AndrewC

Definitely up to something. However this is the boring borough of Bexley where a developer can illegally demolish a pub and only get caught when H&S fined them. The council turned a blind eye. Checking their tree pages, unless they've removed a tree that is under a protection order, in a conservation area, or contains an active bird nest there is nothing stopping them from hacking away.

Paul, others like Nigel have commented around the DCS100. I've still got one and an even older DB100a. Having fed and watered them for well over 25 years, these are my findings and suggested order of trouble shooting. 1: cmos battery. Do this first. Do this annually. 2: loconet voltage being dragged down. Too many throttles without batteries or non-powered UP5 panels can drop the loconet voltage. If there are send issues with the command station you'll get 9 beeps. (then another 9 and another 9... ) 3: bad loconet cable. Use a cable tester from where you connect the DCS from and every terminating point on the layout. This means each throttle panel, stationary decoder, detection device, etc. I had one major failure where a bit of grit had got into an RJ12 socket on one of my panels and nothing beyond would work as it blocked one pin from connecting to the plug. A bad connection or cable can also cause the 9 beeps of frustration. 4: slot max. If you have JMRI connected, keep your eye on the slots, and the loconet messages (from 2 and 3) One strange design "feature" of Digitrax systems was to have a series of slots once you select a loco. If you just grab a new address you don't clear the slot. Eventually you run out. Check your system to see how many it is configured for and purge them through out the day during an exhibition. There are loads of JMRI python scripts that will do this automatically. 5: Check the input voltage and current rating of the power supply. If you have a multi-voltage supply it is easy enough to knock it from 16v to 9v. 6: Support. Not happening. The 100 is regarded as out of support and beyond repair. 7: cooling is important. That's why it has fins. I built a Digi-box based on what Chris Shinn did on the Digitrax list many years ago. It contains a fan for cooling. 8: Inrush current and sound locos. I've found that after any sort of short where there are multiple sound locos the DCS misbehaves afterwards. IF the short was on the booster, no problem. I found a PSX makes a big difference. In fact I now break all my power districts into no more than 3a sections, all protected by PSX units.

Need to go digging to find this. I picked one up on Saturday. Just need to find a chassis for my ancient Parkside Linda, and my Peco Jeanette.

Not sure but possible. The used car place that was there when we moved in had been around since 88 according to their signage. They are still in business but moved to a larger space. The Chryo-lounge was owned by some professional women football players and was doing a booming business until the first lockdown. I think they are still operating but have moved into West Ham's Rush Green training facility as many of their customers were based there. Since then, the amount of wasted building work does hint at something dodgy going on. Similar to many of the local car dealerships that never seem to have customers but their cars turn over on a very rapid basis.

Moaning all from the boring borough. Happy Birthday Stewart. 🎂🎂 And now the local news. Our neighbour TW@ is similar to Mr Bear's but in reverse. In the past few months he has removed 3 of the 5 trees in their back garden. Why, I have no idea as 2 of them were all that was holding up most of the boundary fence between them and our alleyway. The downside is instead of green we now have a lovely view into the windows of his neighbour's extension. Not sure what will happen to the remaining trees or the now part collapsed fence and garage. The stupid thing is half their garden space is overrun with brambles. It is going to take a digger, at least 2 skips, and several cubic metres of new topsoil to put that right. We aren't sure who now owns the property but we do know the tenants are fairly transient. This property has a history of stupidity. Once upon a time they applied to build a second detached house / flats in their back garden. All well and good until it was pointed out to the council that they had no right of access to the alleyway which is jointly part of some of our terrace's property, and partly owned by the company that owns the end of terrace pair. They (and the council) were told that if they attempted to use the alley for access we'd simply erect a new fence inside our boundary and if they so much as touched it, they'd be looking at criminal damage charges. A few years later they applied to pave the back garden to enable it to store off season Ice Cream vans. Council's reply was quick and short. (F O) A couple of years after that they applied again to pave the back and operate a car wash. Again, they got bitch slapped by the council and nearly 50 objections which is unheard of. On the other side of the street, a former small car dealership which became a chryo freeze sports clinic, then ironically a Ice Cream parlour which failed to gain change of use and never opened, has now become a..... car detailing shop. Council's website shows they'd applied to change use to a takeaway (again) and were rejected (again) as it is too close to a school and the new regulations say no fast food within 400m of a school door. Obviously part way through gutting the place and starting to erect the extraction flue, they got the bad news and did an about face very quickly. I hate to think of the money wasted on that shop over the past 3 years with nothing to show for it. That's what happens when people think they can do what they want without planning permission. Asshats. For the first time in a long time I started browsing through some of the narrow gauge threads on the forum. I'd forgotten just how much of the content and context relies on the attached photos. I went through a few threads with nothing but broken links. <sigh> With people moved on, passed on, or no longer in possession of the originals, I wonder exactly how much of our modelling history of the past decade has been lost forever. I know they are trying to recover up to last May but somehow I don't think they'll ever manage it all. On that downer, it is time to pretend to work for the next couple of days. Coffee awaits. Enjoy the day

