zarniwhoop

You were possibly right first time - I think fraggle rock was the southern end of the (norse) kingdom of the isles, but the vikings had occupied dublin, and from the little I've read on wikipedia the (long extinct) gaelic of galloway was much closer to (ulster) irish in terms of the few recorded words than to the other scots gaelic dialects.

I think the accuracy of weather forecasts, except in settled periods (of a week or more) is no better than it has ever been. But now they add coloured warnings of anything they think might happen, to avoid people complaining "why didn't they warn us about this wind / this torrential rain and flooding / whatever". Certainly, these days I pay a lot more attention to the warnings - but those are often overstated when looked at afterwards.

That is what I would have expected. Lentils have long been used in this country, although not necessarily as a large part of most people's meals, but chickpeas definitely have a mediterranean or indian background,

I thought about replying to some food-related posts over the past few days, but by the time I read them they were old. Meanwhile I'm keeping my usual erratic hours (on Saturday I really was an early riser by my standards - just after 1 p.m. after maybe 5 hours sleep 😁 but had to go to bed for a few hours later) So for food items (oh, hope they weren't on TNM) I've been veggie for about 46 years - I did accidentally bite a fishy snack at a hindu wedding in the 80s or 90s, but other than that my only deviations from proper vegetarianism have been non-veggie cheeses (a few when on holiday, or when remembering what I ate on holiday, and of course in the last few years it's almost impossible to get veggie (non-rennet) cheeses in supermarkets). Hmm, not sure if roquefort is veggie or non-veggie - did Ewe see what I did there ? Anyway - for the discussion on manufactured vegan foods I agree they are rubbish. I will offend some people by saying that I eat ginster's pasties (cheese and onion, or moroccan, or quorn), but so be it. Quorn, of course, is a fungus - but so are mushrooms and yeast, and where would we be without fungi ? The other change in my eating in recent years (was it the pandemic that started it, or was it the B word ?) has been a reduction in eating tofu - supermarkets currently have weird and wonderful permutations, but the blocks mostly occupy a large space (not very dense) and do not keep for more than a day or two once started. It used to be that I could get a smoked tofu in waitrose which was very dense, with edges and a square pattern on the top - delicious, and once opened the part that was left kept for several days in the fridge.. The brand is still in production, but they now package it with tomato and herbs instead of smoking it. Strangely, in today's grauniad (the comments on the big house and one or two commentators, e.g. on the post office scandal first exposed by private eye, mostly agree with my own prejudices, the rest tends to be rubbish but it's always useful to have newspaper if liquids spill on the kitchen floor) there are reports of a growth in allergies including people allergic to chickpeas and lentils, supposedly as result of adding foreign foods to our diet. Qué ? But finally (at last, you say!) a question - a lot of the time when I'm lying in bed it seems to me that I'm half-awake or half-asleep - I see images in front of my eyes (one recently appeared to be chinese or japanese ideograms - probably related to a file of japanese vertical typesetting I've recently been playing with on my computer) and I seem to spend a lot of time thinking, or dreaming about, issues I'm currently encountering on my computers (compiling software, creating test files). Is this normal, or just 'normal for me' ?

The first pic makes me think of Crocodile Dundee - "call that a big dinosaur?", the second makes me think of the flintstones. Hence the 'funny' rating.

Hey, this thread doesn't get any fewer posts, does it ? Saw the 4a.m. posts when I was going to bed Saturday morning, 60+ when I got back to this PC, loads more that I've just read. Mostly MIA (trying to sleep in between the spasms, checking the CGM sensor, sleeping, wondering why I felt so tired until I could be arrased to check the sensor, then waiting, and waiting, for sensor readings to drop before I felt safe to eat. Intermittently watching Le Tour, eating Alsace-influenced meals for this day when it headed into Alsace (pommes frites avev sauerkraut, tarte aux myrtilles) and trying to beat my texlive test scripts into shape. I keep finding things I thought I'd fixed, and then they bite me again. I think I ought to give that up, but then what would I do ? For those in my personal timezone: Night Awl.

