Early Risers.

[Erichill16]

2 hours ago, 45156 said:

Got a email from our plumber, he can't fix the toilet for a couple of weeks due to a big job. 

Stewart

Made me chortle. I’m not sure if it’s a northern thing but we often talk about ‘going for a big job’.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_job#:~:text=Big Job%2C a slang term for feces or defecation.

 

[polybear]

8 minutes ago, PupCam said:

There's at least an order of magnitude difference in the risk from Lithium batteries and "conventional"  liquid fuels.     The former are basically unstable incendiary devices when damaged. The damage can be from manufacture, the use of cheap or sub-standard materials,  poor assembly,  physical/ mechanical abuse (impact damage, puncturing etc), usage abuse incorrect charging (over-charging, over dis-charging, unbalanced charging and a host of other things), mechanical damage due to the working environment etc etc etc ad nauseam.    

 

 

There was a Campaigner on the Telly tonight that said the energy in a Li-on battery (E-bike I think) was comparable with that of four hand-grenades.

 

I wonder how you check for internal damage to a car battery after an accident, when the car is repairable?  Or are Insurers going to routinely write-off cars, even after minor-ish accidents?  If that's the case then premiums will go thru' the roof.

[Erichill16]

2 hours ago, The White Rabbit said:

I had Branston Beans on toast ………….and some chives. 

 

Snob!

[PupCam]

15 minutes ago, Erichill16 said:

Made me chortle. I’m not sure if it’s a northern thing but we often talk about ‘going for a big job’.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_job#:~:text=Big Job%2C a slang term for feces or defecation.

 

 

Why did I hear Billy Connelly's voice in my head as I read that! 🤣

 

Nicked off of Faceache but I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment.    Attributed to a (not the) "Steve Davies".

 

To all the Supermarkets and big commercial stores that operate 'Self Check-outs'....... You are heading towards almost exclusively self-checkout now. Yesterday I went shopping at one such store and the lady checking receipts at the exit was stopping everyone.

 

I didn't choose to participate in that nonsense, I had already filled my trolly, emptied my trolly and scanned the items, refilled my trolly and so I just skipped the exit line and left.

I heard her saying "Umm - Excuse me “ as I kept walking and raised the receipt above my head, leaving the store.

 

You can either trust me to do self-checkout, or you can put your cashiers back in place like it used to be.

• I'm not interested in proving that I did your job for you.

• If you want me to be a cashier with no training then that's your problem not mine.

• Keep employing young people and give them job opportunities.

YOU DON'T PAY ME TO SCAN MY OWN SHOPPING.

YOU DON’T GIVE ME STAFF DISCOUNT FOR WORKING FOR YOU.

 

Signed ......All of us

People we need to share this statement its basically about PROFIT to the stores AND putting People out of a JOB....!!!

 

IoN2

 

I think the astronomy can wait.   The thought of bed is more appealing to a tired Puppers

 

Night Awl!

 

 

Edited July 27, 2023 by PupCam

[petethemole]

4 hours ago, woodenhead said:

but really I miss the old vegetarian burgers of the past that were filled with vegetables or beans - you don't seem to see them anymore as it is now some sort of law that vegetarian/vegan alternatives have to look like meat.

Sainsburys do Vegetable Quarter Pounders that have been the same for years;  mixed veg patty coated in breadcrumb, and also Chilli Bean Burgers.  The labelling has changed but the product hasn't.  They also do things made of brown sludge.  We're all omnivores so I cook vegetarian and vegan dishes as well as meat and fish.  Baked beans are usually ASDA No Added Sugar or Salt, which taste fine and are reasonably priced.  They are more likely to be mixed into something than on their own, but I love them with a fry-up when I'm stressed.

 

Speaking of which...Mrs mole and I went to the lock-up garage to deposit stuff and pick stuff up.  On opening the up-and-over door, which has been awkward for a while, it swung over to one side and jammed half open.  The cable on one side was adrift and jammed in the works.  Mrs mole drove home to get Martyn, who has height and long arms so I thought he might get it free..  Cue a wait of about an hour (home and back should be less than 30 mins), then Martyn turned up on foot.  She had a blowout on the way back, limped home on the flat and sent Martyn in a cab (on the car insurance).  He couldn't unjam the cable so I called the agent who lets the garages and he called a garage door installer/repairer (and made it clear that maintenance is our responsibilty in the lease).  We had to clear a space for him to work in and then waited.  By this time I was getting bored and a bit pi***d off, mainly as I had nothing to read and no sudokus (in the car).  There  were books in the garage but all hers, nothing I fancied.  I had some juicy blackberries from the hedge and met a rather aloof cat.  I sent Martyn to the corner shop for sustenance and eventually the man came and repaired the door, not too expensively, and what a contrast to how it used to handle.  Mrs mole eventually turned up with a new tyre.  Nearly four hours stuck in a car park behind some flats with FA to do left me a bit grumpy.  (A BIT????)

