Steve44

> Gerry is also short for Gerald sometimes. > > Tony in the US is often short for Anthony.

These two are incredibly common in the UK. You will occasionally see Ant (as in And & Dec TV presenters) but almost no one uses Anthony, they are usually all Tonys.

The female short names is usually spelt Toni, but pronounced the same.

In Britain we had the very famous MI6 Intelligence office Kim Philby who was also a Russian spy, he was a key part of the Cambridge Five spy ring.

What I didn't know until just now is Kim was just a nickname. He was Harold Adrian Russell Philby and apparently Nicknamed "Kim" after the boy-spy in Rudyard Kipling's novel Kim[2] which surely foreshadowed his career!!

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-24803131

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Philby

I can add some information to this from the UK market

The best baking paper is Silicone Vegetable Parchment. This can be baked on usually 5-6 times so is great for a commercial bakery. The one we sold was a two-sided emulsion of Polydimethylsiloxane coated on 42gsm vegetable parchment. It could be used for dry, wet, fatty foods and for baking application up to 220ºc, together with frozen food, food interleave and industrial uses

There is a silicoat baking paper which is cheaper but can only be used a couple of times. The one we sold was 57gsm Silcoat is a bleached, high density paper, manufactured from virgin fibre with high chemical purity, coated on both sides with silicone and was certified to be Home Compostable.

There is also baking parchment which is is widely available for consumers, these tend to be quite thin and only suitable for single use. It's a parchment paper with silicone coatings.

There is also basic greaseproof (which we used as kids as "tracing paper") which can take some temperature but is nothing like as robust.

Gloster Gladiators biplanes were in front line combat in 1940 successfully defending Malta.

https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/british-bipla...

The Royal Navy also used biplanes, the Fairey Swordfish were used extensively through WW2, including sinking the Bismarck.

https://www.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/the-fairey...

https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/70000163

And we came out of the war with nuclear bombs and were on the verge of [sustained level] supersonic flight with projects such as the Miles M.52

https://museumofberkshireaviation.co.uk/html/exhibits/m52.ht...

> Avro Lancasters, a few years ago, and I was shocked how small and cramped it was.

Two things about that. Firstly I agree inside they are tiny and having the clamber over the wing spar as a 6ft chunky man wasn't easy.

Some time ago I saw a photograph of an RAF Tornado on the ground next to a Lancaster and was shocked how big the modern aircraft are, especially compared to what was a heavy bomber. I can't find that photo, but this gives some idea.

https://c8.alamy.com/comp/P9CWD2/dambusters-617sqn-617-squad...

I quite often print things such as order acknowledgements or appointment information.

It feels like over the past year or so it usually fails. One page on screen goes to 5-10 pages of mainly blank space, certainly not just the details.

I've taken to screen-grabbing and printing that.

It's ridiculous.

There was a lot of talk at the time as to whether COVID should be classed as respiratory or a blood disorder. This seems to be quite a decent and updated article about it.

https://www.bhf.org.uk/informationsupport/heart-matters-maga...

> But as the outbreak progressed, case studies began to suggest that some of the most severe complications of the disease affected more than just the lungs. From reports of ‘sticky blood’ raising the risk of deep vein thrombosis, heart attack or stroke, to neurological effects, many complications seemed to be affecting the blood vessels.

[and yes I am ignoring the common implication of comments like that]

The page says "This website is no longer updated" so if there were ever pictures I suspect they are long gone.

I'd not heard of The Belt of Venus before, but luckily there is plenty of information about it out there.

https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/advice/belt-of-venus from the BBC Sky at Night Magazine seems to be a pretty good article about it.

I used it for a little while and Turnpike email software from the UKs Demon Internet integrated it pretty well.

The problem was only one other person I knew actually used it, it didn't really have a justifiable use for most people.

I did use the encrypted mountable drives for a while, that worked very well. I since moved to TrueCrypt and now onto Vercrypt and haven't used a PGP product for probably over 15 years.

Shame really but it just didn't get enough traction.

Thank you, great response.

> who need to be solving/fixing/building, and that time (together) is therapeutic

Yes, I think thinks like that not only keep the brain working but allows you to concentrate and switch off from everything else.

Keep it up, you're doing very important work that change lives.