Belatedly, Happy Birthday to Baz

So parts of the disputed sea area are claimed by both, and parts by neither? Sounds as if there is scope for third parties in the parts nobody claims.

Apropos spreadsheets - I first encountered excel when we were outsourced to [$oneglobalfirm, which later divested itself of the parent accountancy part after enron] and a project manager was brought in for the system we were developing, providing a plan of how things should go: just a way of drawing a grid with things in it! Nowadays I use libreoffice writer to keep my accounts, but I also use it as a grid for keeping track of my backups (text and dates in cells, delete and post to move things higher). «Plus la change, plus c'est la même chose» Normally I don't mention my day to day activities - went to be early (4am) on Tuesday, at 8am-ish I noticed a light on my phone and found that Parcel Force were scheduled to deliver a replacement diabetes sensor between 14:30 and 15:30. Didn't sleep much, but was up in time for that and sat by the door when he knocked. But I'd planned to go out this afternoon to get some food shopping, and after the delivery I was just too tired and eventually went back to bed. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow ... I've now caught up with Le Tour (a short time trial, I don't think I really needed 5+ hours of coverage although an hour of highlights would have been too short). But (with apologies to Tigger and Grizz) - "bluddy danes!" 😢

I saw when looking at news reports on my phone that a Tesla parked at the kerbside in Islington apparently self-combusted. It was in the Daily Fail so I won't link to it.

Obviously an acquired taste ;-) I used to drink it at student union meetings at uni (take a can in, fit in with everyone else). It has always seemed perfectly acceptable to me - not as marmite as certain past canned ales, and not too strong.

Sounds like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Serriffe but that was in the Grauniad. Thanks for the reminder - I'm intermittently struggling with some TeX stuff (the computerised typesetting system invented by Knuth), in particular with how faint the default original fonts are when viewed onscreen, I'll now think more kindly of him (the last item above 'See Also' on that wikipedia page.

The usual aluminium (aluminum where you are) cans, the sort you can easily squash when empty (unlike 25cl wine cans which are harder to crush). I think I've had another punctured can in the last year or so. In this case the only thing holding the cans together was some cardboard at the top with four can-sized holes and a central thumb hole. That had come off by the time I discovered the leak.

An interesting day - I'd hoped to get out to the local Saints' buries yestereen but the dry spells were too short (spent a couple of minutes longer than planned in getting ready, then saw I could not see out). In view of today's yellow warning of wind I didn't expect to get out (walking with two sticks I have problems with gusty winds at the best of times). Got out after 6pm while it was sunny, but walking from the car park to the store (and back afterwards) I had to keep stopping every time the wind gusted. A lady offered to help me when I stopped on the way out (the gusts were catching the trolley unless I stopped), but it would have taken me as long to get to my car without the trolley so I declined. Got indoors safely, but I'd put the bag down several times on the concrete outside and at the bottom were some cans of McEwan's Export. Unfortunately they were on their sides and one of them had punctured. Turdy curses is I think the correct expression. Now cleaned up, and my copy of Private Eye has now dried out. Will be going back to finishing my recording of today's TdF stage (eurosport - the full stage). Wishing you all stay safe if the weather is bad where you are.

On my virgin-based email I get several a week warning about problems with my mailbox or bill and inviting me to click the link. Fortunately I use a plain text mail client on that account so I can immediately see where the mail claims to have come from (and can look more closely if it looks possibly genuine). Unfortunately, virgin have their own spam filters which only stop random good mailing-list emails. On my gmail account spam blocking is 99% effective, with a few false positives each month, but I hear of problems where google plays silly boogers with mailing lists.

I clicked on 'Quote' to ask if there was a picture, and if so was it some obscure format (I'm using firefox). But now I can see the video. Thanks.

