ejstubbs

Volvo used a figure of 124,000 miles for their rather interesting comparison between the all-electric, petrol and hybrid versions of the XC40: https://www.autotrader.co.uk/content/news/petrol-or-electric-which-is-actually-greenest. What's both interesting and useful (IMO) is the analysis of the break-even point between ICE and EV based on how the EV's electricity is generated: Of course no-one is claiming that these figures are 100% correct, immutable and unarguable, but I've not seen before such a straightforward like-for-like ballpark comparison that takes into account the source of the electricity used for motive power as well as the energy involved in the vehicle's manufacture.

Ahem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_European_Torus The "European" bit is because it's a Euratom project. The UK Is still an associate member of Euratom (as is Switzerland) despite no longer being an EU member state. JET itself resides in Culham, Oxfordshire. It's the "E" in ITER that stands for "Experimental": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER. The membership of that project goes far beyond the EU and its associated states.

Using Google Maps via Android Auto (or the Apple equivalent, depending on your preference of phone manufacturer) puts the display on the AV head unit, same as built-in satnav. In the charity's van that I drive I ignore the built-in satnav; Google Maps via Android Auto uses exactly the same built-in dashboard display. In both the van and in my car, my phone travels flat on the top of the dashboard, tucked right forward under the windscreen edge, with the screen facing down. That means that it doesn't obstruct the windscreen, and it's effectively invisible to me from my driving position, but it does get good GPS reception. Anything that obscures the view of the driver through the windscreen is basically illegal. (I once found myself waiting in a queue behind a character who had a 10" tablet in portrait orientation sat plumb upright on top of their dashboard, smack bang in front of them It was clearly visible on the footage from my dashcam when I checked later.)

I find DNS66 (available from F-droid) is pretty good at blocking ads on Android devices. It's what I use, anyway, rather than adblocking browsers, which IME mean that ads still get through in apps. Better still, it's not detected as an adblocker so you don't get whiny "please disable your adblocker" pop-ups either.

I use Google Maps navigation on my phone. No subscription and always up to date (and you can submit corrections if you find something seriously amiss). I use it in my car, and in the van I drive for my volunteer work*, via Android Auto - it'll connect to the head unit of any vehicle with Android Auto, and if the vehicle doesn't have that you can just use it standalone with the voice guidance (which is pretty good IMO, providing clear instructions without being annoyingly chatty) either coming from the phone itself or via bluetooth to the car's audio system. It monitors traffic and re-routes you if there's an obvious holdup somewhere on the route it originally chose. It's very swift to re-route if I miss a turn or choose to take a detour. It has never yet taken me down a closed road or a farm track. In my view, built-in satnav for private cars is a technology whose time in the mass market has passed. For HGVs and other "special needs" vehicles it probably still has its place (though how many users of said vehicles actually cough up for the additional functionality they need is perhaps questionable). * IMO it's much better than the built-in satnav in the charity's van which I find overly chatty and often confusing.

My 1999 Impreza didn't either.

Shouldn't be necessary: the Yeti has one-way air vents somewhere around the boot area for precisely this reason. I suspect other VAG cars have something similar. (Of course, if the one-way flap gets jammed in the closed position it might not work so well...) Agree, and my wife is the same. I cringe every time I drop her off somewhere because I know that the front passenger door is going to be slammed shut with all the delicacy of a bull in a china shop. (I think it may be because she drove a Renault Clio for a long time and towards the end of its life the doors did need a bit of heft behind them to close first time.) Would that have been the Top Gear episode in which they landed a helicopter on the roof of a Yeti? The one in which, after the road test segment, Clarkson said: "Hand on heart, tell me that you have seen a more complete car than this, because I haven't." (To which James May retorted: "All right. Sell your AMG Mercedes and buy one.") Tell you what, though: having recently endured the rear passenger seat of a VW Passat for three hours (long story), I definitely wouldn't want to pay VW prices for that.