* edit word.

We keep samples of every print run and also use that to cut out and send samples telling the printers to match. They can drift over time so by keeping every run we can monitor.

Some printer are better than others and although often you get what you pay for it's far from guaranteed.

Firstly can I give you a big hug for what you're doing.

Do you find that things such as the man-shed groups play an important part? I feel that life can be more isolating these days and where people move about more and life runs at a faster pace there is less time and fewer opportunities to fully relax and just "talk shit" with someone.

For me TV programmes like Mortimer & Whitehouse Gone Fishing are a reminder of how we should be spending some of our time.

It is, but there are a few caveats.

Usually you tell the printers to print in a specific Pantone colour or using CMYK. The Pantone shade tells them what ink mix to use but it's not what the final printed product will look like as that depends on what you're printing on. Say you've a coffee shop and have your logo printed on a white paper cup and also on a brown Kraft box the same Pantone ink will look very different.

Tring to work back from "I want all my printed items to look like Pantone #12345" to selecting the required inks for different materials is a very hard job.

Another problem is Pantone release a new book each year. You'd like to think that is just to ensure the reference colour charts don't fade etc, but they sometimes change the actual colour mix.

In 2023 Pantone changed how they mixed colours [1] which means some visual differences. We had a customer using 544u and that changed quite dramatically with the new mix, all of their branding looked quite different. We had a long fight with the printers trying to resolve this.

[1] https://www.printweek.com/news/article/pantone-explains-cont... > all Pantone Colors were now mixed from 11 base inks plus a colourless extender, a simplification on the previous 18 base inks.

> tainted my view of software development as full of lazy programmers not bothering to optimize code

I have the opposite memory of the C64 demo coders, they were masters at optimizing and pushing hardware well beyond what anyone thought it could do. Generally though they would be very focussed on writing a great demo, but they couldn't/wouldn't spend the time putting together a full game - the flashy demo was their goal.

I was a Spectrum games programmer and yes we were pushing the hardware but what I was seeing from the C64 demo scene was on a different level. There were a lot of demo writers pushing the known boundaries with things like multi layer bas-relief scrolling and playing with colours & music. I can't remember their being much of a demo scene for the Spectrum at the time here in the UK.

I worked for Melbourne House in the mid 1980s and they made [Holografix actually made them] holograms of Nazgul to accompany their Lord of the Rings game. I've still got my sample buried in a box somewhere, it's not the full size one but about 1" square but still works pretty well.

These are a couple of links I've just looked up with information about it.

https://tolkienvisualcollectingguide.blogspot.com/2022/09/to...

https://www.mocagh.org/loadpage.php?getgame=lotrgameone

Interesting, so yes it does seem to be the American term which is now "leaking" into British English.

A few years ago I stumbled across a little museum called Brenzett Aeronautical Museum on the south coast of England. It was ram packed with a varied mix of exhibits, including quite a lot related to bomb disposal, which you tend not to see in the larger and more curated museums. It was also manned by some exceedingly knowledgable and enthusiastic people who were more than happy to chat about the exhibits.

I think it closed for a few years but seems to have reopened. Hopefully it's still got the eclectic collections and the knowledgable staff.

One of the many interesting exhibits was some pipeline and information about Operation Pluto; that was for getting fuel over to France following D-Day.

https://romneymarshhistory.co.uk/pluto

https://www.rmwcollection.co.uk/

https://aviationmuseum.eu/Blogvorm/brenzett-aeronautical-mus...

That was one of my favourite TV series as a kid.

It was still in fresh memory for a lot of people, broadcast 25 years after the end of WW2, I think it got the feeling over very well.

I think this may be a case of language evolving/devolving and quite possibly an Americanism.

I'm British and to me backup means having a reserve or spare ready to use. You have a battery backup on your servers to step in when there is a mains problem, a photographer will have a backup camera, you backup you files regularly etc.

We would call this a reversing camera, for when you reverse your car using the Reverse gear. You can back into a parking space, or even just back up a little bit into a better spot.

One thing I'm seeing which irritates me is people are starting to call backing singers backup singers. They are not a backup the the lead singer, that would be an understudy, they are supporting like the backing on picture.

> but it's exhausting to me. Whenever I come home from a social occasion I need time to recover.

