southhamster

Just finished "Painkiller" on Netflix. If you ever wondered what would happen if managed to licence morphine and hand it out like Nurofen, this will answer it. Spoiler: it was a disaster.. Greed and hubris backed up by relentless marketing led Oxycontin to kill thousands. The Sackler family pretty much got away with it. Bit of a slow start but I thought it told the story pretty well.

"Sent from my pond"

You'll be pleased to know there was (still?) a special bicycle thread, "BSC (British Standard Cycle) or CEI (Cycle Engineers’ Institute) thread has no American counterpart. The thread angle also differs from other British threads running at a 60 degrees rather than a 55 degrees angle. All sizes ​1⁄4 inch and larger use 26 threads per inch (tpi), making them similar to 1 mm ISO threads, which are 25.4 per inch and also run at a 60 degrees angle."

I've found Notepad++ useful for looking at formatting issues. It saved the day once when our school payroll file was inexplicably sent as little endian not big endian and we identified and converted it perfectly in Notepad++.

We've just finished We Hunt Together (tips hat to 6foot2) Season 1 now on BBC iPlayer. A slightly slow start but plenty of clever and quirky stuff and then gets really mad. Quite dark in places but well acted and looking forward to season 2 which is on nowTV.

When I did my back in a few years ago I found one of those litter picker grab things really useful to save bending over. I don't know it would be with your ribs but might be worth a try?

We rescued this creature from a watering can yesterday. At first I thought it was a hornet (eek) but it's a mimic called with stunning originality the hornet beetle or golden haired longhorn. Never seen one before.

I agree re: switching things off. I use it more for checking consumption. I can see for example that our old oil boiler circulating pump uses a lot of electricity so when it fails replacing it with an energy saving one is definitely worth it.

This TP Link plug is on special offer ATM as the Kasa range is EOL. https://uk.store.tapo.com/products/smarthome-kasa-kp115?utm_source=tplink&utm_medium=buynow&utm_campaign=product I've had one for about 6 months and it works locally perfectly on Home Assistant so you can avoid the TP link app. It's interesting on sunny days to see the voltage swings from the solar PV!

Finally got around to watching Foundation - Isaac Asimov adaption on Apple TV. Really enjoyed it and beautifully filmed, Jared Harris (Chernobyl) is excellent. In some ways I thought Raised by Wolves was better but maybe Season 2 due out ?next week will raise the game.

I bought my first CD player - a Philips CD101 in about 1985 which cost about £300 on special offer. They seemed very space age and futuristic back then and fitted the cool digital computery vibe perfectly. It was also the start of a DIY hifi building journey as it showed up the rest of my system. A bigger problem was finding actual discs to play on it, and they were very expensive; I think there were about 10 boring ones in the whole of Milton Keynes, the least worst of which was ABC The Look of Love for £11.99 - eek! However the sound quality and practicality of the format were a revelation after the space wasting, hassle and scratch/hiss of vinyl and the horrible sound and self-destructiveness of cassettes. If you've ever tried to DJ in an upstairs room with a bouncy wooden floor you'll appreciate CD's.. I still love my old Sony CD player and buy the odd interesting CD off ebay as I've been caught out already by several music services folding, (looking at you google music) although I put most stuff on my phone as MP3's for portability. The best thing - I've not had one CD fail to play so far out of many hundreds, whereas so many records (and their owners) got wrecked at parties....but that's another story.

Interesting article (it's a fairly long read!) re: lack of water in the UK, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2023/jun/15/drought-is-on-the-verge-of-becoming-the-next-pandemic

Can you try an iPad with the clevershare app installed, that may give you clues as to where the problem is. Our reception class used it very happily. https://support.clevertouch.com/products/cleversoftware/clevershare-2

It must be hot. Mrs. SH has taken the blanket off her side of the bed. We have a hosepipe ban so watering the garden by watering can takes ages but does bump up my daily steps! Also chasing the squirrels away from the bird feeder.

Maybe see if your school's sparkies are willing to look at it (if they are nice people - ours were), as they will be used to catering stuff.

Yes he is disgustingly brilliant; reminds me of a person I used to work with about 40 years ago - ugh. Odd fact, the theme tune is sung by Mick Jagger!

Really enjoying Slow Horses on Apple TV (yes I know, but you can get a week's trial) Slightly oddball spy series, a bit like a scuzzy version of Spooks. Some great dialogue and acting. We also watched The Essex Serpent on Apple but let's just say that the book was much better...

Blimey, that's the size of a London flat!

Exactly. About a million years ago (1982!?) I did an evening class and learnt to write 6800 machine code (hex.), then burn the program to EPROM. That really made you understand hardware architecture, albeit on a simple 8 bit processor, but it's stood me in good stead a number of times. It makes the Arduino IDE seem quite luxurious!

We watched Steeltown on BBC. Bars on a true story of the hunt for a 1970's serial killer in South Wales. Stars Philip Glennister as a young detective, then 30 years later solving the crime. It's not fast paced, but some good acting and plenty of flares and dodgy hair!

I once went to buy a car and was shown it by the son of the previous owner - his old uncle who'd recently died. It hadn't been used since then and we found full ashtrays, cigar boxes etc He opened the boot which had a pile of, err, gentlemen 's magazines in it We looked at each other a bit embarrassed and he said he'd clean the car before sale....

A German friend found the word "squirrel" almost impossible to say, (don't know what she made of SQL).. The German squirrel word - eichhornchen has a nice ring to it.

We watched this and enjoyed it, although it did show outback Australia in a very bleak light..

A wildlife and annoying thing. Our pond sprung a leak right near the bottom. There were also a few cracks near the top after 10 years of sun. Pond and rocky border decanted carefully with about 20 newts, pond plants etc. Emergency new liner installed and all back in 2 days. Found quite a few newt eggs but luckily not hatched yet. The pond pump now works properly after a good clean as well. Phew..

We had to change firewall settings. Can't remember what it was I'm afraid. I would hassle their support and make the point hundreds of schools are using the remote service successfully so get them to look at the settings!