Whilst undamaged asbestos cement sheets are 'relatively safe' they have to be removed and disposed of correctly.

The links below documents the approved method of removing an asbestos cement sheet roof.

<https://www.hse.gov.uk/pubns/guidance/a14.pdf>

For disposal off site you must comply with this document <https://www.hse.gov.uk/pubns/guidance/em9.pdf>

Last but not least for your own protection ensure you get a valid Waste Transfer Note from whoever takes the stuff away <https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/duty-of-care-waste-transfer-note-template>

If you just pay 'some bloke £50' to take it away and it is subsequently found 'dumped in a ditch' and can be traced back to you then expect a hefty fine.

Regards,

Geoff

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_registration_plates_of_Europe#/media/File:Vehicle_registration_plates_in_Europe.png

7 hours ago, John Tomlinson said:

A question for you all - I've searched for an answer on NHS releases and so far failed, so maybe someone can help?

 

In the UK we know the strategy is to let the virus spread through the population until, as it were, it burns itself out by having no more hosts, or at least an inadequate density thereof. The idea is to do this in a structured way, in order to match the demand for treatment of the really sick to the capacity of the NHS to administer same. Having had the virus, it is thought highly probable, but perhaps not 100% certain, that one is thereafter immune, and also cease to be a carrier.

 

My question, to which there may not be an answer, is how do we know we've had the thing, if indeed we are amongst the fortunate to be barely aware or only moderately ill? Whilst the symptoms of a continuous cough and/or a high temperature are being widely publicised, they are not much different to the symptoms of many of the colds and flus that circulate anyway, and I for one would be hard pressed to know the difference. The reason it matters is that if we've had something else, we're still at risk and can be a carrier, whereas if we've had Covid-19 itself we should be in the clear for both.

 

Moreover we know that in the UK even with the priority being given to increasing testing, the capacity of this is unlikely to go much beyond NHS staff and those clearly seriously ill.

 

Any answers?

 

Many thanks,

 

John.

A good question John given the large number of shared symptoms but this table from

https://www.dw.com/en/coronavirus-symptoms/a-52233885

gives an overview.

I have 13 days to go before I reach the ' lock in ' time if they insist on it being  the over 70's .

But as one of the many with ongoing health issues , COPD and raised blood pressure in my case

I will looking at the situation very carefully as we progress .

So far though I'm doing nothing different to my normal routine . Being like many, a lone dweller,

I am fairly self isolating most of the time anyway , just popping out as when to collect essentials .

 I can tolerate the limitations on my physical ability but I do need things to keep the grey matter

going , I rarely watch TV these days and need to be in the right frame of mind to watch a DVD and

as my modelling mojo has taken a hit for some time now I find things like jigsaws and sudoku

help to keep me sane .

 So here are a couple of web sites I use for the above . The jigsaw one will supply more than you will ever

be able to complete in a lifetime . Sadly being computer based they don't work as a shared subject but

if you have a significant other you can each have time to yourselves .

https://thesudoku.com/easy-39158-free-sudoku

https://thejigsawpuzzles.com/

I hope this is of interest to some of you .

Stay safe .

I received this yesterday, I don't know about it's provenance

Cheers

Be aware that the signature for signed for may be into possession of the Spanish postal service, not alway the end buyer.

you may find it cheaper to use a freight broker such as worldwide parcels https://www.worldwide-parcelservices.co.uk .

I studied Typography (lettering styles) at college and worked in Print for 25 years so have a bit of professional experience. The confusing thing is typefaces/fonts have different names for essentially the same face/font, basically to try and get around the copyright laws. So ' Swiss' on some computers is nearly identical to 'Helvetica' but also there is 'Helvetica Neu' which is subtly different. I have over 3,000 Typefaces on my computer (and countless different weights ((Semi-Bold, Bold etc)) and that is a fraction of the typefaces out there). My historical typefaces book is in a box that I haven't unpacked yet or I would look it up for you. There are websites that allow you to type in a word and look at it or choose a style of individual letters and it will suggest the possible matches such as this one  https://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/

Simon

Excellent work Paul - The RhB has come out extremely well despite your concerns.

If you are making further decals here are some interesting RGB combinations to try - Put these codes into Word (Font colour; more colour; click on Custom Tab then enter codes)

Gold: Red=192, Green=168, Blue=104

Deeper Gold: Red=165, Green=138, Blue=82

Silver: Red=151, Green=151, Blue=168

Copper: Red=205, Green=115, Blue=0

And further variations round these numbers to tune to match.

https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/08601496/filing-history

A dangling participle walks into a bar. Enjoying a cocktail and chatting with the bartender, the evening passes pleasantly.

A bar was walked into by the passive voice.

An oxymoron walked into a bar, and the silence was deafening.

Two quotation marks walk into a “bar.”

