jmak

Quite a good and balanced article in this week's BMJ: https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n18 On one side:

All in one microwave white sauce (Delia approved!) To make 1 pint: 1.5 oz flour 2 oz butter 1 pint cold milk Add the flour to the milk and whisk. Chop butter into the mix. Microwave on full for 2 minutes and then whisk until (most of) the lumps have gone. Microwave some more - watch out for it boiling over! If it does boil, whisk and leave for a minute or two then microwave some more. Hints: if you start with a bit less milk, you can always add more, just in case it doesn't thicken quickly enough (that applies to any white sauce method) If it keeps boiling up the jug, just leave it for a few minutes and it will thicken by itself If it's lumpy, just whisk it a bit more It'll thicken up a bit more once you add the cheese Advantages of microwave method: you don't have to keep stirring it while it's cooking. Pyrex jug will go in dishwasher whereas my saucepans won't. Disadvantage: because it doesn't require constant attention, it's easy to boil it over requiring a clean-up of the microwave. For 3/4 pint: 1 oz flour 1.5 oz butter 15 fl oz milk I use the Imperial measurements because for some reason when I use the metric conversions, it never thickens [emoji2369]

The only bit I don't get is how you have time to go to work!

@witch There's someone else needing your attentions. Not sure what your preferred type of Australian amphibian is...

That link is worth clicking [emoji106] Personal anecdotes: we currently have a friend who is Covid positive monitoring their oxygen sats at home. They've been ranging between 90% to 93%, mostly around 91%. They've been told not to go to hospital unless it drops below 90%, because the hospital is essentially full. The guidance is that Covid patients should be given oxygen when sats drop below 93%. That's Bedfordshire, not London or a known hotspot. Another couple we know (friends we socialise with, not just people we've heard of) both had confirmed second infections of Covid. Sufficiently unusual that Public Health England sent a courier to collect blood samples and neither were seriously unwell, but a reminder that even if you've had it, you still need to be careful.

It'll be worth bearing in mind that time exposed to danger is relevant, not just how many people you've been near/places you've been to. Therefore if you have a couple of things that you need to be on site for, but the rest can be done from home, it would make sense to leave the building as soon as you can.

BBC radio programme: Hard Talk, Neil Ferguson "Professor Lockdown" Stephen Sackur speaks to British epidemiologist Professor Neil Ferguson, whose early modelling of Covid-19 made him an influential advocate of the lockdown strategy. The UK is back in lockdown and infections are surging - what has gone wrong and why have other countries done better? https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3cszc7j Highly recommended listen if you get 20 minutes (would have been better if I wasn't listening at 3.30am this morning instead of sleeping). Lots of good non-political information - it's about the science and his strong contention is that once the scientists have informed us of what the facts are and the impact of the options, it's up to the rest of us and our politicians to decide how to respond.

I got 172/500, but I've only been to Cork once and it was a stag weekend about 18 years ago, so I was quite pleased! Less pleased that I can't work out how to get anywhere other than Cork.... Edit: cracked that but now annoyed because it's wrong! (Well it have me zero marks because I chose the wrong Church Street out of 5 possibilities in the chosen area.) That's good though - it's stored me spending any more time on it [emoji16]

Interestingly, seems to take account of current flood defenses - looks very comprehensive. Looks like my mum and dad bought at the right end of their street - although since it's a cul-de-sac they'll need to get used to lockdowns!

For those less inclined to get involved in unlocking bootloaders and installing alternative OS's, launchers are your friend. I have a family member with a Pixel after 13 years of iPhones with something that's close enough for them not to notice and another with a Xiaomi using Lawnchair to make it look like a Pixel. Doesn't avoid the issue of the phone calling home and sharing your intimate details with the Chinese government (allegedly), but does mean that you don't need to consider the UI when you're choosing your phone.

The cheapest option overall would be to buy something half decent and then sell it on eBay. If it was me, I know if intended to do that, but then not get round to selling it, so the better option in that case would be to get the cheapest phone you can buy.

True answer for everyone: no one really knows. For someone who has quite a lot of exposure, it's probably worth it. My OH works in front line health care role working with patients confirmed as Covid positive every day and has rapid tests to use at home twice per week, but the point of that is to try and stop asymptomatic staff spreading it at work, rather than to protect us. (Looking forward to vaccination of healthcare workers though.) It does seem to pick up a decent number of asymptomatic people, so is a useful tool for removing people who don't know they're infectious from circulation. It therefore probably makes sense from a public health point of view. Accuracy is very variable depending on how well it's done - although if you're highly infectious (shedding lots of virus) it's pretty good (over 95%). In your situation I'd either give it a miss or go at a time I was pretty sure it was quiet. That's my instinct only, but it's based on the fact you have been sensible and reduced your contacts as much as possible and a guess that a fair number of people who pitch up for a test think they've been exposed, so you might be exposing yourself to additional risk while you queue up...

