ejstubbs

Great stuff. I do enjoy historic racing. And then there was this episode: https://www.goodwood.com/grr/event-coverage/goodwood-revival/2023/9/what-really-happened-to-karun-chandhoks-ferrari-250-gto/ From which this quote captures the attitude of the cars' owners very well: “The owners deserve so much credit. They send these cars that were designed 60 years ago out racing, that are worth so much, understanding that things can go wrong and that these things happen. He told me, he wants to get the car fixed and get it back on track at Goodwood soon.”

Are they really much sought after? Blimey, I built one of those when I was about 10 or 11 years old - I recall that I made a pretty good job of it, too, though it wasn't a particularly complicated kit. That was before I'd even seen the series on TV, so I had little idea who the Angels were, or what they were doing flying around in futuristic fast jets. I remember my pals at school having the Corgi Dinky models of the SPV and Patrol Car, the former at least of which I thought was pretty cool, and I probably read comic strip Captain Scarlet stories in TV21 comic at around the same time or a bit later, but I don't recall seeing the actual programmes until we moved up to Derby in 1970 and I watched the (innumerable) repeats on ATV. Which is a little odd, since I'm pretty sure I saw Thunderbirds on its first release, when we were still living in Sarf London, and Stingray before that.

And by now a lot of the smart people who worked hard to make sure it was successful have either retired, or passed on. It's an issue that NASA ran in to when they decided to start doing manned missions beyond Earth orbit again: most of the people who knew how to do it because they'd done it before weren't available to help this time around. One thing I distinctly remember from my days as an engineering student at Cambridge was the long corridor lined floor to ceiling with bookshelves groaning with NASA journals. I'm sure the knowledge is all in there...somewhere, but I suspect that finding it in millions of pages of hard copy would be a daunting task. OTOH, starting afresh with a blank sheet of paper can lead to usefully innovative new ways of doing things. Like lowering landers onto the surface of Mars from rocket-powered hovering cranes (which still sounds bonkers, but seems to work a lot better than surrounding the lander with airbags), and returning vertical launch vehicles to Earth in a controlled manner so that they can be re-used.

IPA - which is also present in WD40 Contact Cleaner, as I pointed out in my post. My point being that the guy in the video spent a lot of time propounding some dubious arguments as to why IPA is a bad thing to use - and then went on to suggest that a product which does actually contain IPA is OK to use. In other words, I was highlighting a hole in his argument. I wasn't trying to suggest that WD40 Contact Cleaner is a bad product to use.

White Spirit is a turpentine substitute. It's much cheaper than turpentine (around £4 a litre on Amazon vs ~£20 a litre for turpentine) and you can use it as a solvent for many of the same kind of jobs for which you might otherwise use turpentine - probably the most common one being cleaning paintbrushes. Turpentine is derived from plant resin, and has a very different chemical composition to white spirit. The term "white spirit" encompasses a number of different grades of napthta-based solvents. White spirit sold as such in the UK has to comply with British Standard BS 245 which specifies "Not more than 5 mg per 100 ml" of residue on evaporation (which might still be enough to be problematic on model railway track). Products sold as simply "turpentine substitute" don't have to meet that standard, and typically contain a higher proportion of less volatile components which are more prone to leaving an oily residue.

Hang on a minute: the guy in the video spends a lot of time saying that polar products like isopropanol are bad, then recommends WD40 Contact Cleaner? But WD40 Contact Cleaner does actually contain isopropanol/isopropyl alcohol/IPA/propan-2-ol or whatever other name you choose to call it by. It says so in the Material Safety Data Sheet: https://sichdatonline.chemical-check.de/Dokumente/3275/EUF-0057_0010_01-11-2021_EN.pdf and in the ingredients list: https://media.wd40.co.uk/app/uploads/2020/11/20152622/EUF0057-IDS.pdf (both direct links from the WD40.co.uk web site). The SDS on the WD40.com web site says that IPA is 10-20% of the composition, with hexane - which is non-polar - being the other active ingredient at between 20-30% of the mix (the 1,1-Diflouroethane is the propellant). So you could have a 50-50 mix of polar and non-polar cleaning agents spurting out of the "smart straw" of your WD40 Contact Cleaner. Hmm. There is a view that the 'science' of polar vs non-polar substances being propounded in that video is, at best, irrelevant to model railway track cleaning for all practical purposes. As he says himself in the video, water is a polar solvent. There's usually plenty of water vapour in the air, so model railway track is being exposed to a polar solvent pretty much all of the time. A bit of IPA now and then very likely makes diddly-squat difference. The product he's actually pushing in the video, NO-OX-ID, is quite a different beast though, being a contact grease. It may be a good product for the purpose - in fact it may work better than all the other things that people have used over the years to clean their model railway tracks - but I suspect that the polar/non-polar thing is little more than a distraction. Spending 20-odd minutes propounding what smells a lot like pseudo-science as being the cause of all our problems, ending with "but this product makes all that go away", sounds to me snake oil sales 101. It would be a lot quicker just to say "we use this because we find it better than anything else we've ever used before, including all the stuff you've probably tried to use yourself" - in other words, asking the audience to trust their experience - and I would suggest it wold be more likely to be convincing than propounding a dubious 'scientific' argument, which if anything tends to undermine any trust which a healthily skeptical audience member might have in what they're being told.

