[Ed P]

Richard I only cautiously agree with your last post as it verges on ‘nanny statism’, which I abhor. Probably a better way of addressing your points would be to mandate that Insurers use bright red ink at the top of every house policy stating no payout will be made if —-

With respect to insulating a garage door, I investigated this and concluded it would be better to replace the garage door with one that had internal insulation. I had three reasons for this:

a) My old self opening up&over door only used 255 different security codes! Modern ones are more like car locks with resetting crypto, 32 bit codes etc. i.e. the door opener had to be replaced.

b) The task of physically insulating the old aluminium door was daunting in terms of getting insulation to securely stick was to say the least daunting. Due to the paints used on the door it was going to need stripping and sanding before repainting and life is too short.

[edit] I did not look very hard at insulation, but I was considering the insulating blocks as sold by B&Q.

c) Although modern combination plastic-insulation doors are perhaps not as fire-resistant I figured that maybe was the least of my worries as they are normally sized to fit exactly and are made for those who wish to turn their garage into a spare room/storage (not me). I’m very pleased with the result I estimate it raised inside winter garage temperatures by at least 5 degrees and probably lowered house heating bills as a result. I used this company and have no complaints at all.

[Ed P]

Some enforcement on internal conditions can be done by authorities but it is normally done on health grounds. Those targetted are either hoarders or slovenly.

[Ed P]

D-Dan wrote:

So basically, on a desktop system, not worth the effort?

It depends how hard you think it will be, and how important it is to have a secure system. Maybe for the average user a couple of hours would be well spent. From my reading converting a system to uefi is fraught with issues, most seem to advise a clean start.

This comment is made in ignorance of just how hard it is to incorporate uefi in a Linux distro. As to be honest I have never used uefi with Linux. I do not have to take that action, having neither a business, banking or secrets I need to protect beyond the usual off-site backup. In any case setting up uefi with Windows verges on the trivial.

At heart uefi is a low-level security system. I’m afraid that even on Linux the MBR has become almost trivial for script kiddies to attack, of course they have to devise a vector, but unless your Linux is very securely locked down a determined spear-phisher could probably get in and cause havoc.

[Ed P]

Dave, although SSDs are a great help in handling virtual machines, I’ve come to the conclusion that SATA bus bandwidth may be a limiting factor, especially if you have a couple of machines ‘live’ but not necessarily in focus. I’d be interested in your thoughts on adding SATA bandwidth retroactively (i.e no mobo changes).

[Ed P]

For the specific case of Grenville I agree – the Judge appears to be seeking a broad spectrum of evidence and the Inquiry may well result in some meaningful changes.

I’ll reserve final judgement until I see how he handles those responsible for carrying out ‘paper’ studies of materials suitability, and their very evident failures not to pull in high rise fire experiences in the US, Germany and UAE.

[Ed P]

Thanks to all for pointing me in the ‘right’ direction. I accidentally found a counter-intuitive trick in Calc that worked.

a) Select range then use the Data->Text to Columns command in the Data item header.!

This allows you to specify the space between date and time as a delimiter and split the result into two columns. The first needs no change and remains as ‘Date’ but the second new column has to be reformatted as Time. Totally daft but it works and I’ve no idea why!

[Ed P]

Thanks Richard that looks like it will work.

[Ed P]

You will certainly notice, and it may improve your head-banging and Chakras! If you forget to make a uefi bootable stick it will make any system restoration an interesting challenge!

Joking aside, a uefi bios normally allows far more low level configuration of the system and hardware. Whether you will use it more than once I personally doubt, but it does allow you to twiddle around if overclocking or energy conservation are your bag. Above all uefi adds far more low level security and really comes into its own on a lap-top.

[Ed P]

LACORS is a little more fulsome in its guidance (probably due to Local Authority and legal liabilities).

“Class 3, D s3, d2

These include those specified in class 1 with the addition of thermosetting plastics and surfaces covered with polystyrene wall and ceiling tiles.

Not acceptable on escape routes and stairways.