The story made it in to the Gruaniad, which seems to have a not insignificant US Online readership, and has a US Sports section online and in its app: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/feb/01/brian-flores-sues-nfl-dolphins-broncos-giants-racism-black-head-coaches https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/feb/03/flores-reminded-us-the-nfl-values-black-players-for-our-bodies-not-our-minds

British Railway Carriages of the Twentieth Century Volume 1 The End of an Era, 1901-22 was published in 1988 British Railway Carriages of the Twentieth Century Volume 2 The Years of Consolidation, 1923-53 was published in 1990 The History of British Railway Carriages, 1900-53 was published in 1996 Also available from eBay, Abebooks*, independent bookshops** etc etc. * Owned by Amazon ** Who very often list on Abebooks

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That rather depends on which browser you're using, doesn't it? On my desktop machine, only Firefox of the three browsers I have installed has such a setting, and it's the browser I use least frequently. (And, as it happens, the Adblock Plus Firefox extension blocks the pop-up videos regardless of the tracking settings.)

Absolutely not, if you are using solenoid point motors, because when unpowered (i.e. when not actually being 'fired' to throw the point) there's nothing to keep the solenoid in the position it's been 'fired' to. You can actually push the solenoid armature - or in the case of the PL-11, the point actuating rod connected to the solenoid armature by a bell crank type mechanism - back and forth with minimal finger pressure. The point springs are therefore required to hold the point blades in the selected position.

For clarity, I wasn't my intention to suggest anything like that. I was actually responding to Andrew P's post here, to point out how restarts after red flags had been been handled in the past, and arguably could be again. I think part of the mess has arisen from the supposed "let them race" philosophy. The way I'd see it, if the track isn't safe to race on (which is presumably why the safety car is out) then tooling around behind the safety car just wastes laps that could otherwise have been spent actually racing if they red-flagged the race, and declared the winner based on aggregate times between the two parts of the race (as The Lurker noted happened at the 1994 Japanese GP - which was actually after safety cars had been officially introduced into F1). However, given how frequently the safety car seems to be deployed these days, it would seem unreasonably disruptive to stop the race every time instead (in fact I believe that's why F1 eventually decided to adopt the safety car idea). What I would suggest is that, for a safety car incident within a certain number of laps of the end of the race (say ~10% of the race distance?), to avoid both finishing the race under the safety car and the sort of shenanigans that went on at Abu Dhabi, the race is red-flagged. Everyone goes in to the pits and can change tyres and top up fuel if they want to, then when the track is safe again there's a formation lap, a start from the grid (no Spa-like nonsense), and the drivers race to the end with the result declared on the basis of aggregate times as in the old days. If there's yet another incident after the restart then, to avoid any further mucking about (and, dare I say it, disrupting TV schedules) the race is declared over at the end of the preceding lap.

Which is far from "always". To misquote Cicero: Not to know what happened in F1 before you started watching it is to be a child forever.

Ooh, I don't think I've seen any of those episodes (I am a bit behind on the current series, though).

Not true. The first recorded use of a safety car in an F1 race was at the 1973 Canadian Grand Prix, although it turned in to a bit of a farce: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_car#History Safety cars were only officially introduced in the 1993 season, having been trialled at the British and French Grands Prix the season before. So yes, removing the time advantage has been a "thing" ever since safety cars were officially introduced, but F1 managed perfectly well without safety cars for 43 years, so the time advantage issue has only come about relatively recently in comparison - safety cars themselves have only been an official "thing" in F1 for 30 years.

I'm pretty sure that I can remember races back in the day where the timings were taken from the end of the last lap before the red flag came out, and the timings for the remainder of the race after the re-start were added on to determine the final result. In other words, if a driver had an 11 second lead when the red flag came out, then the driver in second place at that point would need to (a) pass the lead driver after the restart, and (b) build up a lead of more than 11 seconds by the end of the race, in order to win. But that was probably years ago when the rules were simpler and most of the audience could cope with the idea that, in those special circumstances, the guy at the front towards the end wasn't necessarily the leader of the race. But then again, it seems to be assumed that the modern audience is fully au fait with the timing intricacies involved in "gaining the undercut" and such like, so I don't actually think it would be beyond the ability of most of those watching to grasp what was going on, especially with decent commentary (and remember that my recollections of the "old" way of doing it would likely have been from the days when Murray "unless I'm very much mistaken...and I am!" Walker was responsible for explaining the goings-on to us!) Given the minute level of detail to which timings are measured and recorded these days, it surely wouldn't be beyond the wit of man to return to this sort of thing?