Perch are freshwater species.

I just noticed your post, and it set me to thinking. So I did some measurements - purely for my own interest, not to make any kind of point - and I have come up with the following: My electric razor charges from nearly flat to full in ~2 hours. The charging adaptor is rated at 12V, 400mA: I make that 12x0.4=4.8W for two hours = 9.6Wh (or 0.0096kWh if you prefer). A full charge lasts at least two weeks of normal usage (the manufacturer quotes 50 minutes shaving time). For me, a wet shave uses a washbasin of hot water which comes out to about 3l. My hot water cylinder is kept at 60°C. Let's assume that cold water enters the cylinder at around 20°C. The specific heat capacity of water is 4184J per kilogram per Kelvin. So that means that heating my shaving water takes approximately 4184x3x40=502080J, or 139.5Wh (or 0.1395kWh). That's nearly 15 times as much energy for one wet shave as for roughly fifteen electric shaves, meaning that each wet shave consumes around 200 times as much energy as each electric shave. Eek. In terms of materials usage, the manufacturer recommends that the cutting head of my electric shaver is replaced every 18 months. Each cutting head consists of roughly 15g of plastic & metal (probably a bit less, since the one I weighed was still damp from being cleaned - in cold water - after my last shave). A pack of five blades for my wet razor is about 12g of metal and plastic - including the plastic dispenser box, which is about 7g on its own, so call each blade 1g. If I'm lucky, that pack of five blades will last me three months, so six packs in 18 months, totalling 72g - getting on for five times the quantity of waste compared to the electric razor. The plastic dispenser thingy for the wet razor blades is easy to recycle, though, whereas the blades - and the cutting head for the electric razor - are probably unrecyclable in practical terms. Take the dispensers out the equation and you've still got twice as much mass of 'stuff' going into landfill from the wet razor as the electric one. But overall, close enough to be a push either way, given the likely range of error in the figures that the cutting head and razor blade lifetimes were based on. Unless my numbers have gone seriously awry somewhere (please shout out if so) I find that quite interesting. Gave me pause for thought, anyway.

Don't think so. I'm getting a 12-panel system with a nominal output of 5Kw and that had to go through the "G99" process to be approved by the DNO - SP Energy Networks in this case. My system supplier handled that for me, and sent me a copy of the e-mail from the DNO confirming that the installation could go ahead. My supplier did also quote for a 3.6kW system, which would have been able to follow the "G98" process which, as Phil Himsworth described, basically just means letting the DNO know about it - they can't refuse permission. My supplier did warn that the DNO can impose costs on a G99 request, if they decide their infrastructure needs to be upgraded to handle the higher export power. In my case that wasn't necessary, which was nice. I was warned that the G99 process was taking longer at the moment, due to a high number of applications. The general - and on the face of it, logical - view seems to be that this was caused by the energy price hikes prompting more people to make the jump to solar PV. To be honest that was pretty much the deciding factor in finally triggering me to go down that route, so I can't really complain if lots of other people thought the same way! There might also have been a bit of a spike in Scotland due to the upcoming change in the loan funding rules, though as I mentioned before I don't know how far back that was actually announced (there certainly wasn't anything about it on the Home Energy Scotland web site when I started my loan application back in May). I suppose it's even possible that they deliberately left it late to make the announcement specifically in order to limit the amount of last-minute "panic buying". In my case, after a bit of a delay my supplier persuaded the DNO to "fast track" the G99 application for our system, which was helpful of them. My understanding from this is that it's the possibility of local infrastructure not being immediately capable of handling exports over the 3.6kW threshold - as mentioned by Phil Himsworth above - that requires the G99 process to be followed. In other words, it's a genuine engineering constraint, not just a bureaucratic rule to generate work for paper-pushers.