 

The blowout appears to have been caused by clipping a badly aligned bit of kerb at a junction, which claims a lot of victims according to the tyre guy.  Looking at it close up on Streetview the  vertical face of the offending kerb stone is dark grey rather than concrete colour.

And I never got my shopping done.

[Andy Hayter]

@PupCam wrote

 

"The VERY, VERY SCARY  THING is just how ubiquitous the Lithium battery has become in modern society; phones, computers, toys etc.    I along with thousands of others have even got one implanted in our chests albeit they won't be getting recharged. "

 

It is important to take a proportional view of this.  Small low power devices have  small numbers of Lithium ion batteries and while these can fail catastrophically, the impact in most circumstances will be small.  There will be exceptions of course - for example even a small failure in an enclosed environment such as inside an airplane fuselage can create special problems.

 

The real problem is when you have large banks of batteries needed to provide the high power to propel for example a vehicle - car, bike, scooter etc..  There the energy build up of one cell failing can cause adjacent cells to overheat and run away and then you have a catastrophic runaway.   All of the stored energy is suddenly released.

 

The same is true of petrol.  Take a single drop of petrol and throw it on to a fire and you might even miss the effect.  Take a litre bottle and throw it on a fire and the impact is likely to be unpleasant.  Take a tankerful and release that onto a fire and - bang.

 

In both the Li-ion and petrol cases the important factor is how much stored energy is potentially about to be released.  

 

So be cautious but don't be overly concerned about the use in small low power devices.  

[Erichill16]

Evening All,

Decent enough day here and we’ve got Sydney for a sleepover. His stays with us during the school holidays are sporadic as can be expected. Not a lot actually got done and what did was akin to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, but as is often said in defence, ‘just following orders’

Anyway here’s a picture of the repaired guest toilet. Hopefully there will be no more such incidents but we do have three of this type of WC and the wash basin and the bath have similar concealed pipe work.

Three dehumidifiers are on the go at the minute but as they’re at the other end of the bungalow  they’re not too much of an inconvenience.

Anyway Goodnight.

 

[Erichill16]

And forgot to add picture of damaged  skirting which is spreading around the bungalow.

 

[tigerburnie]

3 hours ago, 45156 said:

I still think that Leander in this livery just looks like a slightly odd Black 5 - BR Brunswick Green every time

 

Regards to All

Stewart

Seems the loco was this colour from 1949-52, not sure why they chose that livery when restored, I don't mind what colour it is as it is due to come back again on Saturday, so I might get the chance to film it on my movie camera if it's not raining.

[PhilJ W]

Evening all from Estuary-Land. Saw a hedgehog today, the first one I've seen in twenty years. Sadly it was laying in the road dead having been struck by a car. There's no chance of seeing one near my house as there's too many foxes around. Also notable is that the muntjac deer seems to have disappeared, they moved into the area during lockdown.

Edited July 27, 2023 by PhilJ W

[PhilJ W]

Goodnight all.

[BSW01]

Goodnight all 

[The Johnster]

2 hours ago, petethemole said:

met a rather aloof cat.

 

Or, as they are generally known, a cat...  Cats were once worshipped as gods, and they have never forgotten this.

 

There is one up the road from me that is anything but, though; it'll come out of it's house as soon as it sees me half a block away and roll over to have it's tummy rubbed, complete and utter .  The wierd thing is that it did this the first time it ever saw me and apparently doesn't do it for anyone else (I am the cat whisperer...).

[southern42]

' evening all from red dragon land.

 🥱 Yawn! Just let that one out! It's been a bit rough going the last few days due to the earlier pollen attack and trying to get things done. Accordingly, I have gone to bed earlier. But guess what? I have been waking up at silly hours instead of gaining extra sleep. 🥱

 

Interesting afternoon upstairs starting the process of sorting through "stuff". Lots of old memories, even my first year junior self-made-in-the-classroom history book with coloured in Gestetner copied pictures and tracings of people, from the Greeks to the Romans to the Brits. The one item I forgot I had was a photo of my great uncle, who was killed in WW1, looking very much like my Dad who was named after him. There was also a cartoon I had been asked to create of a horse that never came anywhere near winning a race. My solution to capturing the essence of it was by portraying the horse approaching the finish line on the back of the puffed out jockey, the horse giving the viewer a rather soulful look. I also came across some more mags for recycling. Not all MY "stuff", either!