A malapropism walks into a bar, looking for all intensive purposes like a wolf in cheap clothing, muttering epitaphs and casting dispersions on his magnificent other, who takes him for granite.

Hyperbole totally rips into this insane bar and absolutely destroys everything.

A question mark walks into a bar?

A non sequitur walks into a bar. In a strong wind, even turkeys can fly.

Papyrus and Comic Sans walk into a bar. The bartender says, "Get out -- we don't serve your type."

A mixed metaphor walks into a bar, seeing the handwriting on the wall but hoping to nip it in the bud.

A comma splice walks into a bar, it has a drink and then leaves.

Three intransitive verbs walk into a bar. They sit. They converse. They depart.

A synonym strolls into a tavern.

At the end of the day, a cliché walks into a bar -- fresh as a daisy, cute as a button, and sharp as a tack.

A run-on sentence walks into a bar it starts flirting. With a cute little sentence fragment.

Falling slowly, softly falling, the chiasmus collapses to the bar floor.

A figure of speech literally walks into a bar and ends up getting figuratively hammered.

An allusion walks into a bar, despite the fact that alcohol is its Achilles heel.

The subjunctive would have walked into a bar, had it only known.

A misplaced modifier walks into a bar owned a man with a glass eye named Ralph.

The past, present, and future walked into a bar. It was tense.

A dyslexic walks into a bra.

A verb walks into a bar, sees a beautiful noun, and suggests they conjugate. The noun declines.

An Oxford comma walks into a bar, where it spends the evening watching the television getting drunk and smoking cigars.

A simile walks into a bar, as parched as a desert.

A gerund and an infinitive walk into a bar, drinking to forget.

A hyphenated word and a non-hyphenated word walk into a bar and the bartender nearly chokes on the irony.

I use Inkscape a lot and have used it for etch artwork.

I have started this thread following comments from various people that they have difficulty getting into CAD, but would like to be able to produce artwork capable of being used with craft cutters such as the Silhoutte machines introduced so ably by JCL here: http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/79025-a-guide-to-using-the-silhouette-cameo-cutter/

So what is Inkscape?

It is intended to be a free alternative to Adobe Illustrator. Very simply it is a vector drawing program which is easier to get familiar with than typical CAD programs.

What is a vector drawing?

Forgive me if I am being really basic here, but there are fundamentally two types of computer images: raster and vector. Raster images are things like phtotgraphic images (or bitmaps) that when enlarged become blocky, whereas a vector image is made up of geometric definitions that can be zoomed in on without losing quality.

Where can I get Inkscape?

Inkscape can be downloaded from here:http://www.inkscape.org/en/. I will not cover the download and installation of Inkscape here, I am assuming this will be intuitive enough.

https://modellbahn-schweiz.net/category/modellbahn-schweiz-aktuell/

I forgot to mention the website address in case other folk have an interest in the magazine...

Peter

Heh. Odd lockdown madness I guess , but reading through that lot drags up odd memories. Now , I haven't had a television in the house for the last 25 years, to quote C.P. Scott, "

Television? The word is half Greek, half Latin. No good can come of it." 

But from my youth I have an earworm. There was a version of Robinson Crusoe, in black and white. At least I assume it was in black and white, but since we only had a black and white telly I might be wrong. The series dragged on for what seemed like hundreds of episodes, but it was the music that has stuck in my head all these years. 

Anyway all this led me to look it up, and lo there it is. 

Anyway, music added to iTunes, so there for my dotage. Thanks all. 

This might help: https://www.justanswer.co.uk/printers/b1ko3-when-attempt-print-canon-mg2450.html

4 hours ago, Edwardian said:

 

I decided to fit new axle boxes to a print I had, instead of ordering a pair of underframes with right pattern.  It worked.

 

$69.39, or £49.00, is a frankly stupid price for a pair of wagon underframes. I don't know why Shapeways is still in business; it charges a small fortune for prints markedly inferior to the results people get on domestic desk-top printers these days. 

Phew, seriously mate I'd be looking at buying a resin printer - straight off the bat the first UK site I see  has a Mars Pro for 280 pounds, or just under 6 wagon underframes but they are always having sales.  The bigger formfactor ones like the Elegoo Saturn or the Anycubic one are  bit more but you can print  that coach off in one go.

The detail they can achieve is staggering and magical  technology means that I can spend a few minutes in a spooky graveyard with a camera..

run the pics through a free software package

and print it off with detail identical to the original without involving a single traditional ("analogue"?)  modelling tool

I requested on line my NHS Covid Vaccination certificate on line on Sunday, just arrived today.

Hope I never need to show it - but I have it just in case (wife also). Handy if you haven't got a smartphone / NHS app.

