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The many different video clips will provide enough detail for a pretty good analysis of what initiated the explosion and enable any Cubans to be spotted I suspect that the Beirut explosion will form a text-book example for future University Fire Risk courses.
The linked Guardian article shows that the root cause of the disaster was bureaucratic cock-up and inept organisation rather than terrorist conspiracy.
Energy conservation Keith – everything bows to that unless you want to be castigated by the Greenies.
However, surely the easiest way of transferring anything to an SD card on a phone is to remove it from the phone and plug it directly into your PC.
Actually the latest Beeb video taken from a high angle shows lightning flashes in the ‘smoke’ of the initial fire. To me that suggests a very high particle density in the smoke, so grain dust may indeed be a factor. The lightning would also give enough energy to initiate a potent detonation wave.
Stepping through the video, it starts with a ‘normal’ fire in or near the grain silo – no red gases. If that fire caused the release of a cloud of grain dust and glowing particles the combination with the fertilizer prill would be deadly. (the integrity of the fertilizer store must first have been compromised in some way by the first event. (maybe a grain dust explosion).
Add on pigeons as noted by Boris. If they are the problem buy a Nerf Gun and just shoot them. You will not even hurt them with this kiddy-safe toy. However if you combine it with lamping as they settle down early evening to roost they quite quickly look for more friendly and less terrifying roosts. :yahoo:
“feet/crawling.” — almost certainly starlings or maybe sparrows. Mice are quiet except when gnawing. Rats would have left noticeable evidence behind. Squirrels maybe but normally they are very noisy running around the whole loft in the first hour or so after dawn.
Tbh I would not bother with traps. My experience is that SWMBO freaks out when the little bodies are pulled out, and even worse if the trap half kills them and you have to do the duty, but it is 1000x worse if is a humane trap that does not even kill them and you have to drive up to the Moors to (illegally) release them.. Poison is much better as bodies are rarely if ever seen.
However I’m with those who say birds, especially as the noises are from the roof edge. Just try and keep them out as they can be hellish noisy at 4am in the Spring.
Even if you haven’t got vermin it is a good idea to fill any holes inyour airing cupboard just from a heat loss standpoint.
Over the years I have had more than my fair share of noises in the attic.My first response would be to bait it myself.
Unfortunately due to poxy Health & Safety regs amateurs are no longer allowed to buy the very effective poisonous stuff, but Wilco and others will sell you a minimally effective bait. Buy both rat and mouse baits. Put the bait containers near where you think the animal is scratching and inspect it every three days. If the bait is taken, replace it and you will have all the evidence needed to talk to Rentokill etc. If you want to make the bait super-attractive to rodents smear a little peanut butter on the bait, rodents generally find this irresistible (squirrels will go for this as well)
With respect to the cause of the noise. If it is just a light scratching it could be mice, if a heavier scratching then it could be a rat. If it sounds like you have an animal or two racing around your attic then it is probably a squirrel.
Birds can also make scratching noises and you may have starlings setting up a warm winter roost. Look for any holes/tears in the roof lining ‘felt, and if you can see your roof from outside look for any displaced tiles or missing air vent grills in the eaves. I eventually used a small drone to find out where the damned starlings were getting in. (a missing air-vent grill).
If you do have any squirrels eliminate them with extreme prejudice. They may look cute but they can cause £’000s of damage including setting your house on fire. Squirrels have ‘dry’ mouths so they nibble with impunity at electrical insulation. They seem to get a buzz from doing this, as if left on their own it will require a full house rewiring. Call in Rentokill and they will either trap or bait as the Wilco stuff will not touch them.
Do not worry about ‘smell’ from small decomposing bodies, the poisons desiccate them and I cannot remember smell being an issue.
I would not bother about trying to use technology to gather evidence.
It looks a lot like a reprise of the 500 ton Tianjin explosion in which a fuel (acetylene) accidentally became mixed with the fertilizer. Tianjin is thought to have been caused by firefighters at an adjacent fire mistakenly spraying water over calcium carbide containers.
