Steve44

My kids usually manage the music, it's easy at the moment with an AUX lead so no real connection with the car. I can see as things are getting more connected this could have issues.

I went 2-3 years ago and really enjoyed it, there is so much to see and they have a lot of unusual exhibits.

My main gripe, which I did feed back at the time, was they had a wide selection of vintage computers and consoles running but there were no instructions. It’s a long time since I’d used any of them and had forgotten much of even the basics,;they also had Spectrum with the SSD type libraries but again no instructions on how to load and use the games. That meant you could look at them, try and type a couple of things in and hope you get lucky, then move on to the next item feeling frustrated.

The museum is continually evolving so I hope that something has been done to help what I felt was a fairly big shortcoming. I appreciate it’s a lot of work creating cue-cards for each one but as you’re encouraged to have a play around it would greatly add to the experience.

Have a look at a the trade association http://foodservicepackaging.org.uk/ and also https://www.packagingnews.co.uk/ which covers other packaging but there is a fair amount of foodservice items covered.

I'm currently in the food packaging industry and over the past few years we have been seeing manufacturing move from China to Vietnam and India. Likewise in Europe it’s moving from Poland out to Romania, Greece, and also Turkey. These decisions are largely based on manufacturing costs.

> Truman ordered nuclear bombs dropped

Or should it read "Truman authorised nuclear bombs dropped", there is a fair difference in meaning.

I was under the impression we have a continuous patrol policy and there is always at least one submarine out on patrol.

The Roman Empire covered a huge area, including some of the Middle East and North Africa so it’s highly likely that people, objects, and ideas all moved around. They could well have taken inspiration from something seen at one of the outposts.

Related to this I recently found out about the origins of an old electrical distribution board under the stairs in my parents house, this was Southport, NW England. I knew it wasn old and not in use but was never removed.

Apparently the houses near the new tramway, installed about 1900, had an electricity feed direct from the tramway which passed the end of the street. I think it was possibly 600V DC from what I can see about tram power.

I’ve never researched it but having had a quick search can’t find anything specific to the houses being fed. I’ll bookmark for later as it’s an interesting step in the electrification of our towns. [1] is a link about the trams.

[1] http://www.petergould.co.uk/local_transport_history/fleetlis...

This is one of the reasons the "letter of last resort" the British submarines carry must remain secret. It’s the not knowing which helps keep the balance of peace.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/36824917/trident-what-...

I think there is a flaw in that story. I’ve a few pairs of high quality shoes and yes they do last well and look good but they still need maintenance. I send them back to the manufacturer for a resole when needed, they come back refurbished but it’s cost about 1/3 the price of buying a new pair.

I also have a 30 year old Omega watch. Every five years that goes back to Omega, it’s away for about a month and costs £2-300 each time.

Which arena of science hasn’t said something like this.

In the history of computing there were quotes from prominent people such as “there will never be a need for more than five computers in the world” followed about 30 years later by something like “there is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home”.

There is a fair amount of press in the UK at the moment related to a Westminster VIP paedophile ring where it looks like the "victim", a Carl Beech, may have been making it up.

This is basically the 'ticking bomb' scenario isn’t it. If the question was to keep torturing until “was Mr Bloggs a part of the meeting” is a yes then that is pretty much not valid as the subject will likely say anything to stop it. To find the location of bomb going off in 30 minutes is a very different matter as it’s a clear true or false question with a very direct answer.

When I was programming I loved working in an office with other teams. The buzz with the other creatives, coders, artists, musicians, really helped me to develop what I was working on. If I was ‘in the zone’ I could be totally focussed for hours but when I needed a mental break, or to chat over ideas there were always others around to do that with.

I’ve sometimes worked at home which can be great for a few days of pure coding but for the longer term development I really relish having other peers around.

I once did a project, about six months work, purely from home and although I was disciplined enough to work I feel I was nowhere near my best because of the isolation.

This is why I find it strange the drive a lot of people have to work at home, for me it’s nice occasionally but it just doesn’t work for my creativity.

> I would constantly look at my clock, phone, watch, etc.

I have a projection clock which displays a dull red digital clock on the ceiling. It means if I do wake up I can check the time without having to roll over, rind a bright clock etc. It’s so dull it doesn’t disturb my sleep and I find really useful to have.

I try and build little worlds in my head and fly around them, working on adding details as I go. I think it works because it blocks everything out and requires zero physical effort.

Plus most people would ‘double dip’ when using jars so there will be a transfer from the skin into the cream in the pot. If you have a pot which lasts a couple of months that is potentially quite a lot of material transferred from your skin into the dish.

