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Why don't you petition St. Tabitha to intercede for you aboot 'pooter ? (How very Edwardian that sounds)

 

Now something to raise the spirits: click this Wiki page on Anthony Trollope quite the best I've found

We happened upon it after a commies v  capitalist profiteering monopolies spat in the bell tower about UK wide Broadband (while Sunday communion was underway downstairs). We remembered him arguing about Rowland Hill and the launch of the nationwide flat-rate Penny Post.  

 

Railway relevance: hot tempered AT served as a Post Office Inspector for Ireland.  He wrote his earliest novels while travelling around the island by train; "he gained inspiration for his novel writing by occasionally dipping into the "lost-letter" box for ideas".

Beat that for serendipity  T. O'Doolite Esq. !

:)

dh

Edited by runs as required
edited for biographical accuracy
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1 hour ago, Edwardian said:

my mouse and keyboard are failing, at least I hope that's the cause of their intermittent rejection by my 'pooter. 

If both are intermittently dropping out it's more likely something up with your usb ports or controller (which would affect both mouse and keyboard, assuming they're using USB cables not ps2) rather than both peripherals managing to synchronise their demise. Do other usb devices plugged into the same sockets drop off? Have you another bank of usb ports elsewhere you can plug the mouse/keyboard into and see if that helps? Often different bunches of ports come from different headers on the motherboard, and the usb2 (black sockets) and usb3 (blue ones) will have different controllers.

I once had a power failure which fried the SATA 3 controller on my motherboard and left me with no access to hard drives, but the slower SATA 1 controller clearly was made of sterner stuff and the pc soldiered on (a little slower) for another 5 or 6 years with some cables swapped around.

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2 hours ago, Edwardian said:

Great Merc, Phil, I recall some big aircraft-engined pre-war German car once featuring on the old Top Gear

 

Methinks this is the one you were thinking of...

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJn7LHE83cc

 

Quote

"The Brutus" combines a 46-litre BMW v12 engine, originally used to power an HE111, with a chassis from a 1906 New York fire engine - and brakes that, "well, they exist only in the imagination of the madman who built this thing!"

 

In the programme, they "raced" it against an alleged replica of a blower Bentley, which actually contained a non-supercharged land version of the RR Merlin engine.

 

3 hours ago, Edwardian said:

Very pre-Woke the old Top Gear now seems

 

WOKE?

What is Castle Aching coming to?

 

The only context in which I would use the word is illustrated in Rick Wakemans "The Breathalyser"

 

Quote

I woke up this morning
Woah my head was throbbing so bad I just couldn't sleep
My eyes had ceased to serve me
Last night I past a police car in a thirty mile a hour zone and I was doing 93

That's what they say
I'm a guilty man oh so I blew in the breathalyser
Watch those pretty little crystals turn a shade of disgusting blue
They took me down to the station, but I refused to give a blood test
So they went and took the urine out of me
Oh, oh oh man, that's piercing

 

So there!  :jester:

 

 

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6 hours ago, runs as required said:

Was it great uncle Percy who led all the family on those intrepid motor cycle tours?

dh

You can see many of the family bikes & cars in this album. http://www.ipernity.com/doc/philsutters/album/1254184?with=39575290 Neither my Mum nor I have ever driven. Maybe that lot used up all our fuel allowance before WW2.

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A Maybach must be a mega-rare car in Britain.

 

Even that modern Mercedes-Benz ones, which are really only Maybach by name, are incredibly rare - I've only ever seen one, outside a West End theatre, presumably collecting or dropping A Star.

 

Maybach is the forgotten man of i.c. engine development, at least forgotten in this country, and in a fairer world his name would be as well known as Daimler's, and probably better known than that of the daughter of a very astute car salesman (Mercedes Jellinek).

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8 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

I note that the BBC dramatisation of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, which has been the subject of discussion here, starts this evening at 9 pm, hard on the heels of Pullman's His Dark Materials

Which is worse, Woking being served by a GWR branch, or the train consisting of a 2251 hauling Hawksworth coaches?

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3 minutes ago, Regularity said:

Which is worse, Woking being served by a GWR branch, or the train consisting of a 2251 hauling Hawksworth coaches?

 

Im not watching it "live", its being recorded* so I'll have a look later in the week.  Apart from it being set in "Edwardian" England, instead of being transposed elsewhere/elsetime, I believe the plot has been butchered to include a more proactive female lead so hopes aren't high.  GWR? Deary me!  You'd have thought they'd at least have had a word with the Bluebell Railway, perhaps they wanted too much for filming....

