JJGraphics

Red Devil said, "Smart meters have to be the most idiotically named items ever ....." Agree 100% with that. In my experience a significant proportion of things which have "Smart" in their name are anything but. Some are useful and work well, but a lot are just "got to have" items which contribute nothing much of use to life that anyone with a normal amount of common sense could not achieve for themselves. John

Probably VM's spam filters getting a bit over-enthusiastic. Happens with BT, too sometimes. Log-in to your VM account and set RM as a "safe sender".

In the early 1950s my Grandfather used to take me to a builder's yard at the bottom of Highgate Road in Kentish Town in North London near where he lived where there was a good view of the tracks from St Pancras and an oblique view of Kentish Town shed. He was a bus conductor at Highgate trolleybus depot and he would occasionally take me to the depot, on one side of which there was a pair of double doors leading out to a loading platform where there was a goods yard served by the line between Gospel Oak and Upper Holloway. I stood with him and watched fly-shunting taking place in the goods yard alongside the depot. From then on I was hooked and when I grew older I went transporting at most of the North London termini. John

A while since I visited this show. Last time was in the old, rather crowded venue. Made the trip from down sarf on Saturday on a packed XC service and stayed overnight to visit the show today. Quickly in with my prepaid ticket well before the scheduled opening time with no Warley-styles queues. It was quiet to begin with but soon got busy. Thoroughly enjoyed it as there was a nice balance of layouts and traders and well laid out with a nice amount of aisle space to circulate. Layout quality was generally very good with most having a decent number of trains on the move. Special favourite had to be Euxton Junction. Thanks to all involved for a very enjoyable show. John

If only!

I did not say it was a Smart Meter. My comment referred to the post by Hroth which mentioned the "Nag meter" and commented, "it may as well be unplugged and left in a drawer with all your old deceased smartphones and tablets.

It is interesting to see the not inconsiderable number of those things thrown in the "electronics scrap" bin at our local waste disposal site. There were quite a lot of them in the bin when I went there last week and I'm aware that the bin gets emptied fairly frequently. It is normal to see a number of then in the bin – I know as I use it regularly to dispose of electronic scrap. Listening to what friends and neighbours have told me probably gives a clue to the reason for this – that the displays go wrong and the supplier then will not/cannot replace them. Others fail to show the rate actually being charged for electricity or gas and thus become useless. Others are just forgotten about or get in the way and gather dust and get thrown out.

We have not seen a meter reader for about five years – and no, we don't have a "Smart" meter.

If you can safely extract the files from that disk it would probably be a good idea to re-format it with Disk Utility and then test it several times before re-using it. It is probably only the file system which has become corrupted unless it took a good knock. An acquaintance of many years is a storage device engineer and one of his favourite sayings is, "It's not if a hard disk will fail, but how soon." How true that is! Over the years, despite giving dire warnings to people, I have seen vital data lost simply because they did make the effort to back-up. John

You don't have to use iCloud or iPhoto if you don't want to. Coming from a digital graphics background, I manually manage my photo library (about 22,000 images) in folders, each containing 250 images, on my Mac. I allocate a number to each image and keep notes on each one in a Numbers spreadsheet. I use Growly Photo to visually locate an image and I think that even on its own, that application would suffice for many people. I burn batches of the image folders to DVD-R disks when enough have accumulated to fill a disk. Those are kept at my daughter's house for extra security. I back up my Mac using Time Machine to two separate external storage devices which I rotate to provide extra security. If you are interested in data security, you might care to read the information in the file below. I wrote it for Mac users, but the general principles are the same for other platforms. John Data Security.pdf

The e-mail is legitimate. My Photo Stream is a legacy service provided by Apple which is being closed down as it has relatively few users and is nowhere near as capable as iCloud. You (as most people do) are using iCloud which is unaffected so you have nothing to be concerned about. If anyone has images stored in the My Photo Stream service it is important to remove them before 26/7. John

It's getting on towards the evening as, having brought in the Darley Vale portion of an express from St Pancras, D6714 has pushed the stock back and is running round before setting the stock back into the platform to form a later departure.

Ours actually gave us the paperwork from the local council, but you are probably right and a lot don't go through the process!

The contractor fitting the roof which is manufactured by a national supplier has to apply for Building Regulation Approval.

Absolutely the right thing to do. Did that with my layout when I started it almost seven years ago and have never had an electrical problem. Make sure that you also wire the points properly regardless of whether they are live frog or not as that also has a huge impact on reliability. A little time spent on doing those things at the beginning will avoid grief later! John

Had the life-expired polycarbonate roof on our twenty five year old conservatory replaced in mid-2021 with a fully-insulated "pretend" tiled roof at a cost just shy of £8000 which has transformed the original 5m x 4.5m conservatory into a year-round usable room. It is south-facing, does now not get so hot in the summer but warms up fairly quickly in winter sunshine and only needs a little input from an electric convector heater to become pleasantly warm on a cold day. It retains the warmth for quite a while. An unexpected addiional benefit is that the lounge from which it is accessed via folding doors requires less heating.

During a warm sunny afternoon at Darley Vale, the cows waiting to be picked up from the cattle dock by the local farmer are completely uninterested as 3F "Jinty" 47629 slowly propels a few vans down the yard towards the distant goods shed.

As the evening draws in 42613 pulls a mixed rake of empty coaching stock and vans from the bay at Darley Vale Station to be stored overnight in the sidings.

After doing a walking inspection of Darley Vale tunnel, Jim the platelayer took this photo before heading for the signal box to scrounge a cuppa.

Once the beancounters get any kind of say in running a business the future can indeed be bleak. Over many years of running my own business I saw three previously successful businesses destroyed by their actions. John

Absolutely agree with you. The ability to think for themselves seems to have been programmed out of a lot of people these days and some call-centre staff (but thankfully not all) have not been trained in even the most basic aspects of customer service and in some cases have no idea of basic good manners. There was no doubt about the bluntly rude attitude of the first "customer service" person I spoke to, but the second one got the message that I was not going to be fobbed-off. Let's hope that the weather over the Winter does not turn too cold so that we can conserve energy and keep the bills down. John

Some companies are definitely taking the Michael with DDs or perhaps they are just trying to bank a load of our money as someone suggested earlier in this thread. A supplier who had best remain nameless tried to almost TREBLE our elderly, disabled, lady neighbour's DD. She is careful about what she uses and was almost £900 in credit when I heard about the problem from her. She had spoken to them and got a "we know best" type of brush-off. She was very upset by the ridiculous amount of money being demanded. It took me two phone calls to get the DD reduced to something more realistic. The first person I spoke to obviously had no idea what she was talking about and after I asked to speak to a manager put the phone down on me. The second person launched into the same sort of spiel but, when I changed my attitude to being very firm, did put me through to someone more senior. After a bit of faffing about the "manager" did concede that the proposed DD was too high and agreed what I felt was a more acceptable amount. The moral of this story is: don't be intimidated by suppliers into paying far too much but be careful to pay enough. John

Seen on a gateway to a private garden from the towpath of the Basingstoke Canal:

Just in case you happen to be on the receiving end of a phone call which tries to get you to part with your hard-earned cash, this new service may be of help: https://stopscamsuk.org.uk/159 John

Golden Rule Number One: NEVER reply directly to e-mails or SMS of that nature. Always look up the actual contact address/phone number on a bill from the supplier or the back of your Credit/Debit Card and use that. John