Acceptable in small rooms and parts of other rooms if the total area does not exceed more than one half of the floor area up to a maximum of 20m².

Not acceptable on escape routes and stairways.“

The latter remark underlines John’s wisdom in removing the tiles from his main escape route.

Apparently the fire resistance treatment is effective enough on modern tiles not to exhibit the terrifying results of the past. I have not tried so cannot comment other than pass on a third-party remark.

[edit] Although I recognise that the LACORS guide had to do a cya deferring to the Courts. but I shudder to think about ignorant judges prognosticating on technical issues. Sure they can weigh up evidence but how do they know that they have seen all relevant evidence — they just do not have the training or experience to do so.

[Ed P]

One case I had (a Coolermaster iirc) was fitted with a hot-swappable esata on its top. Although it made some internal plumbing/wiring more difficult it was a huge advantage when it came to organising backups. It was a nice to have plus, as it made sticking in a backup drive an easy routine. It seemed to give pretty much full sata speeds, though I never did a speed check. I do not have it now, and I miss it!

[Ed P]

I agree – unfortunately Windows now adds so many checks on ownership and other flags that copying takes ages to perform. It can get even worse if Windows gets its paws on a network share or even worse an alien Linux or Apple disk (even when just a fat32 directory is being copied) as it seems to delve down and check root ownerships etc. I’ve given up using Windows own utilities.

[Ed P]

Not seen that behaviour. What browser are you using? Maybe your browser does not properly support the latest webm(?). Edge in particular has had reported issues.

[Ed P]

The elder brother of these is called a BLEVE (Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapour — scary as hell for fire-fighters), but I guess a Thermobaric MOAB Explosion (fully mixed fuel and air) releases nearly the force of a tactical nuke so must be a LOT worse!.

[Ed P]

Like Steve I do not understand the need or purpose, but you MIGHT be able to get something out of the Wayback Machine – it is very hit or miss on sites such as MM

[Ed P]

I was brought up in an agricultural area that was infested with horseflies. If you can whack the spot as soon as you feel the stab the resulting swelling is normally quite small – also gives you a chance to stamp on the nasty thing. They hurt as the fly evolved to feed on cows and horses who do not fight back, so they dropped the subtlety and go for the maximum jagged bleed, spit in anti-coagulants and lap up the blood.

Stinging or biting flies seem to show preferences for people, In the UK they all go for me, but in New Zealand I was left alone and my wife was inevitably  surrounded by a large visible cloud of biting sand-flies., black-flies (They also have a painful horse-fly like bite, but pee on the bite to make it worse)

[Ed P]

I hope the future allows a system where everyone does their own thing.

Unfortunately we face an upheaval in the capability of technology that will make the 19th century Industrial Revolution look like a Teddy Bear’s picnic. As a nation today, most of our national wealth is earned in the South East, and most of it through brain power.

Although wealth production may become a bit more dispersed, it will be brain power that continues to earn it. The rest of the population will feed off this through the service sectors etc. Unless we concentrate our limited resources on supporting and growing the future wealth generators this country will slowly slide down to become just a sixth rate tourist spot.

[Ed P]

Sorry I confused you!

Python has a huge number of routines like beautiful soup which are really general purpose programs, very powerful but their names often have no real world meaning. That short script takes the html code for a site and tries to turn it into a form in which data can be more readily accessed.

[Ed P]

Mine is a genuine gmail addy.

[Ed P]

I did not dream up the streaming bit, as that is exactly what China is doing.which means something like 0.5 million/year of highly trained highly qualified people hitting the system every year (I allowed a 50% failure rate).

[Ed P]

If you want to try a bit of Python the following  script MAY help:

# code follows,

#!/usr/bin/python2.7
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

#the above line tells the script is uses python 2.7, you will have to look up how to import beautiful soup and urllib2 for your os

# the next just sets the fonts used

# apologies but  I cannot remember from where this was cribbed

 

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup

import urllib2
url = urllib2.urlopen(“https://address of page you want to scrape”)

content = url.read()

soup = BeautifulSoup(content)

print soup.prettify()

# code snippet ends

[Author]

Posts