With both of our kids we had a great social life with groups of the other parents all through school. There were annual dances, fetes, mums nights out, dads nights out, meeting for a quick beer etc. etc. Now the kids have left school the majority of that has dropped off, we do keep in good social contact with a couple of people but I really miss how busy and varied the social life used to be.

Wasn’t this premise part of the story in The Matrix where they initially created a perfect work but the humans didn’t thrive in that. We needed a world with some pain so we can enjoy living.

In discussions about what you’d change in your past I’m fairly unusual in that I wouldn’t change anything, including the bad bits [0] because it’s all part of what has formed the person I am now.

In the plant world a forest fire is often good in the long term as it helps with the distribution of nutrients so allows fresh growth.

[0] I appreciate that for some people there will have been possibly devastating events or rabbit holes they’ve been down from which they haven’t been able to recover and they may well have a different view.

In addition to those reasons generally a computer system is a business tool. If a machine is doing what a company needs then why spend valuable time and money upgrading it to something else that will do exactly the same job.

I do appreciate the problem of security patches, but XP is pretty rock solid as a platform so for many businesses their tool does what they need.

In the UK we now have the capacity to recycle all the 2.5 billion plastic lined cups we use each year. There are an ever increasing number of recycling collection points and many major companies are working to make this happen.

https://resource.co/article/veolia-recycle-120m-coffee-cups-...

> However, two reprocessors have announced this year that they have the capability to recycle coffee cup waste. In March, packaging company DS Smith stated that it could recycle all the UK’s coffee cups at its paper mill in Kemsley, Kent, while on a smaller scale, paper manufacturer James Cropper launched its own trademarked ‘CupCycling’ process in May

> Costa announced its aim to recycle as many coffee cups as it sells by 2020, equating to 500 million cups. The programme involves the chain subsidising a number of waste collection companies, including Veolia, to collect takeaway cups from stores (£70 per tonne collected). This subsidy aims to raise the value of coffee cups as a material in the eyes of recyclers, making it more financially viable to collect them.

> [0]: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/315159

That link isn’t about a manufacturer developing better cups, it is a retailer spending ten years deciding which type of cup to use. The cup they chose, as far as I can tell from that description, is a standard double-walled PE lined paper cup which has been in wide use for many years now.

> Some 2.5 billion coffee cups are thrown away annually in the UK, almost none of which are recycled because of their plastic lining.

That is woefully out of date. We now have the capacity to recycle all the disposable cups used in the UK. The collecting and sorting is where the effort needs to be put now.

https://www.dssmith.com/recycling/insights/coffee-cups-recyc...

> so they end up in regular garbage bins

So is there any point in using them if they are not composted?

The standard paper coffee cups are about 92% paper and 8% PE for the waterproof lining. Come compostable cups have a lining made from a form of PLA and are, in theory, compostable under the right commercial conditions.

The PE lined cups can be recycled, the UK currently has capacity to recycle all the 2.5 billion cups we use annually.

I'm not sure where you are but there are a number of schemes in the UK now for recycling these cups. The main one is, I think, Simply Cups so possibly worth contacting them.

> Also, beach scenes. Snow scenes. Cameras and film often (counterintuitively) underexposed those.

The snow being under-exposed is the camera is trying to balance out the image to 18% grey [usually]. This means in a scene with mainly bright white snow it will expose to make the scene grey, unless you override it. The camera can't [with current technology as far as I know] know that you are shooting snow. If you're shooting in snow then you probably want to adjust exposure by +2 as a starting point.

Photographers used to carry around a physical grey card and would use that to take a light meter reading from. That would give the base standard exposure for the ambient light so the scene should be correctly exposed. [ it's more complex due to dynamic range etc but that covers the basics ]

I've always known is as "I Seem To Remember" and I thought it was in common use. It's been around for as long as I can remember, apologies for assuming.

Something I read a couple of weeks ago discussed this. From what I remember it’s to increase the time a user spends on a page, this increases the page ranking in Google; ISTR it was called dwell time.

I’d never considered that but it’s an interesting concept. When you’re deciding what to wear you only have half the number of shoes to look at so have a smaller physical area to search and compare. Once you’ve chosen it’s fairly straightforward to find the matching one in the second container.

One downside would be if you have a few very similar pairs of shoes, that would undoubtedly make finding the matching shoe much more difficult because you couldn’t immediately home in on it.

I don’t think I’ll try it, but certainly something new to ponder.