I thought Intelligent Octopus was for EV owners - specifically, those with "smart" EV chargers which can talk to Octopus to charge at the best rate. From what I've read on their web site (not the clearest information source on the web, I will admit - and the horrible neon-on-black colour scheme doesn't help, either), it doesn't seem to be aimed at installations with just a storage battery and no EV. Style over substance seems to be a common problem with a lot of renewable energy web sites: energy suppliers, equipment manufacturers and system installers. Too many of them seem to think that to engage with customers you have to appear to be funky and with-it and not bother them with too much detail. My entire working life was spent in a technical industry, on both the customer and the sales sides. As a result, when looking to buy stuff I expect to be able to get hold of is detailed specs and clear explanations of how new technologies work. If we need a new household appliance, I'm the one who downloads and reads user manuals as part of the decision-making process. Any assumption that you can just trust the sales person and their spiel is an immediate turn-off for me (and that's based in good part on my own experience in sales organisations!) Aaanyway...our PV and battery system is due to be installed next week. I think I'm going to start off on Outgoing Octopus - their basic 15p/kWh export tariff which just plugs in alongside the Flexible Octopus tariff we're currently on - while we get a feel for how the two components function, both individually and as a system. Once I've got an adequate handle on how to drive the thing I'll start looking at switching to one of their "smarter" tariffs like Octopus Flux. It turns out that, purely by luck, we've been fortunate with the timing of our application for the interest-free loan from Home Energy Scotland. I sent in the application in mid-May and it was all confirmed in the first week of June. What I was unaware of at the time (and I don't think an awful lot of notice of the change was actually given) was that from 27th June any application for a loan for PV or PV+battery would only be approved if it was part of a package together with a heat pump or high heat retention storage heaters. We're in no position to consider installing either of those technologies just yet so it turned out I'd got the paperwork through pretty much just in time. I do wonder how many properties in Scotland actually are suitable for those technologies - at least without a significant amount of additional energy efficiency work up front, which will take time to get done. Of course we should all be aiming to get closer and closer to being carbon-zero but, given the practical issues with old housing stock vs new heating technologies, I wouldn't be surprised if the take-up rate on loans for PV and batteries didn't drop off significantly for a while. As far as heat pumps are concerned, I'm keeping half an eye on developments in the high flow temperature systems which are apparently starting to become available, and which seem to promise to be a more straightforward replacement for 'legacy' boiler-and-radiators heating systems.

Tuberculin testing was carried out on the cows, not the milk. If you've read, or seen the TV adaptations of, the early James Herriot books you should be reasonably familiar with the early rollout of tuberculin testing in the mid-1930s. By the 1950s it had become compulsory, so the "TT" mark on the milk bottles (actually I think it was on the foil caps - my memories of it date back to the early 1960s when I was but a wee wain) was merely a reassurance. I'm pretty sure that by that time any herd with a "reactor" (an animal that had reacted positively to a skin test) had to throw away its milk until the herd tested clear again. So there should have been minimal to no risk of TB contamination from mixing milk from different herds during the collection process. I certainly remember, from family holidays in Pembrokeshire from the mid-1960s an in to the 1970s, farms with milk churns stacked on the wooden platforms at the top of the farm track, awaiting collection by the milk lorry. Given the narrowness of a lot of Pembrokeshire roads, if you found yourself following the milk lorry you often just had to stop and wait while they loaded them. Some motorists would jump out and lend a hand with the loading, just to get moving again a bit quicker*. There was another way that milk was brought in to cities: in the Canaan area of Edinburgh's Morningside there was for a while - at least in the 1920s - a "brown dairy" or "dry dairy" called Paterson's Farm where cows were kept indoors and fed on grass and other fodder brought in by cart from a farm or farms beyond the built-up area. I've also found reference to "dry dairies" in, of all places, Anstruther in Fife, which on the face of it would seem to be small and compact enough to have managed perfectly well on milk supplied more or less directly from neighbouring farms (and even Morningside is not, even today, all that far from agricultural land). I've struggled to find precise details of the way these operated: some sources suggest that the cows themselves were brought in from the farms on rotation, being given regular periods of fresh grazing in between 'shifts' in the dairy. As far as I can ascertain, the practice seems to have been restricted largely to the inter-war years. * Other motorists in Pembrokeshire, obviously urbanites with no previous experience of country lanes, could be almost unbelievably unhelpful. My Dad once met a fellow coming the other way on one such narrow road. Both drivers stopped. Dad pointed out to the other driver that there was a farm gateway he could reverse in to right behind him. The other driver initially refused to do so, on the grounds that "it would get his whitewall tyres dirty" (which tells you how long ago the encounter took place). Dad replied that, as it was a nice day and he wasn't in a particular hurry to get anywhere, he was happy to wait and enjoy the sunshine while the other driver came to his senses - and proceeded to do so! The familiarity with country road driving that I gained during our later Pembrokeshire holidays stood me in good stead when I moved up to Scotland from London and spent a lot of my leisure time chasing Munros around the Highlands. On the evidence of my last holiday to Pembrokeshire in 2013, a good proportion of visiting drivers still find narrow country lanes a bewildering and frightening experience.

