Nick C

They're getting cleverer though - I had one supposedly from the TV Licencing people (I think there's a thread on it here too) which looked very convincing - the only obvious clue was that it didn't have the name or address (plus by that point was rather well known, making me instantly suspicious)

I fully agree with using a password manager - One common example generates a different random 20-character password for each site - which with uppercase, lowercase, numbers and symbols gives 128 bits of entropy - meaning that an attacker would have to try, on average, 3x10^38 different passwords to guess the correct one - that's 3 with 38 zeroes after it, which is rather a lot.

Can you not have a removable trolley that you roll down (in the orientation of the diagram), then to the left - into the space occupied by the operator by the colliery in the diagram, allowing you to walk through from the right-hand side of the operating well?

I'm another one of these strange people who takes pride in fixing something rather than just buying new, wherever I can... I've maintained my own cars ever since I started driving (and keep old ones going for longer, which is much better for the environment than buying a newer 'more efficient' one), and my wife is very keen on avoiding waste wherever we can - especially with food and single-use plastic. Can't claim to be a saint by any means, but at least we're aware of our consumption and do our best to minimise it, unlike a lot of people...

It's those of us born in the early 80s who suffer all that - the 26-30 railcard is available to anyone born after 1988 for example, and my house cost nearly 10 times my salary! (The mortgage was roughly 3.6 times our combined salaries)

This is definitely the case - though I find that often the people are rude before they demand the pin-perfect customer service (and, indeed that larger companies are increasingly providing terrible customer service, but that's another matter - regardless of how bad it is, it's not going to get better if you're rude...) The Brexit views thing really winds me up - this whole thing of "everyone who voted X is an idiot/moron/brexidiot/bremoaner/etc" - We should respect people's views, providing they've actually got one (and didn't just vote one way or the other because that's what their newspaper told them to, or voted for party X in the general election because that's what they've always done, without actually thinking for themselves) As for how we're going to get people to realise that resources aren't infinite, and that they can't just keep consuming as much as they want, I really don't know - it's going to need a huge culture change...

That was the part of the film that really disappointed me - having read most of the books, I had a very clear mental image of what Reacher looked like, as Child describes him really well - and Cruise is almost completely opposite!

What's with all the people who are too impatient (or self important) to wait in the queue, and use the other-direction lane before barging in at the last minute? We are British after all, we're famous for queueing properly!

It's probably worth something - a quick google suggests they're about £75 new in the UK, so you'd probably get at least £40 on ebay for it - though the custom nature would reduce it's value compared with a standard one. You don't usually need an install CD for a router - they usually have a web-page you connect to (by connecting a laptop directly to them with a network cable) for configuration. You can usually switch off the 'router' bit and use them just as a wireless access-point - which means they can be used with some of the DCC systems to allow a smartphone or tablet with a suitable app to connect to use as a hand-throttle - I've seen a couple of layouts at exhibitions with an access-point underneath and all the operators using old smartphones to control it...

The really worrying thing there is that it's clearly a residential street (there's a photo in the article) - yet she lay unconscious for several minutes (according to the article) before waking and seeking help - which mean that no-one came out of their house to check what had happened - surely someone would have heard the noise of the impact?

Having just done the maths, I have to agree, sadly. The best current panels are 15-20% efficient, and standard irradience is 1000w/m^2, so lets say 150w/m^2 in sunny conditions. A bus roof is roughly 11m x 2m, so 22m^2 - cover the whole roof and we get ~3.3kW generated. this article suggests an average efficiency of 2.15kWh/mile for an electric bus, and an average speed of 10mph, so an average current draw of 21.5kW - so the panels would cover just 15% of the requirements (and that's under ideal conditions - even with the panels getting 20% efficiency we only get 4.4kW)

I'd second Falcon Figures - I don't think he's got a website, but he attends a lot of exhibitions in the South. Contact details are on this thread

I went to a talk a few years ago by someone who had worked for the national grid - his thoughts were "The grid was massively over-engineered when it was first built - and that's the only reason it hasn't collapsed yet - but all that kit is coming to the end of it's life in the next decade..." He pointed out that most of the 'last-mile' systems were designed for fairly low use - even though each house may have a 100A breaker, most people only use a fraction of that at any one time, so a substation supplying a dozen houses might only have the capacity to supply three or four at their full demand. This, of course, will fail horribly if everyone wants to charge an electric car overnight... This hasn't reared it's ugly head yet, as most substations are currently only supplying one or two electric car owners at most, but it will do as the numbers increase, unless something is done beforehand.