Trying to calm down before I contact the company who produce the diabetes sensor I've been prescribed - the app had an update when I looked at about 4am before going to bed (yesterday was a late day after a very long sleep), opening it just gave a blank white screen until I rebooted the phone. Then it had a butterfly at the bottom with a notification of a change - clicking on that, when I start my next sensor it will automatically send readings to the phone. Sounds good if it doesn't drain the battery. But since then it keeps turning off the alarm for low level because it's lost the signal. On once occasion I was asleep in bed with the phone next to the bed (within 2.5M of the sensor worst case), and on another I was either standing while making breakfast and carrying it to the sofa, or sitting on the sofa, all the while with the phone in my pocket. Not impressed, but I had emailed the local diabetes team about another issue and got a phoned reply today, mentioned this, got an email about a different sensor to consider, and later another phone call offering me an appointment for review in 4 weeks. I guess that side of things is looking up but I worry about how much these (expletive deleted) sensors are costing the nhs.

Details on the Small Skipper page at butterfly conservation, found by a quick google search. https://butterfly-conservation.org/butterflies/small-skipper But google tailors searches to an individual's search history, so in this case I suspect you might not have got the same result for 'distinguish essex skipper from small skipper' (and in other very specific searches I often get completely irrelevant results, so maybe I was lucky today).

No complaints about the source of those funds, but it isn't Bozo's money, it's from general government funds, ultimately from taxation.

Before the pandemic, and then the panic over electricity supplies, I used to regularly make (usually, wholemeal) sourdoughs - originally I started with yeasted loaves, switched to yeast sponges, and then got an american book which went into a lot of detail about variations in (mostly european) breads and encouraged me to work on sourdoughs. I'm now back to making sourdough when the timings fit with my plans, and also making yeasted breads when the timings don't fit. For some time I had used instant yeast when I wanted to make yeasted dough, but new-ish regular dried yeast, with sugar to feed it, works a lot better. I will also mention that the flours vary over time - I always used to use Doves Farm wholemeal which was not especially strong and is often not available. Waitrose wholemeal has always been very strong, at the moment Doves and Allinsons seem to be similarly strong.

I hadn't considered the possibility of a front door inside the arch, but it make sense. I went back and zoomed in because I thought there might be a normal door on the big arch door, and after making the image fullscreen on firefox there definitely is a normal door in the big door. But don't try that at home - the tab now occupies my full screen with no way of getting back to a menu or closing a tab. Edit: Alt+Space brought me a menu which allowed me to leave fullscreen - suggestions of using F11 (for windows) were not helpful for this linux machine which uses that for hibernate.😢

Supposedly it is still ongoing. But since it is limited to i686 (32-bit intel/AMD) CPUs with their 4GB address limitation, it seems unlikely it will ever go anywhere. I found a mirror on github which says it is updated daily, but very little has changed in recent times. There is another site, apparently running on hurd, which claims there was a 2023 update - but I could not get the 'details' link to work. There are many obscure almost-personal computer projects, the hurd is now in that category. It lost its niche when linux took mindset. Most of the GNU tools are doing well, apart from with the subset of rustaceans [1] who want to use "totally free" (non-copyleft[2]) licenses and are convinced their new tools will be inherently more secure. Footnotes for those who don't know what the terms mean - 1. rustacean, n.: Advocate of the rust programming language, often used pejoratively. 2. non-copyleft, adj: Take freely, adapt without any requirement to make changes available to anyone to whom you provide a product.

I thought people usually started a new thread in the layouts section ? Obviously a lot of pictures were lost in the server crashes, but many threads have had a lot of discussion about how to build (design details for the tracks, considerations when it doesn't fit, sometimes a lot of detail discussion, with photos, of approaches to baseboard construction). That's why I generally look through the layouts section once a week (and occasionally more often if something of particular interest to me is being updated frequently).

I think my leg is starting to recover! After the first spell of standing with crutches, and then sitting in a firm chair, I'm mostly using two crutches as walking sticks indoors. Able to get out to the local Saint's buries this evening (when the place is quiet) and get some light food shopping, including a pizza. Also some more dextrose tablets in case things go downhill again (not expecting that, just trying to be prepared), and some more ibuprofen tablets - I'm usually reluctant to take those, but one or two a day seem to be helping reduce the muscle pain in my calf and make me more mobile. Things is looking up. Must put the oven on soon (fan in lounge is already on to cool it).

Happy Birthday, @PhilJ W