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A short story, from the pen of Mr Barry Cryer, about a woman who buys a parrot from a dockside pub and when she gets it home, it won't stop swearing at her. So her husband went to see the landlord to see if he had any ideas... "Every time it swears at you put it in the fridge for ten minutes"...

Similar only in that it was designed to run inside a protective case and not to have folk who should know better playing with them outside of their design envelope. TV: 25KV but at under 2mA - a much lower current and unlikely to kill you. I never worked on colour TVs for exactly this reason -...

"625 Death Due to Fractal Wood Burning: An Emerging Public Health Problem" https://academic.oup.com/jbcr/article-abstract/41/Supplement_1/S158/5776139 Microwave Oven Transformers, aka MOTs, are EXTREMELY DANGEROUS THINGS! The secondary typically produces 2000VAC at several 100mA - the...

I had a rush of blood to my head... We have a nice solid oak shaker-style oak kitchen that is now 20 years old... I've cared for it well, but it's looking a tad jaded. The current finish was most likely an oil of some sort - probably Danish or similar. Stripping it manually would be a massive...

I went looking for a book online...

No disrespect, but I've spend my career in security and technology for banks and hedge funds. In those environments, data on a drive can be worth millions to the right/wrong person. Not only that, but as a CTO I was responsible for the security of that data and were it to fall into the wrong...

It's very tricky to get right. Generally, you need to either physically destroy the drive (e.g. thermite or shredding) or use a vendor supplied tool. As it happens, Samsung provides just such a free utility; Magician https://semiconductor.samsung.com/consumer-storage/magician/ Do NOT trust...

Crucial are the retail arm of Micron, one of the world's largest memory manufacturers. Good company - I've used their products many times and never yet had a failure with either SSDs or board-level memory. Being a bit picky, but NAS just means "Network Attached Storage", a term that in itself...

If your use case is mainly read-only, then SSD choice isn't too critical. Just make sure that your paging & swap files are on an appropriate device, as are any log files & databases that get written a lot (MySql, MariaDB, SQLServer etc.) I should have been a bit clearer about wear levelling...

There's SSDs and then there's SSDs... Without going too technical, it's the WRITE cycles that wear out SSD cells. The internal SSD controller will do something called "wear levelling" (WL). The memory in the SSD will be of two main types: some expensive cells that will take a huge number of...

This is what I did for a big, heavy, wide cellar door... Didn't want the outside edge to ever drop... 3 years in and it hasn't moved at all. In this case the timber is 8x1 rough sawn tanalised with a 1.5cm lapped joint and 3mm gap, so each board can expand/contract as needed. I stained the...

I use Ikea IVAR shelving extensively in the workshops/garage and elsewhere. It comes in two main shelving forms - 30cm or 50cm deep and 80cm wide (40cm wide shelves are also available). Brilliant stuff with loads of combinations and can sometimes be found s/h on Gumtree etc. for not-a-lot. Takes...

The answer (for me at least) is to treat all/most "statements of fact" with a healthy dose of cynicism. The Sagan Standard/Laplace Principle of "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" always seems a good starting point. It's the quality of the "evidence" that folk need to examine...

My issue is really the inabilty of a lot of folk to think critically plus being totally susceptible to selection bias. The need for people to find any reason, however irrational, for almost anything that happens appears bizarre to those who a) have a brain, and b) know how to engage it. They...

Astonishing number of records set today. I'm currently in SW France (Bayonne) but following from here. Possibly a most unlikely victory tomorrow? Fwiw, I used to live in Dubai when Pakistan played their internationals there at the ICC Headquarters in Dubai Sports City. The main olympic pool was...

From WIkipedia: John Lorimer Campbell is an English YouTuber and retired nurse educator known for his videos about the COVID-19 pandemic. Initially, the videos received praise, but they later diverged into COVID-19 misinformation.[2][3] He has been criticised for suggesting COVID-19 deaths have...

A soldier shows up for military training but realizes he forgot to bring his gun. The sergeant hands him a stick and gestures to the training field. "You'll have to use this, soldier. If you need to shoot someone, just aim your stick at them and shout 'Bangity bang-bang'. If someone gets too...

To those complaining about FFX service etc., here's their eBay stats: That's pretty impressive. Over 1 million feedback comments, the vast majority extremely positive. 3.4 million items sold over 17 years makes around 200,000 items sold on eBay each year, let alone what they sold directly on...

For what it's worth, I had a left leg TKR (Total Knee Replacement) a couple of years ago - I know the surgeon as we have a shared interest in restoring old Landrovers... I told him that I wanted my old knee back (a TKR is a complete swap out of the knee joint for a metal or ceramic one - only...