JJGraphics

Red Devil said, "Smart meters have to be the most idiotically named items ever ....." Agree 100% with that. In my experience a significant proportion of things which have "Smart" in their name are anything but. Some are useful and work well, but a lot are just "got to have" items which contribute nothing much of use to life that anyone with a normal amount of common sense could not achieve for themselves. John

Probably VM's spam filters getting a bit over-enthusiastic. Happens with BT, too sometimes. Log-in to your VM account and set RM as a "safe sender".

In the early 1950s my Grandfather used to take me to a builder's yard at the bottom of Highgate Road in Kentish Town in North London near where he lived where there was a good view of the tracks from St Pancras and an oblique view of Kentish Town shed. He was a bus conductor at Highgate trolleybus depot and he would occasionally take me to the depot, on one side of which there was a pair of double doors leading out to a loading platform where there was a goods yard served by the line between Gospel Oak and Upper Holloway. I stood with him and watched fly-shunting taking place in the goods yard alongside the depot. From then on I was hooked and when I grew older I went transporting at most of the North London termini. John

A while since I visited this show. Last time was in the old, rather crowded venue. Made the trip from down sarf on Saturday on a packed XC service and stayed overnight to visit the show today. Quickly in with my prepaid ticket well before the scheduled opening time with no Warley-styles queues. It was quiet to begin with but soon got busy. Thoroughly enjoyed it as there was a nice balance of layouts and traders and well laid out with a nice amount of aisle space to circulate. Layout quality was generally very good with most having a decent number of trains on the move. Special favourite had to be Euxton Junction. Thanks to all involved for a very enjoyable show. John

If only!

I did not say it was a Smart Meter. My comment referred to the post by Hroth which mentioned the "Nag meter" and commented, "it may as well be unplugged and left in a drawer with all your old deceased smartphones and tablets.

It is interesting to see the not inconsiderable number of those things thrown in the "electronics scrap" bin at our local waste disposal site. There were quite a lot of them in the bin when I went there last week and I'm aware that the bin gets emptied fairly frequently. It is normal to see a number of then in the bin – I know as I use it regularly to dispose of electronic scrap. Listening to what friends and neighbours have told me probably gives a clue to the reason for this – that the displays go wrong and the supplier then will not/cannot replace them. Others fail to show the rate actually being charged for electricity or gas and thus become useless. Others are just forgotten about or get in the way and gather dust and get thrown out.

We have not seen a meter reader for about five years – and no, we don't have a "Smart" meter.

If you can safely extract the files from that disk it would probably be a good idea to re-format it with Disk Utility and then test it several times before re-using it. It is probably only the file system which has become corrupted unless it took a good knock. An acquaintance of many years is a storage device engineer and one of his favourite sayings is, "It's not if a hard disk will fail, but how soon." How true that is! Over the years, despite giving dire warnings to people, I have seen vital data lost simply because they did make the effort to back-up. John

You don't have to use iCloud or iPhoto if you don't want to. Coming from a digital graphics background, I manually manage my photo library (about 22,000 images) in folders, each containing 250 images, on my Mac. I allocate a number to each image and keep notes on each one in a Numbers spreadsheet. I use Growly Photo to visually locate an image and I think that even on its own, that application would suffice for many people. I burn batches of the image folders to DVD-R disks when enough have accumulated to fill a disk. Those are kept at my daughter's house for extra security. I back up my Mac using Time Machine to two separate external storage devices which I rotate to provide extra security. If you are interested in data security, you might care to read the information in the file below. I wrote it for Mac users, but the general principles are the same for other platforms. John Data Security.pdf

The e-mail is legitimate. My Photo Stream is a legacy service provided by Apple which is being closed down as it has relatively few users and is nowhere near as capable as iCloud. You (as most people do) are using iCloud which is unaffected so you have nothing to be concerned about. If anyone has images stored in the My Photo Stream service it is important to remove them before 26/7. John

It's getting on towards the evening as, having brought in the Darley Vale portion of an express from St Pancras, D6714 has pushed the stock back and is running round before setting the stock back into the platform to form a later departure.

Ours actually gave us the paperwork from the local council, but you are probably right and a lot don't go through the process!

The contractor fitting the roof which is manufactured by a national supplier has to apply for Building Regulation Approval.

Absolutely the right thing to do. Did that with my layout when I started it almost seven years ago and have never had an electrical problem. Make sure that you also wire the points properly regardless of whether they are live frog or not as that also has a huge impact on reliability. A little time spent on doing those things at the beginning will avoid grief later! John