Going to the gym is exhausting, running a marathon is exhausting, spending a day weeding your garden or laying a new carpet could be exhausting.

Usually people feel great afterwards because of the experience and despite it being hard work and taking time to recover from. Parties etc. can be the same.

On a related note here in England we also have the only known reproduction of the Sistine Chapel Ceiling in the world. It's a 2/3rds scale replica in a small plain looking church near Worthing on the south coast.

https://www.sistinechapeluk.co.uk/

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g2j1gv9e4o

https://english-martyrs.co.uk/our-church/visiting-us/sistine...

It's the first time since the tapestry was made nearly 1,000 years ago that it has returned to the UK, they are refurbishing the museum in France I believe. It was a very complex and delicate process to get it here and there was quite a lot of opposition to the loan.

It's also a record of a very significant point in British history, it was the last successful invasion and influenced large parts of our culture, language, and architecture.

There is a BBC documentary covering the move and information about the tapestry at https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/mediapacks/secrets-of-the-...

> residential buildings at the mercy of DC load.

Thousands of people Google "why is my building cold" causing the AI DC to wake up and pump out heat. AI sees the heat and reports "heating is on, you're fine" then shuts down.

They are now stuck in a cycle.

I still use my T61p quite regularly.

These days it's only really a thin client for RDP into work and some admin tools & toys, but the 1920 x 1200 matt IPS screen is unbeatable and the keyboard is still lovely.

> excess heat to be used for residential building heating

In the late 90s I worked at an insurance company in leafy Surrey[1]. I was told that they used to use their IBM mainframe to heat the swimming pool[2] effectively for free; when they upgraded they had to buy and run a heating system for the pool as the new mainframe didn't pump out enough heat.

[1] In England, south west suburbs of London to be precise.

[2] yes it had an indoor pool, badminton courts, outdoor tennis courts and other facilities - a great place to work.

Virgin Media cable user in the UK here.

I had their Tivo box until a couple of years ago when the forced an "upgrade". The new box has uch better hardware but the software was a leap backwards.

Regarding ads, on recorded programmes I can fast forward through them. It's not a direct skip but can jump +30 seconds at a time.

When viewing through any of the channel apps most of them used to allow skipping, but over the past few months it's now blocked on all of them I think. They do tell you how many adverts there are in each block and how long the one is, such as "2/10 29 seconds to go". Unfortunately they don't tell you the total length of the break, some sections are just a few seconds.

I use a similar system. I have paper console tape on each drive and write the date last used on it and also keep a text file log of which drive and when. The backup batch file also writes a timestamp.txt to the root of the drive.

I also have a set I curate and put in with the family & household papers. That doesn't have any of my personal crap, just documents, photos, and family history etc.

Common word in the UK. Basically a tanker is for transporting, a bowser also dispenses. It's usually fuel but can be any liquid, such as water.

> Apparently it could intercept at 65000ft

Reportedly it intercepted a USAF RB-57F[1] at 80,000ft and also did a zoom climb to just under 88,000ft.

https://theaviationgeekclub.com/raf-lightning-pilot-recalls-...

[1] A reconnaissance aircraft based on the English Electric Canberra. NASA still flies a couple of them for high altitude research.

My experience over the years.

Had a Miele about 30 years ago and it was very good. It died when someone tried to hoover up a spilt glass of water and the motor was going to cost as much as a new cleaner.

We've had a couple of Dysons. They are great; they clean very well, the variety of tools is great, and the connectors for the tubes & tools is easy and very secure. Mine were all mains powered.

Downsides to the Dyson is it needed emptying very often and that could also be quite messy. Possibly a combination being good at sucking up, and a comparatively small hopper/"bag". I stripped it down once as it seemed to be struggling to clean as well, the cyclone/jet engine was full of "dust" and some of it was caked on but after a good clean was as good as new.

Now got a Henry. The bag hardly ever needs changing, the cable is very long, and the tube is long. I don't think it picks up as well as the Dyson and the tools are fiddlier to use as they are all just push fit and also don't feel as good quality.

Yes Henry is very robust, can be easily repaired/maintained, and they just work; that is probably why they are used commercially and so well loved. I don't think it cleans anything like as well as the Dyson though.