AFAIK he rarely kept any stock in: his modus operandi seemed to be to get people to register interest in particular items, then schedule a batch for manufacture and let those interested know that they should place an order. So most of his stuff seemed to be out of stock most of the time. He also became somewhat grumpy after he stopped doing non-7mm stuff about people enquiring after kits in those scales. Bottom line: if you do ask, you might not get a wholly friendly response...

I bought a new electric razor this week. Same manufacturer as the old one which must be ~10 years old. The charging socket on the new razor was the same size and shape as the one on the old razor, and the plug from the old razor's charger fitted fine. I did, however, check the specs of the two chargers. The old one was 12V 400mA; the new one (once I'd managed to read it, because it was printed in black on a black charger body, in about one-two-millionth point) was rated at 12V 0.4A. In other words, exactly the same as the old one. So I charged the razor up with the old one (which also has a handy curly lead) and put the new one aside as a spare (with its non-curly lead still coiled up). I've had the same with a razor and a set of electric hair clippers from a different manufacturer. It does seem terribly wasteful. In fact, I don't see why it can't be mandated that razors and the like should use industry-standard USB charging sockets, the same as more or less every other small electrical appliance these days does.

I'd suggest that it should be a reasonable conclusion based on a rational analysis of the available evidence. "Thoughts" sounds like the sort of nonsense that the 'natural philosophers' of centuries past came up with when they tried to do science in their heads, without bothering much with all that time-consuming observation and experiment.

Three swifts whizzing over the rooftops in Balerno yesterday, which was nice. The sand martins have returned to their nesting site in the middle of the Pentlands, too, which is good to see:

Spotted another single swift yesterday, during an outing to the lagoons near the romantically named village of Skinflats on the south side of the Firth of Forth, a mere* stone's throw from what one might reasonably assume to be the not particularly wildlife-friendly Grangemouth refinery. There was a decent number of swallows and martins about, so there must have been a reasonable quantity of flying insects out there too. Swallows and martins, however, are happy to hunt at low altitude: I've seen swallows flying between the seed heads of tall grasses when hunting over meadows, and the sand martins at a site nearby to me will fly between your legs when focused on gathering food for their nestlings! Swifts, on the other hand, tend to prefer to take higher-flying prey; yesterday's bird did venture close to the lagoon surface a few times, but I got the impression that it wasn't that impressed with what it found there since it departed the scene shortly afterwards. * Er, see what I did there?

I saw one - just one - rather unexpectedly on Wednesday last week when I was walking on Dumyat above Stirling. First of the summer for me. Rather disappointingly: we'd been to Portobello the week before which is the most reliable spot for swifts round here, but nary a one to be seen. I suspect that the continuous, nagging north-easterly winds we've been experiencing don't help - neither the birds themselves, nor the insects they feed on (it has been a notably poor spring for flying insects so far - as noted on Springwatch the other day). We used to get swifts flying over our own neighbourhood on a regular basis but I've seen very few up here in recent years. The local starlings often raise hopes, only to be dashed, when they fly around in small squadrons screeching at each other in a very swift-like way. That said, I'm partial to starlings as well, and I'm pleased to say that we have several newly fledged families of starlings coming to our garden regularly at the moment (and getting through astonishing quantities of bird food!)

