywhere else, but drivers here are pretty good with boxes. I'd not be surprised that the London control room is financially motivated. The more people you nick, the more you are paid. I don't know that for a fact, but they nick anyone for the most trivial of offences.

For us, ANPR offences have the backing of the law. And if you repeatedly ignore them the fine escalates, and then finally you end up in court. Speed and red light cameras similarly. The killer are mobile speed cameras - basically a van with a window in the side. You cannot mess with these - you pay the fine, period. If you repeatedly ignore any of these these you end up in court. Parking offences tend to get ignored. These are issued generally by third party outfits who send increasingly threatening letters and eventually just go away. There are other camera based offences. We have something called a box junction; the rule is you should not enter the box until your exit is clear, except when turning right. So if you have two wheels in the junction - bosh - fine. This tends to be restricted to London. The trap is you have a green light, so you drive ahead. But the traffic in front stops and leaves you stranded in the junction. Also only in London you can be fined for parking on the grass verge. Elsewhere in the country this is allowed. So for anyone from the US or anywhere else and driving in the UK - you have to be aware of the driving rules.

We are looking for you?

Anyone note the triangular lock shape on the box with the stick on pubes?

I bought a job lot of veneer a few years ago. Lots of it. For a whopping £100. It cost me more for the shelving to store it! But all the suggestions regarding the bargain price for all that hardwood are good. Snap it up and then work out which of the suggestions work best for you.

Stick on beavers! The Victorians were nothing if not entrepreneurial. Posted out of order!

Meanwhile, in the UK we have an ANPR (automatic number plate recognition) system for traffic offences. They send you a photograph of the offence to support the fine. This guy got a fine for driving in a bus lane in Bath. Strange, he thought - I've never driven in Bath: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/oct/18/motorist-fined-number-plate-t-shirt

June 6, 1944, James M. Doohan of Vancouver, led D Company of Royal Winnipeg Rifles ashore at Juno beach. He would be shot 6 times, survive and go on to become Scotty on Star Trek.

Well that was a result. We pay for a landline phone from Virgin Media. We have been paying £27 a month for a long time. I decided to look at alternatives, and Direct Save Telecom came up with £19.50. So I phoned Virgin Media, quoted the alternative prices to them - and with zero negotiation the slashed the charges by £10 to £17 a month. And because of where we are in the billing cycle, they will refund £9.60 and only charge us £7.40 for this month. No idea why I haven't done this years ago!

Look at the raw hatred on the face of the girl following

That is pretty impressive! Are you going to get a tree surgeon in to remove it? This isn't a problem so much in UK properties, where the garden is like a postage stamp by comparison, even on otherwise impressive properties.

Well we went to the theatre this week - a matinee performance of The Mirror and the Light. This is the last of a trilogy of plays about the life of Thomas Cromwell, based on Hilary Mantel's books. The play was awesome. But the theatre was packed to the gunnels, no need of proof of vaccination or a negative covid test. So if the national average was present, one in ten was not vaccinated. And since the government has abandoned mandatory mask wearing (as a courtesy to others only), only half the audience were wearing masks. We found the whole experience very disquieting. Going to the theatre was very much our thing pre-covid, at least once a month. But the gung-ho attitude of our idiot leader regarding public safety makes us very wary of repeating the experience any time soon.

I've a similar cyclone (mine is plastic) bolted to the side of my shop vac. Amazing thing - all the machine tool shavings, including fine dust, end up in the cyclone, and nothing in the shop vac. So the filters in the vac don't get blocked up, and it retains maximum suction. But mine is passive. Yours seems to be a powered one? Yup - same make as yours but this one https://www.oneida-air.com/dust-deputy-deluxe-cyclone-separator-kit

Almost as bad as Bridge https://www.bridgebum.com/bridge_bidding_conventions.php .

Bloody hell. I'd have ended in the ditch.

My daughter surprised one in her armpit while she slept. So she got a nasty bite when she grabbed it in surprise. Her husband is an arborist (it is his company) https://www.gibbontrees.com/ . He was surprisingly unfazed by this, and reckoned he probably brought it home somewhere in his work clothes. So she ended up with the classic two-fang puncture in her armpit. She felt a bit sick was all, and a few ibuprofen was all that was needed. They live in Newcastle NSW. Mind you he found one in his UTE cab one morning, and even he did not want one along for the ride. So he ejected it with a leafblower.

Current RIAA figures are out (link below). This is of course USA figures, but the headline is that vinyl record sales doubled in the first half of the year, with revenues now over 11% of paid for streaming. https://www.riaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Mid-Year-2021-RIAA-Music-Revenue-Report.pdf

You know, that makes me really glad to live in the UK - there are no animals that can kill you (unless you have an allergy to a sting). We have one poisonous snake - the adder - which is rare (I've only ever seen two), and the bite is no worse than a bee sting. And it is totally non aggressive. We have three stinging insects. The wasp, the hornet (wasp on steroids), and the bee. And one stinging plant - the nettle. And you can even eat that. Blanching kills the stings, and you can eat it as a salad leaf, or make it into soup. But the US pales into insignificance with poisonous things as compared with Australia, where our daughter lives. The working assumption is that any insect or snake is out to kill you, and many things in the sea too. The worst thing seems to be the Sydney Funnelweb spider. Not only is it venomous in the extreme, huge and ugly, it is also aggressive. If it takes a dislike to you the darned thing can jump 18 inches with fangs bared. Google it. Of course some things just try to eat you outright. Like saltwater crocs or great white sharks.

Just heard a long segment on the Today current affairs radio 4 programme (in the UK), about the ESA BepiColumbo mission to Mercury. It has just done its first flyby of Mercury - the first of 6 before it gets captured into orbit in 2025. My interest in this, is that I was overall project manager for one of the 12 instruments on board - the Mercury Imaging X-Ray Spectrometer. That uses X-Rays from the sun, the reflected X-Ray light from Mercury having the spectrum of the elements on the surface of the planet - so how much iron, silicon etc, with a 10km resolution. It was launched in October 2018 After shakedown to make sure everything worked after launch, it then did a maneuver past the earth to send it on its way to the inner planets. Since then it has done two Venus flybys and yesterday the first Mercury one. So why go to Mercury? First because it is a rocky planet that has never had an atmosphere, so to learn about how the earth might have formed, Mercury is a good place to learn. Also it is the second densest planet in the solar system - very close to the Earth's density. In addition it has a magnetic field (no-one knows why), and ice at the poles (which is weird given how close it is to the sun). US interest in Ariane 5, is that the James Webb Space Telescope will be launched on one of those, imminently.

Meanwhile, the latest initiative to solve the trucker crisis:

I'm talking rubbish - of course PSU2D can do CLC!

Except it doesn't do CLC filters. You can do RC, LC, or just C. He's just about to issue a new version, which *might* do CLC. OK - he's released it, and it looks like it indeed does CLC. Must have a play.

Maximum for a capacitor input is 60uF. So 220uF significantly exceeds spec for a GZ34, https://frank.pocnet.net/sheets/030/g/GZ34.pdf

What rectifier tube are you using Kevin?