Simple to order, just need your NHS No, Date of Birth and your home postcode (that is registered with your GP)

https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/coronavirus-covid-19/covid-pass/get-your-covid-pass-letter/

Brit15

If you are just starting to read the novels, this is a diagram of how the storylines are set up.

https://imgur.com/a/Yqipw

The novel Night Watch comes very far into the series and relies on a lot of what comes before.

8 minutes ago, idd15 said:

.......There are a few electricians who do YouTube videos of their installs, Artisan Electrics for example, which may help you.

 

A good shout out for Artisan Electrics, as the young folk say.

Well worth a watch to get an idea of what's involved in some awkward and challenging situations, as well as the much more common, fairly straightforward installations.

I would also recommend Fully Charged, which is the channel with the largest following and which covers all sorts of aspects of electric energy and electric (and hydrogen fuel-cell) vehicles.

They are at the forefront of dismissing a lot of the myths and misinformation that surround these subjects.

.

1 hour ago, eastwestdivide said:

If you think train info for passengers is bad, try catching a bus some time. Mobile phone ‘live bus tracking’ apps that bear no relation to reality are my bugbear at the moment. 

If you haven't seen it, try the bustimes.org web site - sort of the bus equivalent of realtimetrains but with a lot of extra features (like links to images of each bus on Flicker). I've found the tracking on it very accurate, so long as you pay attention to the "last updated" information for each bus. And as long as the bus company uploads their position data, though for some reason I'm not travelling much these days so haven't been able to try it out in many places.

6 hours ago, BR60103 said:

Sometimes there's a bit of railway jargon in the announcements. I remember a GO Train that was delayed by a CPR train "on the diamond" -- there was a flat crossing of the CP and CN mainlines.

Some time ago I caught the Cardiff to Holyhead loco hauled when it was 57 hauled. It failed at Newport and we were all decanted onto a conveniently waiting 175 across the platform. I can't fault the ease of transferring, but the announcement that our train had failed due to ETS problems and we should transfer to the waiting 175 could probably have been done in a more layperson friendly way.

18 minutes ago, petethemole said:

Back in the '80s the president of our military modelling club was a retired army major who was head of security for British Gas Southern.  He was also a security advisor on behalf of BG on the first (I think) Russia-Western Europe gas pipeline project.  He made regular liaison visits to the then Soviet Union.  The intent then was certainly to augment the UK's supply of North Sea gas.   He was still a reserve officer and at the club we used to speculate/joke that his trips also involved spying.

Maggie Thatcher I have read stopped that. She said we should never be dependant on Russia for primary energy. She also fell out with the miners and instigated the "Dash for gas" - gas burning power generation. A long time ago, we have wasted a valuable asset that could have lasted far longer if coal had continued. The (fairly) recent green agenda has changed everything again.

One day (50 years or so) Russias (etc) gas will run out / low. We keep kicking the can down the road.

Also "green" Germany burns Lignite - a very messy obnoxious fuel, half way between peat and coal.

I doubt that we will now see a hydrogen economy where the hydrogen is sourced via cracking Methane (Natural gas). 

Only a small % of Russian gas is imported via the interconector pipelines. LNG is imported by ship to Milford Haven and Isle of Grain terminals. This comes mainly from Qatar, and other nice places.

This is our real time gas supply real time flow data for system entry points. This information is updated every two minutes and published at twelve-minute intervals.

https://mip-prd-web.azurewebsites.net/InstantaneousView/Index

https://mip-prd-web.azurewebsites.net/

Interesting times ahead.

Brit15

#1 Son is travelling in & out of London every day. He reports that there's a regular pattern to the level of occupancy on train and tube.

Monday : Nearly empty

Tuesday : 1/3rd full

Wednesday : 2/3rds to full

Thursday : 2/3rds to full

Friday : 1/3rd full

He reckons most people (mostly Working From Home) have settled into a routine of just one or two days in the office, arranged to give them the longest weekends possible.

As a result of my project to build a six car BLS EW I train I realised the SBB coaches I'll be using as donor vehicles don't have the correct pattern roofs. The BLS ones have ventilator grilles above the passenger doors and the SBB ones don't. I wracked my brains to come up with a decent way of making the grilles so they'd be indistinguishable from the factory created ones and I came to the conclusion there was really only one way to do it. I was going to have to have the correct design 3D printed in resin. The problem was I'd never successfully touched 3D CAD before yesterday; the few times I'd tried it in the past I gave up in disgust, but after going through some posts on the subject here on RMWeb I downloaded the free version of Autodesk Fusion 360 and watched a beginners' video. It's one of the steepest learning curves I've ever had to climb but it's a good bit simpler to use and more intuitive than the other packages I tried before. I'm never going to design complex machines with this stuff but roofs and other simple(ish) components look like being within my reach. It's frustrating to begin with but I've become addicted to the process and it's actually a lot of fun seeing something recognisable appear as you intended it to.  After a lot of false starts here is my, as yet, bare bones Lima style roof with the corner locating clips constructed. It's still to have two more clips along both sides of the roof's length and the ribs, rainstrips and ventilator panels are yet to be done but I think it's coming on nicely.