Hope they recover soon. I know you can find guidance just as easily as me, but if they don't have a temperature and are improving, they should be safe to be near you the sooner out of 10 days from when they showed symptoms or tested positive. Fingers crossed for a family Christmas [emoji1696]

I've used a pair of the £300 Bose headphones with active noise cancelling and they're transformational when there's background noise. But in a back to back comparison with my £85 Sennheiser (wired) cans in a quiet room, they sounded really over processed. As a rule, it would be surprising if a sound signal that's been compressed (Bluetooth) and then uses whatever digital/analogue convertor they put in the headphones could match the analogue signal coming from a decent source. Last week I bought an Apple USB C to 3.5mm adaptor to use with my phone. It cost £9 and has a built in DAC. How?!

But...... is in charge and will be .......... And..... said ......... So........ reason for delays on the M20...... can't be due to...... Everything's under control and going as planned. Sorry, rest of post was self redacted to make sure my post isn't political [emoji57]

You're welcome. Quote function isn't working properly on my app so I can't break the answers down. Flex seal looks good. If you can't scribe, maybe you could grind a slot? The expanding foam is definitely not structural. It'll fill a gap, but isn't suitable as a mounting surface. I suggested battens at the side as I was assuming that if you batten at the top, you'll end up with gaps at the side. You could make wooden shims to put between the conservatory frame and the wall at the points where you attach it. After all of the rest of my ideas... You could just grind out the deeper render at the top... It depends how much grinding you think it'll take. My instinct is that using battens would be easier; either will work. The key thing will definitely be getting it level. The builders who fitted ours used shims like these for fine adjustments: https://www.screwfix.com/p/broadfix-assorted-plastic-shims-medium-200-pcs/80408

We looked at a complete ban using GPO, but couldn't make it work for us due to the need to be able to connect cameras and SD cards from cameras and Lego devices. You can create an allow list by hardware id, but you need to create a policy for every type of device you have (i.e. every model of SD card etc). We couldn't use GPO to enforce bitlocker for the same reason. We did it by organisational policy. We'd had a near miss - a SenCo mislaid a stick with all manner of personal details on it. Much panic and many tears later it turned up in a different handbag. That caused enough concern that people stopped using them for confidential data, but I suspect that organisational memory will lapse as staff have moved on and it will become a problem again. I think I was the biggest user of memory sticks... I would find it very inconvenient not to have a stick with drivers and scripts and BIOS updates on it. But I am different to ordinary staff [emoji57]

So a few things to note, if not a complete answer... Are you certain you know what is under the render? The 3 phase power supply to my house was buried under the render behind the conservatory on our house. A builder found it with an angle grinder when he was replacing the flashing on our conservatory. The bang was very big. The bill was very big (builder's insurance paid). On the plus side, no one died. With the knowledge that there was a cable buried illegally, I saw a bulge in the render... Expanding foam. As the man in the video experienced "it's called expanding foam for a reason"! Most people make a mess the first time they use it. Also, you do need it to expand beyond the hole you're trying to fill, otherwise there'll be gaps. Therefore there will be overspill. Mask the surfaces around the hole you're filling, then you can cut back to the level you need and won't end up with foam stuck around the hole looking messy. The foam will last indefinitely and is a good insulator, so there no problem using it to fill the gap. However, it can absorb water and then effectively leak, so you need to make sure it's covered with a weatherproof layer. My advice on the fitting: I would batten out the top and the sides, fill the gaps with expanding foam and get some trim that matches the conservatory to cover the gaps at the side. Cut the trim to follow the contours of your house and leave a vertical line where it home the conservatory and it will look smart. If the surface you attach to isn't perfectly square/flat, you're likely to twist the conservatory when you attach it, which will cause problems down the line - probably leaks. We had a replacement conservatory fitted last year, using the existing dwarf wall. It was a bit more complicated as we went for a flat roof with a lantern, but to give you an idea, it took them a week and they spent the first day and a half getting everything level. It was complicated because the wall wasn't level and it fits in the inside corner of an L shape of the building and the walls aren't at right angles to each other. Once they'd got a square surface, the rest went up in a couple of hours. Hope that helps. Edit: mikeprice style anecdote. A colleague had his 6 month old company car written off by a can of expanding foam. One was dropped on the road in front of him, exploded and covered the front of his car. It got inside suspension, brakes, radiator and covered the paintwork and insurance company said it wasn't worth repairing. It was 15 years ago and the car was £25k.

Isn't it mandatory to be able to offer a meal? To meet FSM requirements of nothing else. In which case, shouldn't the school be closed?

Yep. Proof absolute that it was just political posturing, not a real security concern.

Shame it's out of stock, but worth looking it for similar. I've bought Xiaomi phones for family members and they've been at least as good as the more well known brands for significantly less money.

I know there's a separate dad/bad jokes thread, but there's a bit of a theme here. The top 10 cracker jokes as voted by TV Gold viewers

I think you have taken the Covid quiz on the same page.

Don't. Ever. Cycle. In. Flip-flops.

This one? https://factfulnessquiz.com/category/test I can thoroughly recommend the book. It gives quite a positive view, but with the take that it is worth trying to fix things; it's very easy to fall into the trap of thinking that all the things that were awful 20 or 30 years ago are still broken. It's not all rosy, but we should focus on things that do need to be fixed. Keep up the fight, but make sure it's the right fight.