Moaning all from the boring borough. Seems as though a large number of tractor related posts were purged. Oh well. No truth to the rumour that Putin's May day parade was replaced with Ukrainian tractors. All quiet here. Lousy sleep until around 03:00 when I moved into the office. Whump, like a brick for 4 solid hours. Depending on my knee and how adventurous I feel, I may get some more de-cluttering of the shed done. Roast cluck for the bbq tonight. Tomorrow will be a Tuesday that feels like a Monday but is actually a Thursday. A 2 day work week, then away for a few days. That is all, enjoy the day.

Moaning all from the boring borough. Yesterday was rather stressful on the liver and wallet. Trips to the Garden Centre, BBQ Barn, Invicta Models, all started the descent into excess spending. The upside is I now have sufficient track and a second loco to start playing with a little OO-9 project. Following that, the decision was made to go to the Micro Pub's party instead of the brewery. Good decision in the end. However, the usual door to door bus was on diversion so that meant Uber both ways. Good beers, good food, and a rather good Mariachi band. Slightly tender this morning but nothing a full breakfast won't put to rights. Today will be mostly bbq cleaning, replacing the ash basket, and laying down an offensive layer or nematodes to combat the rising slug insurrection. Enjoy the day.

Am I the only one to connect the dots. Germany needs gas. The French have it pre-packaged. Et Voila, problem solved.

Same here. 2087 working days until my retirement unless I go postal first.

The gents is technically out of the station now and under Westminster management. It is along the exit for the Trocadero. Still in operation.

Good moaning from the boring borough. When we had the whole house refurbished 4 years ago (bloody hell has time flown) we decided to do the painting ourselves. Mainly because the builder hated painting and would have hired another to do it at a hefty mark up. Anyway the whole house had fresh plaster so painting should have been easy. It wasn't. Even with a coat of pva followed by a plain under coat of white, the top coat of colour was bloody awful to put down. We used a few custom matched colours from the orange place. Valspar paint is crap. There, I've said it. Goes on poorly and wears poorly. The office, hallway, and stairway all need a refresh already. The slightest knock and the paint seems to rub off back to the white undercoat. Scheckels will be accumulated and used to hire a painter and decent quality paint in the coming months. There was discussion of doing a Mr Bean with some fireworks and large can of paint, but masking the cats would have been problematic to say the least. Little else to say. I've turned down a reasonable job offer which would in the medium term just be swapping one thing for an identical thing. I'm now concentrating on looking for something with either a compressed week or just fewer hours. The idea of permanent long weekends is becoming more and more attractive. 1 liver but 2 events this weekend. Conundrum time as we've got invites to 2 beery things which conflict. A spring party with new beer launch at a brewery, or a Mexican day complete with mariachi band at a local(ish) micro pub. hmmmm. Time to pretend to work for the next 8 hours. Enjoy the day.

It would be my luck for a double decker bus to stop right outside the house while I was mid stream. A rather more subtle supply of said liquid will be distributed to see if it discourages them. I'd forgotten about using wee to get rid of foxes. Failing that a box of Scoot from the local hardware store will be obtained. That's worked well in the past when we had them in the garden prior to the new fence.

The foxes around here just got a yellow card from SWMBO. There is a den in the alleyway under all the brambles and bushes. We seem to be on yet another generation there. At least 3 showing up nightly on the Ring camera. SWMBO leaves fresh water and sometimes excess bird food out back for them. They never venture into the garden due to the metal fence, even though they sometimes sit on the neighbour's garage roof. However, this morning it appears a pair had an evening of passion in the front garden, damaging a number of plants and leaving a big nasty poo that the bin man didn't see before dragging the recycling bin through it. SWMBO is less than impressed. I predict some rather uncomfortable plant life will be going into the front flower bed in the near future.