19 hours ago, black and decker boy said:

as my previous post, due to my EV I’m going to use 100kwh per week overnight and 49kwh to 70kwh per week during the day. My business case therefore doesn’t rely on exporting electric.

 

for people with solar with a lot less EV miles to cover, that Flux deal looks very good though

Ah, I did think that your EV energy usage sounded quite high, this explains it.  I haven't yet dipped a toe in the EV world, so I'm not particularly au fait with the ins and outs of it.  From reading around on the Octopus web site (which IME is not always easy to navigate ☹️ sometimes it's easier just to use Google to take you to the page you want 🙄) my understanding is that Intelligent Octopus requires a 'smart' EV charger* whereas the older Octopus Go tariff didn't have that restriction.  Which is probably why the overnight rate for Intelligent Octopus is ~20% cheaper than Octopus Go, as the 'smart' charger is better able to adjust its demand vs overall demand from the grid.

Given the above, I could understand why they don't offer the higher export tariff to customers on the EV tariffs, if they have no way of knowing that you weren't just going to use the cheap electricity to charge a PV battery instead of an EV, and then sell it back to them at their ~15p export rate.  That said, the new Octopus Flux tariff does allow you to do that, albeit the nighttime cheap rate is not as cheap as either of their EV rates (but then the Flux peak time export rate is higher even than the normal daytime export rate).

I suspect that Octopus may continue to tweak their 'smart' tariffs as the value of being able to make use of domestic PV and EV batteries for grid balancing becomes clearer.  However, if I've interpreted the first graph on this page explaining what smart EV chargers do correctly, that would seem to suggest that EVs are less likely to be a useful source of electricity for the grid at peak times, since that is also the peak EV charging time.  Then again, if people are expecting to use their PV batteries to cover their nighttime usage, then they may not as inclined to sell it back to the grid during the evening peak either.

For myself, in the absence of an EV on the driveway at the moment, my plan is to get a chunky PV array and a chunky battery, and to join Octopus Flux once they're installed.  (I'm also getting the EPS functionality on my inverter, to provide some backup power if the grid fails.)

* I appears from the web page linked above that all new domestic EV charger installations have had to comply with the 'smart' capability requirement since July last year.

20 hours ago, Ian J. said:

Linux's biggest problem is that you're considered to be either a 'dumb' user, or an outright Guru. There's no allowance for being a power user who only occasionally needs to change settings, where GUI elements help to remember how to set things. The command line requires seriously learnt knowledge, retained in memory constantly, and doesn't allow for making sure typos don't screw things up.

Actually, no. What you need is a basic set of CLI instructions, not so much under your fingers but so that you recognise them. Most things you can use your favourite search engine to describe your problem, add the terms "Ubuntu" or "Linux" and there will usually be someone providing a potential solution. At first glance that may appear to be written in Hungarian but if you recognise the commonest commands then you can see what the solution proposed might be.

Key ones these days are (in Ubuntu systems)

sudo    -    this gives you root (aka administrator) privileges for the command you type immediately behind it and you will be prompted for a password.

apt   -    this is the command line version of the software install programme. You will almost certainly want to "sudo" this to make sure you have write permissions in all the locations needed. For example sudo apt install mypaint is a command line instruction to install a programme called "mypaint" (an interesting art application incidentally)

ps  -ef    -     this lists running apps. This will return a huge list so you want to "pipe" it to another command

|              -    the "pipe" command. This is found next to the "Z" key on UK keyboards but will be somewhere else on others. Put between two commands it outputs the result of the first to be the input to the second, so:

                     ps -ef | more returns that list of running apps one page at a time and you advance by pressing the space bar.

grep      -     is a simple word search, very useful connected to ps -ef via a pipe:

                    ps -ef | grep -i firefox will list all processes associated with Mozilla Firefox. It's useful to discover a zombie left by some badly behaved javascript in a web page. Unix systems like Linux - but unlike Windows - are case sensitive. the "-i" switch makes grep case insensitive.

top      -     lists the top resource hungry applications

A little bit of play is needed to learn how to use cd, cp and mv to navigate directories and copy and move files

A decade or so ago it would have been necessary to know how to unpack an archive, unzip a compressed directory or link files, but I haven't done that in years, the graphical application managers do the job well enough. It's been a while too since I needed to use vi to edit a set up file, and as for complicated scripting using sed and awk, I never needed that in my personal computing, only in my work stuff. I couldn't do it now anyway.

Any command in a solution can be checked using the internet so you can decide how uncomfortable you feel with something before proceeding.