Wear resistance? It looks like the pins slide along the rail to operate the mechanism on the wagon, which could lead to too much wear if the rail was plastic (the pins would also have to be made of equally wear-resistant material, of course - or easily replaceable). It certainly looks to me as if there would be more rubbing and friction involved than in a simple trip-operated system. It would be interesting to see a video of it in action.

I'm a bit surprised at this, given the popularity of The Repair Shop*, and its resident horologist Steve "two sets of spectacles" Fletcher who seems to get given something to fix (albeit not always strictly clock-related) in every single programme. I am constantly astonished at the way he just seems to know how a given clock goes back together. He seems to disassemble them and just put all the bits in a pot for cleaning etc without making any particular note of which bit went where, and after the fettling of the individual parts he just puts it all back together apparently without any reference to notes or diagrams. Either the footage is heavily edited, or it really is the accumulated knowledge and competence from years of learning and experience at the job. Or, most likely I suppose, a bit of both. (Myself, I can barely keep track of the comparatively small number of parts involved in servicing an RTR loco, even with the service sheet in front of me!) Then again, maybe the show's audience demographic is wrong for getting young people interested (i.e. it's only old pharts like me who watch it). * Audiences of over 6 million when it moved to evening prime time for series 6, according to Wikipedia.

Generally seems a lot better now, although loading the "New Content" page still seems a bit 'sticky'.

I'd suggest that it's probably worth replacing those wheelsets anyway. Plastic wheels are notorious for picking up crud and spreading it around the track. The cost of replacing 24 axles might appear daunting initially (I think the Hornby ones tend to work out cheapest at ~£20 for ten - shopping around might find cheaper) but if it solves your gauging issues and avoids track grime woes further down the line then IMO it would be worth it. (Personally I'd replace the old steel track as well, given that your old Magnadhesion-equipped locos don't seem to need it - and if you're going to end up running a mix of steel and nickel silver track anyway then any benefit they did get would be dependent on which bit of track they happened to be traversing at the time i.e. intermittent and not reliable.)

Page loading glacially slow for me last night and again this morning. No timeouts or "currently unavailable" screens (yet) but something is very obviously not functioning as smoothly as it normally does. Have you tried turning it off and on again?

I've always religiously shopped around come renewal time but for the last five years at least I've never managed to find a conspicuously better deal than the renewal quote once all factors (details of cover, excess etc) are taken into account. It's probably helped that we've had a multi-car policy for some time now, and most of the alternative quotes have been to cover both cars separately. Hopefully the new rules will go some way to obviating the annual faff, given that it's turned out to be largely a waste of time for us in the recent past.

There's quiet a lot of information about the Lone Star Treble-O-Lectric products on this web site: http://www.irwinsjournal.com/a1g/a1glocos/TrebleO.html including a page specifically about servicing the locos: http://www.irwinsjournal.com/a1g/a1glocos/TrebLocoService.html ISTR that last time I looked into the subject (my first "proper" electric train set was a Lone Star and I was indulging in a bit of a nostalgia trip) there was more than one web site with info about the Lone Star products, and there may also have been sources of spares e.g. the drive bands - possibly even on eBay. I wouldn't be surprised if a bit of Googling wouldn't unearth more than the above (in fact, there do seem to be some "how to" videos on YouTube). Edit to add: this web page has some other relevant-looking links (I haven't checked them but it definitely includes the web site I linked above). Note that it states: "The Lone Star 000 electric system is supposed to have disappeared by the mid-1960s (although Beatties still seemed to have some stock in 1967)." I know that Beatties had some stock later than that, because my Mum managed to buy some of the US image stuff from them in the early 1970s.

From the link posted by Andrew P above: ...the squadron, which uses Hawk T1 training jets, has been cleared to continue flying by F1, which doesn’t class the Red Arrows as military aviation. and It is not known whether other national aerobatic display teams using training aircraft, including the Patrouille de France and Spanish Patrulla Águila, will also be able to continue flying at grands prix. I would also direct readers' attention to my remark about desperate times calling for desperate measures.