SHMD

Fairy Penguins, St-Kilda, any day. Kev. (actually, I 'av no idea but I've been to St Kilda and Phillip Island quite a few times.)

not yet.... (I guess the ramps would upset too many...) Kev.

Six days ago I was up in the northern half of Sweden. Bally cold and everthing was ice locked with 0.8m of snow on the land. (Roads and paths clear though) So no pics of any boats. Today, I find myself a few thousand miles south east of there (and about 40 degrees warmer). Guess where: - Kev.

That is one seriously unimpressed cat! Lov-it. Kev.

Where's the Landy gone? Only joking. Great tohave you back posting again. Kev.

Kev.

That actually says that! In Mandarin (PinYin): - JingZhi ODa KeRen (Although the "O" (3rd character) is written in the "complex" form.) Jing = Strict Zhi = Stop O = Gather together Da = Beat Ke = Guest Ren = People Kev.

The "class 25" rescuing you is actually a class 24. Absolutely wonderful pics, thanks again. Kev.

Here's something to put things into perspective - forwards and backwards! https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p0f7sx0n/the-22nd-century-people-living-among-us?utm_source=taboola&utm_medium=exchange&tblci=GiChq-O_TR0AKNZTCPCxL-IM4QHiGD8K9lj7R9WJ1qdoHSCMjFQo_JCUtOiJy9zXAQ#tblciGiChq-O_TR0AKNZTCPCxL-IM4QHiGD8K9lj7R9WJ1qdoHSCMjFQo_JCUtOiJy9zXAQ Kev. I'm less than 60 (just) but now I have been given a seat, on public transport, 3 times! (I guess that when I lose count of that statistic, I will be officially old!)

Turn the sound down! Kev. (..just try it.)

I've actually seen that tower - although not knowingly and from the other side of the Thames when I was staying in the Intercontinental Hotel. Just outside the entrance to this hotel is this: - Kev.

Is that BrakeVan needed there? Can you use it where you need it now? Kev.

Shove a Brake Van on the back and be done with it - wait a minute, we don't use Brake Vans anymore... Kev.

Very much so. I normally stay (once or twice a year) in central Berlin and commute out to Botanischser on the S1 or S2 lines. There is plenty of old trackwork to ponder about whilst travelling to and from work. When I was last in Berlin (June 2022) the Berlin Macht Dampf (at Johannisthal on the S8, S9, S45, S46, S85 line) was having its' first open day/live steam event since Covid. It would have been rude not to attend!! Kev.

This assumes we all have a smart phone. I do not. I do have a works phone but I am not allowed to install anything on it. (It's checked...) I also find using none-tactile controllers difficult - I find the need to have-to-look at the controller before attempting to press anything, thus taking my eyes off the action at the critical moment. Kev.

Hi Paul, Do you have an up to date plan for BeiJiao so that us newbies can arrive a bit prepared? Kev.

Sassy certainly is a big cat. You need to find a box that's (definitely) too small for her so that we can all have a laugh at her attempts to get in! Kev.

Possibly the PSU supplying the points has failed. Any more details? (Diagrams, descriptions, parts used...) Kev.

That does look good, but I am always wary of good looking backgrounds with not interaction. Maybe that was just a 80s thing! Kev.

I've been playing Fortnite (so no surprises there then) but I am in Poitiers, France, and there is a "Geek" bar there. Beer, drinks, cocktails, and 10 PCs maxed out for gaming. (La taverner du geek) If you drink, you play for free. On the second night, (tonight), I had a small audience watching the "old man" play! (Yesterday, they would have seen me win, but today I only managed one 2nd, a few top tens and a couple of howlers! A good evening all the same. Kev. (Typo - Fee to Free)

I would question "why they have packed up" ! These toggle switches are pretty reliable - as long as you don't exceed their specified ratings. (Using toggle switches on Seeps, or other solenoid type point motors, will exceed the contact ratings and cause them to fail - for example. Kev. (Farnell supplies mine, or I buy them direct - over the counter - when I am in China.)

...I'm pretty sure the answer is 42. Kev.

Those vehicles all look "powered" to me, and not MK1s. Kev. (Who is as blind as a bat and twice as daft!)

I can only guess that most commercial software uses multiple "threads" in their finished software. If you are "Polling" the coms port, instead of using "interrupts", then you WILL lose data whilst the PC is off servicing some other routines when more than one byte is received. Once I added the second "thread", for coms servicing, then I didn't lose a byte AND I increased data throughput significantly. Kev.

Hi Ray, Although I don't use Arduinos, (I use the PIC processor family), I too "tinkered" with RS232 coms at 9600 between the PIC and the PC, and found the link to be totally unreliable with about 20% of all characters transmitted being "randomly lost" at the PC end. The PIC transmitted everything beautifully, (verified by capturing the signal on a Digital Storage Scope), but messages could only reliably be received if transmitted at a slow Baud rate BUT with a big delay added to the end of each character being sent by the PIC. The PC was new(ish) and of quite a high spec, so imagine my disappointment when things had to be slow, oh so slow, to reliably send and receive bytes. It turned out that the problem was the operating system on the PC. PCs run "lots" of stuff all simultaneously, have a look in Task Manager. ...but PCs DON'T run things simultaneously, they actually "time slice" the processor resources between the various tasks that the operating system demands. So the program I wrote, (in Visual Basic Express 2010), was only "polling" the coms port, AND thus, losing characters that slipped in between "poll". The solution, (after much searching, hard thinking, and even harder implementing), was to use "Threading" in VBE. This basically, runs TWO programs - one being the Thread that handles the coms, and the other being my program that uses the communicated bytes. This then worked very well. Kev.