Krakow has a number of battery single-deckers (I'm not sure how many) - they get the charge topped up at the termini while the driver is having their break. I don't know if they also get a full charge overnight though. The buses have a pantograph on the roof that engages with an overhead gantry at the bus stop, so there's no faffing about with cables and plugs. In sunnier climates you could also have solar panels on the roof - buses and trucks have large flat roofs after all - probably wouldn't have the energy density to fully power the vehicle, but could at least reduce the charging demand.

Best wishes Linny - Mental health can be such a difficult thing to cope with, especially as there's a huge amount we still don't know about how the human brain works. Regarding energy levels in winter, have you tried using one of the daylight lamps sold for seasonal affective disorder? I know a couple of people who suffered very badly with that and those lamps helped both of them enormously. It's all down to the frequencies of light given off - we spent far too much time in the winter sitting under cold fluorescent lights and not in natural sunlight. My wife and I have got a sunrise alarm clock (the sort that gradually gets brighter over the course of about 30 minutes), and we've found that makes winter mornings a lot easier too.

Surely the solution to that is to make the new diary available from Christmas day onwards - that way the people who are working then get the first chance to bag it for the following year?

Clearly you should therefore carry on looking after you find it... A couple of months ago I wasted about an hour hunting for a pair of pliers I needed for a particular modelling job. Having given up, the next evening I went back to the railway room and found them straight away - sitting on top of the layout... As mentioned above, it's down to the cats messing with the space-time continuum...

I might be missing something, but is there a way to filter the figures on the website by era? It seems to exist for the railway figures but not for the others. I'd quite like to, for example, see all the figures suitable for the 1950s - as it is at the moment each category seems to be sorted differently.

Agreed - I get most of my news from the internet these days. I find it's good to use a news aggregator so I can read the same story from several different sources and thus cut through the bias they all have (the level of bias on the BBC in particular seems to have got a lot worse over the last couple of years). If anyone knows of a genuinely neutral news source I'd love to hear about it... Or for that matter a more reliable way of achieving the last part of your post!

Dolomites have the same two fuse arrangement, so I suspect spits do too...

I used the Percy chassis under a model of the Southampton docks 'Ironside' - if I remember correctly, you undo a couple of clips underneath to separate the body from the footplate. The keeper plate unscrews to allow the wheels and rods to drop out, then a couple of screws on top of the footplate hold the chassis in, it then comes out upwards. I can't remember if the cylinders were integral to the footplate though.

The biggest difference between the LBSCR conversions and those done by other owners was usually the front sandboxes - Brighton moved them under the footplate, whereas others usually left them in the original position. Tanks were frequently swapped between locos, as were boilers, so you need a clear photo of the loco in question to be sure of the details - for example I have seen photos of one BR example with 8 lamp irons, and another with just four. Toolbox locations varied too, especially on the ex-iow ones that didn't have the one behind the bunker.

There was a great one of those on youtube a while back, in which the callee managed to persuade the caller that he had indeed been in an accident, and that he had been fatally decapitated. I can't find it at the moment though...

That sounds like a brilliant idea to me. It works for public transport too - e.g. "If you're changing trains at X, there's a great little cafe just outside the station, much better than the BrandNameChain on the platform"

One of the first things I did after passing my test was to do the "Pass Plus" course - which I think they still offer - it was a 6-hour set of extra lessons (with the same instructor) covering motorways, night driving, adverse weather etc. I believe it was well worth having done it. I've seen lifts big enough to get a small Fiat in. The question surely is whether you can do it the other way around...