Morse is on a more or less permanent repeat cycle on ITV3 - along with Vera, Heartbeat, Foyle's War, Agatha Christie's Marple, Poirot, Lewis, Scott & Bailey and what seems like just about every other crime-based ITV production back to the year dot including The Sweeney (for John Thaw fans) and Minder. In fact ITV3 is now showing earlier series of Endeavour as well. All of the aforementioned should also be available to stream on ITVX (ITV hub as was - the difference being that on ITV Hub they were ad-free, whereas on ITVX you have to pay to get rid of the ads). STV Player also has some but not all of the aforementioned, ad-free IIRC.

Access to the original Forth Road Bridge is nowadays restricted to pedestrians, cyclists and public transport vehicles. As such, it's not very heavily used and it wouldn't be unusual for a bus to cross it without encountering any other traffic (pedestrians and cyclists are segregated from the lanes used by public transport vehicles). Either side of the bridge, though, it will be mixing it with normal traffic, from Ferrytoll to the bridge, and then from the bridge to Edinburgh Park, which latter part includes a couple of reasonably complicated junctions.

I've never tried to use one, only seen them for sale. Is the sound quality worse than when they were the latest thing in telephonic wizardry? I don't recall our old bakelite phone being exactly hi-fi...

Some old rotary dial phones that you find in antique shops have already been converted to tone dialling. I think there's a distinct limit to the appeal of an old bakelite phone as just a decorative item in its own right. (The one that we had when I was a kid was downright ugly IMO - though it did have the wee pull-out drawer where you could write down "important" numbers.)

Ah, I did think that your EV energy usage sounded quite high, this explains it. I haven't yet dipped a toe in the EV world, so I'm not particularly au fait with the ins and outs of it. From reading around on the Octopus web site (which IME is not always easy to navigate ☹️ sometimes it's easier just to use Google to take you to the page you want 🙄) my understanding is that Intelligent Octopus requires a 'smart' EV charger* whereas the older Octopus Go tariff didn't have that restriction. Which is probably why the overnight rate for Intelligent Octopus is ~20% cheaper than Octopus Go, as the 'smart' charger is better able to adjust its demand vs overall demand from the grid. Given the above, I could understand why they don't offer the higher export tariff to customers on the EV tariffs, if they have no way of knowing that you weren't just going to use the cheap electricity to charge a PV battery instead of an EV, and then sell it back to them at their ~15p export rate. That said, the new Octopus Flux tariff does allow you to do that, albeit the nighttime cheap rate is not as cheap as either of their EV rates (but then the Flux peak time export rate is higher even than the normal daytime export rate). I suspect that Octopus may continue to tweak their 'smart' tariffs as the value of being able to make use of domestic PV and EV batteries for grid balancing becomes clearer. However, if I've interpreted the first graph on this page explaining what smart EV chargers do correctly, that would seem to suggest that EVs are less likely to be a useful source of electricity for the grid at peak times, since that is also the peak EV charging time. Then again, if people are expecting to use their PV batteries to cover their nighttime usage, then they may not as inclined to sell it back to the grid during the evening peak either. For myself, in the absence of an EV on the driveway at the moment, my plan is to get a chunky PV array and a chunky battery, and to join Octopus Flux once they're installed. (I'm also getting the EPS functionality on my inverter, to provide some backup power if the grid fails.) * I appears from the web page linked above that all new domestic EV charger installations have had to comply with the 'smart' capability requirement since July last year.

Having watched it through several times I've not found any mention of "slot signalling", or even the word "slot" in that section, or anywhere else in the video. I did wonder if it might have appeared on screen as a result of a glitch in the automatically generated subtitles, which are notoriously unreliable (a particularly egregious example from that video is the word "semaphore" appearing in the subtitles as "some of four"!) However, again, I found no occurrence of the words under discussion in said subtitles. The only other possibility I can think of is that the OP misheard "block" as "slot" - but the only person who could verify that is the OP, who seems to be taking a somewhat belligerent attitude to any attempts to throw more light the supposed origin of the information in their posts. My conclusion: nothing to see here, move along.

In the FAQs for the Octopus Flux tariff it does say: "Yes, you can join Octopus Flux if you have an electric vehicle". I assume that means they're OK with you charging an EV on the Octopus Flux cheap rate (~60% of the day rate) between 02:00 and 05:00 - they're certainly OK with you charging the battery in your PV system during that period - but you won't get the super-cheap EV rate (~25% of the day rate*) between 00:30 and 04:30 that Octopus Go offers. * Note, though, that the Octopus Go day rate is ~12% higher than the Octopus Flux day rate. Note also that all these figures are based on their quotes for my postcode.

Are there not rules against behaviour which brings the sport into disrepute?