That sounds like a right load of cobblers. As some of you that have met me know, I live in Doc Martens. Well I used to. Once the company went boom and the name was sold off, the original tooling, patterns etc were retained by Solovair. They still make shoes to the original pattern with the original sole. (patent long expired) These shoes are basically indestructible. The crap made for the company that now owns the brand name tends to fall apart faster than a Camden market fake. I've still got 25 year old Docs in great condition. My Solovairs are all in good nick despite some now being close to 20. My last pair of crap docs lasted maybe a year before the sole wore, leather split, and they basically fell apart. In other news, b*gger all happening. Time for coffee and maybe some of last night's left over pizza. (home made, wood fired, stone baked) Enjoy the day.

Moaning all from the boring borough. Buffalo chicken drums on the bbq last night with...... surprise!!! Asparagus. Basically, trimmed ends, cut in half, bit of olive oil & some Mexican fajita seasoning, then grilled for 6 minutes. My missing sound decoder has been found still in Ontario. Seems that Rapido has been really suffering with staff shortages due to Covid. The repair guy thought it had shipped 2 months ago but apparently it is part of a larger bulk shipment to the UK office. Hopefully it, and the rest will be sorted in the coming days. Coming to the end of my tether with Sonos. After a lot of early problems with different speakers dropping out, I spent a lot of time and effort, not to mention £££ making sure they were all on a separate network with minimal channel contention, the whole bloody thing now has issues connecting to the music library. Worked fine for nearly 2 years but now, Sonos tells me I need to update to the latest firmware. However, that means junking at least 3 of the components that they sold me only months before releasing a major change that isn't compatible with these older devices. They then offered a scrappage trade in. Bunch of t*atwaffles. If not for the fact the library is on a rather high end NAS drive that is physically cabled to the same switch as the Sonos boost router, I'd be blaming either the NAS or the network. Seems though, Sonos's last update to the older gear's "b" grade firmware can't handle the throughput and the Boost gets confused and fails to connect at random times. Enough is enough. Time to find something that actually works without all the f*king about. 100m of speaker cable, a tame plasterer, and a dozen JBL speakers should do the trick. 🤬 Coffee time and a look at what steaming 💩 awaits me in the mailbox of merde.

Good day all. Another Moanday almost half over. Buckets of fun at work. A rather good weekend was enjoyed. Most of Sunday spent on the patio with some small items needing repair for SWMBO and a couple of Ukrainian beers. Postal votes posted. More crap to top up the recycling bin popped through the door this morning. Bit of a waste really as they could dig up Fred West's rotting corpse, dress it up like Jimmy Saville, slap a blue rosette on it and it would still get elected around here. I long ago determined that the only way to vote is choose the one who will sh*t on you the least. Probably had the strangest interview of my life today. The job sounds ok but the woman conducting it is one of those personalities I'd never want to work for in a million years. Think Sue Perkins meets Priti Patel. Now to tell the recruiter, thanks but no forking way. Now to forage for lunch. Left over Nepalese curry I think. Enjoy the day.

The muppets aren't the problem. It is the evil b*stards who have their hands up the muppet's backsides that are the problem.

I remember way back when, a lecture when I was taking my broadcasting / television production diploma. The teacher was American and basically said that political advertising kept a large percentage of American local stations afloat. At that time most were family or locally owned. Our local cable company used to do a good job of blanking a large portion of the advertising breaks from the Spokane stations they used to relay. Our council elections are coming up. Postal vote done. So far the blue bunch have been limited to a single page flyer of "vote for us" and the red team dropped off a 3 page pamphlet on why the blue team are utter w*nkpuffins. On the other hand the far right swivel eyed whackjob candidate seems hell bent on filling our recycling bin. Sadly no representatives of the Monster Raving Looney Party, or Count Binface are running in our area. None of the incumbents have chosen to run again. A shame really as one of them was quite good. TFIF. Just some mopping up to do on my last project, then 2 weeks of "training", "bench time", with a week of leave thrown in. Enjoy the day. edit: insufficiently caffeinated speeling errror fix.