 

* To allow skipping over the bits that cause extreme mental anguish.  I record ITV stuff as a matter of course, then its easy to skip over the adverts. And if the programme is complete tat, I don't waste my time!

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We had more Maybach engines than you could shake a spanner at in Canton, but they were too big to stick in a car. The cylinder heads were a mega complicated fabrication, built round a central combustion chamber which had several inlet and outlet valves plus fuel injector. Very nice in a Uboat which could depend on a nice steady supply of cold seawater to cool it, but linked to a hydrostatic cooling system on the loco which failed with monotonous regularity, overheating and cracking happened all the time, the old cylinder heads went back to Swindon Works, were they went into a stack known as the “Berlin Wall”

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I think it was just artistic foreshadowing - Woking had fallen long before any Martian showed up, and without the strength of the mighty LSWR was a prime target just waiting for attack. 

 

Either that or they had a railway enthusiast producer who knew that doing what they did would really, really, annoy pedants like me and their superiors would be none-the-wiser as to their mistake. :P 

 

Still, given how precise Wells was about his description of the effect on railways, I was rather hoping for CGI Precedents multi-heading up Camden Bank with a heavy refugee train, and SECR locos rolling across the concourse at Waterloo with troop trains. Too much to ask, though. 

Edited by sem34090
Corrected my assumption that a railway enthusiast producer would be male...
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48 minutes ago, Martin S-C said:

Nothing that a quick hose with a heat ray can't fix.

If wishing made it so...

 

Also amused to see that 110 or so years ago, Horsell looked like a Cheshire village, and the Common bore remarkable similarities to (then) Lancashire’s coastal area south of Southport... ...so it’s a shame we didn’t get to see something LYR.

 

One thing that did seem reasonably reminiscent of an aspect of travel at the time was the pace of the plot, which was tortuously slow.

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The novel was better.

 

It would have been very progressive and in-keeping with the general idea if they'd just moved the whole setting to Liverpool and the surrounding area - None of this old fashioned London-centric and South East favouring rubbish. 

 

Sigh...

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1 hour ago, sem34090 said:

The novel was better.

 

It would have been very progressive and in-keeping with the general idea if they'd just moved the whole setting to Liverpool and the surrounding area - None of this old fashioned London-centric and South East favouring rubbish. 

 

Sigh...

 

The Mercury Theatre moved the whole shebang to Grover's Mill, New Jersey...

 

 

 

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17 hours ago, brack said:

If both are intermittently dropping out it's more likely something up with your usb ports or controller (which would affect both mouse and keyboard, assuming they're using USB cables not ps2) rather than both peripherals managing to synchronise their demise. Do other usb devices plugged into the same sockets drop off? Have you another bank of usb ports elsewhere you can plug the mouse/keyboard into and see if that helps? Often different bunches of ports come from different headers on the motherboard, and the usb2 (black sockets) and usb3 (blue ones) will have different controllers.

I once had a power failure which fried the SATA 3 controller on my motherboard and left me with no access to hard drives, but the slower SATA 1 controller clearly was made of sterner stuff and the pc soldiered on (a little slower) for another 5 or 6 years with some cables swapped around.

 

That's what worries me.  The mouse and keyboard are pretty old and flaky, so plan A is to replace them.  Here I am with new mouse, so we'll see if it drops out. 

 

I had a cheapo multiport usb port, which I can try to find. 

 

Plan C will be wireless ones!

 

 

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17 hours ago, Martin S-C said:

More from Roger Farnworth on the Lynn & Fakenham. Also note the loco No.11, now wouldn't that make a stunning model.

https://rogerfarnworth.com/2019/11/16/the-lynn-and-fakenham-railway-part-1/

 

Yes, it will.  I have the donor chassis and the tender.  I was going to scratch-build the loco body, but I believe that a member of the Parish will soon produce a 3D print version.

 

It is slated to work coal traffic from Wolfringham Staith. 

 

As ever on CA, we've been here before Ex-CMR Sharp Stewarts

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15 minutes ago, Edwardian said:

 

That's what worries me.  The mouse and keyboard are pretty old and flaky, so plan A is to replace them.  Here I am with new mouse, so we'll see if it drops out. 

 

I had a cheapo multiport usb port, which I can try to find. 

 

Plan C will be wireless ones!

 

 

With doing graphics texture work and building digital layouts wearing out mice and keyboards is something that happens for me al the time, - so they definitely have a finite life James.  I normally buy professional/enterprise grade keyboards from computer recyclers three or four at a time for roughly $NZ5.00 each so I don't end up stopped in my tracks (pun possibly intended) by yet another keyboard going bung.  It's always the same four keys that die, but once that happens they are useless.