 

Toot on the flute became interesting as I checked a video for the current song's twiddly bits. I spent quite some time trying to rework my fingers to produce a particular set of notes only to find on another of the teacher's videos that it was (slightly) different but was the one I was already playing. Doh! A bit frustrating, but also reassuring that there is more than one way of doing things. Next up was playing along to a tabla beat. Several attempts later and I started to get somewhere with it. 

 

Time for a mugacocoa.

' night all and nos da.

 

Memories of learning about long ago...

  

 

Memories of learning to be a cartoonist!

 

 

[AndyID]

6 hours ago, Andy Hayter said:

@PupCam wrote

 

"The VERY, VERY SCARY  THING is just how ubiquitous the Lithium battery has become in modern society; phones, computers, toys etc.    I along with thousands of others have even got one implanted in our chests albeit they won't be getting recharged. "

 

It is important to take a proportional view of this.  Small low power devices have  small numbers of Lithium ion batteries and while these can fail catastrophically, the impact in most circumstances will be small.  There will be exceptions of course - for example even a small failure in an enclosed environment such as inside an airplane fuselage can create special problems.

 

The real problem is when you have large banks of batteries needed to provide the high power to propel for example a vehicle - car, bike, scooter etc..  There the energy build up of one cell failing can cause adjacent cells to overheat and run away and then you have a catastrophic runaway.   All of the stored energy is suddenly released.

 

The same is true of petrol.  Take a single drop of petrol and throw it on to a fire and you might even miss the effect.  Take a litre bottle and throw it on a fire and the impact is likely to be unpleasant.  Take a tankerful and release that onto a fire and - bang.

 

In both the Li-ion and petrol cases the important factor is how much stored energy is potentially about to be released.  

 

So be cautious but don't be overly concerned about the use in small low power devices.  

 

6 hours ago, Andy Hayter said:

@PupCam

 

Petrol requires an external source of ignition to ignite. Li-ion batteries can ignite with no external ignition source. That's a very big difference.

 

Double quote

Edited July 28, 2023 by AndyID

[jjb1970]

I find it interesting how the whole debate about meat eating changed over night.

 

For most of my life vegetarianism was motivated in most (but not all) cases by religious belief and animal welfare concerns and an aversion to killing animals. That led to more ethical animal farming for meat eaters who shared concerns about animal welfare but wanted to keep eating meat.

 

Now vegetarianism carries a similar stigmatism in some quarters to eating meat (it's veganism or nothing, and I suspect we're on a pathway to an end point where we won't have a choice) and it's all about saving the world.

 

I am a tree hugger myself and do think we need to reduce emissions drastically, but I also cringe at some of the virtue signalling on the basis that if you're going to point fingers at anyone then you'd better be walking the walk, and calculating lifecycle emissions of goods and activities can give some interesting results.

[jjb1970]

For flammable liquids and gases too separate and distinct risks tend to be conflated, fire and explosion. Fire is the result of ignition, but explosion is a result of containing the results of that ignition. Ignite gas or petrol in an open space and it'll just burn, have a gas leak or an accumulation of petrol in an enclosed building or tank and ignite it and you'll get an explosion. Batteries are a bit different.

[Ozexpatriate]

13 hours ago, The White Rabbit said:

If we had a daily/weekly competition for the most amusing (or ridiculous?) sponsorship, I wonder what the other entries would be? Could be some hot competition. 

Been done of course. "News/blog" here.

[Ozexpatriate]

10 hours ago, woodenhead said:

It seems all the effort to promote a plant based diet focusses on creating meat substitutes which are costly and very processed. 

As per your second thought, the marketing/promotion/advertising of meat substitutes is what is funded - by commercial interests.

 

Traditional plant-based recipes are everywhere as are the ingredients to prepare them. They're just not the potential money-spinner of industrial meat substitutes.

 

Edited July 28, 2023 by Ozexpatriate

[Ozexpatriate]

8 hours ago, woodenhead said:

Slavery wasn’t abolished, it was industrialised.  When you are sentenced they indicate the cost of incarceration which is paid by doing ‘work’ whilst in prison.  
 

Prison pays in America, it’s a profit centre not a cost centre and they want people locked up.

Slavery is completely illegal in most states and most states "pay" incarcerated felons for their labour - there are loopholes regarding minimum wage. It is paid at less than the usual minimums. Some (seven) states still have an allowance for forced prison labour - effectively slavery.

 

Some penitentiary systems in some states (not all) are run by "for profit" companies. This system literally lends itself to your assertions of being a profit centre, but it is not accurate to say this is the case everywhere and the numbers are declining. Data here.

 

Many states are attempting to roll back levels of incarceration, particularly for people arrested on felony possession charges for small amounts of (then) illegal drugs, now legalized. Without being political, where states are attempting to increase commuted sentences or reduce incarceration for minor property crime, it is often accompanied by "lock them away" blow back.