Ok, now I'm very paranoid. Not more than 90 minutes after posting my Canada pension rant, I receive an email with my first pension deposit information. I'm wondering if CSIS is monitoring ERs. What started as a potentially very likely crap week is getting somewhat better. An extra (small) but welcome deposit to the bank account, my latest covid test came back negative and I'm feeling a bit better, shorter than expected week, project issues fixed quickly, good job interview this morning, and a very quiet & relaxing weekend in the garden has lowered my stress levels greatly. In other news my "Lady and the Truck" came by and took away all the accumulated junk, cut down brambles, and other waste. Far easier than making at least 8 trips to the council tip. Now for a late lunch and a deserved glass of Dutch ale.

I share your pain. My turn: Went to apply for my Canada Pension. Do it online they said. You will need a Service Canada account. Tried to register, told I needed to register with my bank. Nope no Canadian account, ok use provincial registration, nope don't live in Canada. Ok. Register for a GC key. 6 weeks later I get the key. Yippee, I can log in. Go to apply. SIN number not valid. Try again. Nope. Call them up. SIN is blocked as it hasn't been active for more than 10 years. They send a form. Another few weeks go by. Get form, send with all the ID they asked for. A few more weeks and voila I can finally log in to CRA and see all my tax and pension availability. The useless ****s still haven't returned the ID, so I'm going to have to order a replacement birth certificate. Asshats. Click apply, ooo I will get $xxx per month or if I wait 2$xxx. Take the first option. Fill in all the online stuff. Click finish. "Unable to complete at this time". <more profanity> Try again, and again over a few weeks as their site is up and down more than a toilet seat at an incontinence festival. Finally, after spending hours trawling through all the small print on the site I see "applicants out side of Canada must apply by post or in person. Finally get the forms filled in and posted. One form had to go to Quebec, and the other to Manitoba for the banking information. <sigh> 7 to 10 days is their online processing time. Now I have to wait 120 days as that is the time for manually processed applications. I'm hoping beyond hope that I'll get my first pension payment in time for my next Birthday.

Moaning all from the boring borough. Day 5 of Covid v3.0. Despite having it twice before and being triple jabbed I feel worse than ever. It may be coupled with a cold or something else as well so who knows. Managed to "sleep" most of yesterday away. Work still bites. It is amazing how things change. A few years ago job hunting was a painful experience. These days they come to you. Especially if you have an in demand skill set. 2 interviews for next week already. Several short term contract offers in the £900/day range turned down. Been there, done that, can't deal with the hassle and uncertainty any more. Especially so with my last mortgage renewal coming up in a few months. If I was younger and had the luxury of being able to work half a year at a time, I might have gone down that route again. These days, not so much. Lamb thawing for tomorrow's dinner. Isolating means no weekly shop so no eggs this year. I really don't need the sugar anyway. A large quantity of Ukrainian beers are enroute thanks to various suppliers though, so that should make up for the lack of chocolate. That's about all from me. Another coffee then try to rearrange some rubbish to be collected next week by our tame disposal lady.

Oh bother, I was so hoping it was the battery/charging circuit. At least a visit to Brighton on Sea has several good brilliant beer destinations. I'm am hoping you managed East St Tap, North Laines Brewing, or at the very least a visit to the Heart & Hand to say hi to Bailey the cat and plunk a coin into their haunted juke box.

Vermin, err Virgin merged with O2 last year. I'm shocked they didn't just flip your network over. They did with my crappy old emergency phone. BTW, for those who don't know. Virgin doesn't actually exist. (sort of like Newcastle's women) It is simply a licenced brand name. Virgin Media = the parent of NTL, Virgin Money = parent of Clydesdale (or the company they merged with), Virgin mobile = O2. The list goes on. The bearded band botherer makes his lolly by selling the big V to other companies.

and Scotchguard on the furniture I hope.

Are you really sure, or is it a zombie. 1: does it switch on? If yes then try factory reset If that fails, give it a decent burial. If no then your battery or charging system is kaput. well known issue. Take it to Apple or to iSmash. Likely it can be saved. Usually around £45. Worthwhile really. I've got an ancient Ipoo 2 that lives on and is used as a mimic panel for the layout/modules.