I got tired of buying ex-lease mice half a dozen at a time so this time around I purchased a gaming mouse of a type developed for those who go in for competitive computer gaming and these have ultra reinforced heavy duty switches and internal workings since competitive computer gaming would destroy the average office grade mouse in no time.  So far it's very good and noticeably more precise than an office grade mouse, - so we shall see how it goes.

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26 minutes ago, Annie said:

With doing graphics texture work and building digital layouts wearing out mice and keyboards is something that happens for me al the time, - so they definitely have a finite life James.  I normally buy professional/enterprise grade keyboards from computer recyclers three or four at a time for roughly $NZ5.00 each so I don't end up stopped in my tracks (pun possibly intended) by yet another keyboard going bung.  It's always the same four keys that die, but once that happens they are useless.

I got tired of buying ex-lease mice half a dozen at a time so this time around I purchased a gaming mouse of a type developed for those who go in for competitive computer gaming and these have ultra reinforced heavy duty switches and internal workings since competitive computer gaming would destroy the average office grade mouse in no time.  So far it's very good and noticeably more precise than an office grade mouse, - so we shall see how it goes.

 

I am one of many, no doubt, who tried his best not to join Amazon Prime, but was eventually unwittingly co-opted.  I have, however, found that it has benefits, as I was able to order a mouse and keyboard on Saturday evening and receive it yesterday. Of course, that means some poor b8gger is out delivering on a Sunday.

 

It'll be fun when the first Amazon drone touches down only to be leapt upon in greeting and torn to shreds by 3 happy Labradors. 

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10 hours ago, sem34090 said:

 ... It would have been very progressive and in-keeping with the general idea if they'd just moved the whole setting to Liverpool and the surrounding area - None of this old fashioned London-centric and South East favouring rubbish. Sigh...

I thought they had - the Government action all went on inside St Georges Hall or on the steps opposite Lime St station.

Very disappointed to find it serialised; I thought it was going to be done and dusted in one showing like the Orson Wells radio version.

dh

PS I realise I get it mixed up with Conan Doyle's The Poison Belt which IIRC all takes place around Box Hill 

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Watching some BBC war thing - World in Flames/World at War/Flaming Nora (can't remember) - anyway, I was pretty much with it until the point the two renegade Polish soldiers walked through a forest, full of Russians and previously identified as Eastern Poland, into a British patrol, which, presumably, made it Belgium. 

 

Anyway, the English scenes are largely set in Manchester, so it was fair enough to lurk under the Castlefield viaducts and go to the John Rylands Library to join up.  If you've never seen the latter, it's quite something.

 

Meanwhile, in Poland, we see a lot of a certain church interior, which I am sure is the 1830s Gothic Oldham parish church! 

 

As with all things, on CA, we've been there before St Mary with St Peter

 

1882322066_St.MarywithSt.PeterOldham05.jpg.c24c0b51fa6c59adec5fe36e6f2e067c.jpg

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On 15/11/2019 at 10:43, runs as required said:

Off Rail for one moment but  back onto Land Speed Records - my favourite picture is this 

38106896_thereddevil.jpg.3c5e87ac550a82fa510b323862335a92.jpg

Camille Jenatzy, the "Red Devil"  built 'Jamais Contente'  a torpedo shaped electric car on which he claimed the "Land Speed Record" in 1899 as the first man to exceed 100 kilo metres an hour on a road 

No one thought to remember brakemen sitting out on top of Great Western trains had been exceeding 100 kph (60 mph in Brexit speak) since 1840.

 

He went on to drive giant 90 hp petrol GP racing cars for Mercedes after1900 but by 1910 was dead - shot (accidentally?) in the balls by his mistress's husband on a hunting trip; he'd been imitating a wild boar as a joke hiding behind a bush. But he did actually die in a Mercedes as he always said he would - in the back of a shooting brake being rushed to hospital in the Ardennes.

dh

I recognised that car immediatly from my copy of Huck Scarry's On The Road, which along with his Steam Train Journey are 'books worth reading'

51KYWNCjQjL._SX258_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg0001382381.jpg

Edited by Talltim
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Whenever watching films/tv I am more than willing to suspend disbelief so I can enjoy the story. I do not try to recognise the locations and if I do ignore the thought unless the location is the right one for the story. However having a couple of Polish soldiers walking through a forest full of Russians and then meeting a British patrol would be a step too far, destroying the internal narrative. It may have been physically possible to walk from the Poland/Russian border to the German/Belgium border but such an epic trek avoiding German citizens would be a major part of any story. 

 

Don

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