[Ozexpatriate]

6 hours ago, PupCam said:

The best containment process seems to be to bury them in deep sand presumably to remove the oxygen source whilst they burn out. 

They are dangerous because they do not need an external oxygen source to burn.

 

I thought this is a useful explanation:

Quote

Li-ion batteries have all the elements needed to self-sustain a fire

 

To understand how a Li-ion battery can catch fire or explode, it is necessary to investigate how the battery is built. A Li-ion battery store and release its electrical energy through electrochemical reactions. When electrical energy is drawn/discharged from the battery, lithium ions move from one electrode to the other. The electrodes are submerged in a liquid called an electrolyte, which allows for the movement of ions and consists of lithium salt and organic solvents. It is these organic solvents which are the leading fire hazard in Li-ion batteries. Furthermore, the positively charged electrode (cathode) in the battery contains oxygen, which may be released if the battery is subjected to specific stresses, e.g., internal short, excessive heat, and more. This means that the Li-ion batteries have all the elements needed to self-sustain a fire.

Early days. Safety will improve. It has to.

 

EDIT

We've had >120 years of learning to manage how to "safely" handle, store and use internal combustion fuels. The Tesla Roadster (one of the first practical Li-Ion powered production cars) was introduced in 2008*. All the hallmarks of disruptive technology/innovation are there - like the novel technology being perceived to have shortcomings over the incumbent technology.

 

* The first generation Apple iPhone is older - introduced in 2007.

 

Edited July 28, 2023 by Ozexpatriate
Added paragraph

[Ozexpatriate]

54 minutes ago, jjb1970 said:

I find it interesting how the whole debate about meat eating changed over night.

 

For most of my life vegetarianism was motivated in most (but not all) cases by religious belief and animal welfare concerns and an aversion to killing animals. That led to more ethical animal farming for meat eaters who shared concerns about animal welfare but wanted to keep eating meat.

 

Now vegetarianism carries a similar stigmatism in some quarters to eating meat (it's veganism or nothing, and I suspect we're on a pathway to an end point where we won't have a choice) and it's all about saving the world.

I am firmly of the perspective that by the time Gen-Z (Zoomers if you will) are the same age as today's boomers, the point of view expressed by @Tim Dubya regarding mammalian* sentience will be a widely-held if not majority opinion - leading to far less consumption of mammals for food / leather / glue / etc.

 

* At a minimum

Edited July 28, 2023 by Ozexpatriate

[jjb1970]

I must admit that qualms about killing animals has led me to eat a lot less meat. However, I must confess to being weak willed or a hypocrite (or both) in that I can't bring myself to give up meat. I try to assuage my feelings by buying meat which has been ethically farmed, but even then I seldom make the effort to trace the claims and tend to take the labelling and certification at face value. And as someone who worked in certification (though classification of ships, and in renewable energy, not agriculture) I should know better than anyone to not just take certification claims at face value.

 

I once went nuts in class, it was probably the only time I lost my cool. A ship yard questioned what the class approval of an engine sub-system meant. My initial thought was 'it means it meets the class rules and can be used on our classed ships' but thought I had better read the certificate. The cover sheet was a regular approval certificate (i.e. approved), the following page listed 28 aspects of the design which did not meet the rules and that it could not be used on our ships. A regional office had approved it then in the small print said it wasn't approved. No, I couldn't figure it out either. Needless to say the supplier was selling it as having been approved by class and most yards (who did know better) accepted it as they could blame class if anything went wrong. However, the upside was I got a very pleasant trip to Korea to read the riot act and do an audit of other work in the office. Terrific food in Korea.

[Ozexpatriate]

On 26/07/2023 at 20:33, AndyID said:

If I had one it would have to live in the driveway

Kind of like all those Hyundai and Kia owners (irrespective of the motive power source)?

Quote

More than 567,000 vehicles are affected by an issue that can cause wiring in a tow hitch to short circuit and cause a fire. Owners of more than 567,000 Hyundai and Kia vehicles are being told to park their cars outside because of a defect in the towing harness that could result in a fire.

...

Hyundai said wiring in the tow harness can become wet, causing a short circuit in the electronics that could create a fire.

And nothing at all to do with Li-ion batteries - just bad wiring harness waterproofing.

[monkeysarefun]

13 hours ago, polybear said:

Paws up all those that think tommy sauce on toast is rather good....

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Add basil, chopped tomato, garlic, chopped onions and chilli, pineapple bits,  grated cheese and sliced ham or cabanossi and whack  it back under the grill for a minute or so to melt - poverty pizza!

Edited July 28, 2023 by monkeysarefun