The report that it was a sodium nitrate explosion is definitely not the whole story. Without a ‘fuel’, sodium nitrate is almost completely inert, It is even quite hard to make it detonate using heat alone. However mix it with something like solvents or a flammable gas and it is as dangerous as hell.
Looking at the Guardian clip there is the characteristic orange ‘smoke’ of nitrogen dioxide immediately before the explosion, so sodium nitrate was probably involved but something else supplied the fuel which caused it to detonate.
This article confirms my suspicion that a lot of other things must have gone wrong at the same time.
Thanks but no thanks. I have too much Python code to play with.
Please delete my other posting.
Sorry guys I was in the middle of posting when you wrote your contributions. I will delete my post.
The video of the explosion in the port of Beirut scared the pants off me. link
Purely guessing but it had the appearance of a 0.25Kt bomb blast following a nearby fire. As it was a single blast I doubt if it were a munitions store, but rather an LPG BLEVE (fuel-air explosion). This is the sort of event which gives all fire-fighters sphincter cramp or brown trousers. My thoughts go out to all the families involved as the death toll must surely be in the 100s, and damage to property huge.
The cause of the explosion is unknown at this time, but I suspect cock-up rather than Israeli/US action/sabotage.
btw the satellite view of the port shows what looks like half a dozen LPG 500 tonne spheres
My edit disappeared.
The only reason simpler old code does not compile is that it offends managed code rules or extensions. Try right-clicking on your code and select ‘C/C++ -> Advanced Properties and then Compile As C89 or maybe even C87 if that is allowed.
My #1 son had an excellent book on C/C++ written iirc by an Indian gentleman. However like my own C/C++ books it was written in the days when the only IDE of any account was that of Borland and both C and C++ were a lot slimmer.
Graphics of course were and are a course of study in their own right especially if you add on nVidia’s contributions.
I just read an article that purports to claim that Japan has successfully avoided a lock-down and had very few Covid deaths by them encouraging their citizens to avoid areas where the ‘Three C’s’ overlap.
The C’s are:
a) Confined area
b) Crowded places
c) Close conversation/shouting/singing
For example an in-door basketball match would be a very bad Covid risk area.
A nice simple concept and one we should pick up.
Confusion with symbols often comes because we do not have words for them. (try learning mah-jong tiles without having English words for the symbols.) You could try telling her that the word or sentence for the three dots is ‘continued’ or ‘Press to continue’.
Iirc Americans call it an ellipsis or ‘hamburger’ but to me that is equally meaningless in a menu!
Struct was an old C concept which I guess evolved into the ‘Class’ concept. Iirc I used to use it a lot as a handy way of getting out of a tangle of pointers by defining a pointer to an instance of a structure. (bit like a pointer to a class member). It was also a handy way of compressing info by defining a byte structure with the components made up of yes/no bit fields that in total formed the byte.
Totally off-subject but led there by mentioning compression is this completely zany way of encoding and compressing words into numbers, all one would need to do is to encrypt the numbers to finish with a fairly difficult to break ‘Book Encryption’ routine that would tickle the nerdish fancy of many in GCHQ. (fyi There are ways of moving from Python into C++ especially if you use an Apple.)
It appears that M$ have been slowly switching off the lights on Windows Live Mail. link.
If you need to store your POP mail, you may need to switch to a different program. Thunderbird is pretty good if you install a few addons such as import/export.
[edit] to my post – Dido Harding’s INEPT efforts.
We have seen her lack of managerial ability before at Talk-Talk, but it appears that she still has not learnt any management skills and a review by UCL and the London School of Tropical Medicine have found that our so-called ‘World Leading’ Track & Trace programme is not fit for purpose.
Maybe it is time for her to eat crow and ask the German’s to give us their code for their working Apple/Android app!
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