JamesF

Fascinating project.  I shall follow your progress with interest.

James

1 hour ago, neil phillips said:

This thread will just go round in circles.

Crop circles?

James

1 minute ago, Jonesdee said:

must be aliens 

I reckon you're right.  They're all over the place at the moment.  We've had Martians parked in the orchard for the last month and the Jovians have only just left the guest room.  We won't be having them back.  They made a terrible mess.

James

Fantastic build, and I also love the artificial grass

James

Large roundabouts such as those at quiet motorway interchanges are excellent for practising "getting one's knee down" on a motorbike.  A friend told me.

James

Perhaps we're all expecting a bit too much.  My daughter tells me that Brian Cox and cosmology featured heavily in her Ethics and Philosophy A Level class today.  Most of the students are not studying physics as far as I'm aware.  I feel it's probably a good thing that they're being exposed to the ideas.

Meanwhile, I'm still trying to get my head around Kant, Descartes, St. Anselm and the Ontological Argument for the Existence of God because my daughter is confused by it.  Perhaps the BBC could find some other presenter to do a series on philosophy that philosophers might think is rubbish, but I might be able to cope with.  It could even involve lingering shots gazing off into the distance from a mountain top because I feel that's the sort of thing that philosophers should probably do.  Is Helen Czerski free?

James

36 minutes ago, Zermelo said:

"a handful of"

That one is particularly irritating.  Whose hands are we supposed to use for this?  Has the recipe-writer not noticed that there's quite a lot of variation in hand size?

James

3 hours ago, vineyard said:

Exquisite.  Parts of Pickering's Triangle look like a Marvel female super hero descending with arms raised. And the delicate thin strands (from middle stretching down to 6oclock, 5 o'clock) 👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾!

I was just thinking that if the image is rotated 90° clockwise, I see a mermaid swimming on her back, with a large wave about to break over her

James

My wife has cooked meals a few times recently where the recipe called for "a bunch of spring onions" (salad onions in Left Pondian, as far as I'm aware).

How much exactly is "a bunch" of onions when I go out to the veggie plot and pick them?  And if I go out and pick two bunches (whatever that is) and then put them together, do I now just have one bunch?

James

1 hour ago, Stefek said:

The components that are used nowadays in consumer electronics are quite generic.  Sensors or other components are sometimes selected on quality and marked "scientific" or "military" or sometimes "industrial" grade. In such case the manufacturer using such graded components would not miss to claim that with bold letters in their marketing materials. Have to admit that I did not see much of that in marketing messages of usual camera suppliers. Makes me thinking that in fact they are all the same if coming from the same source. Of course could be wrong , but so far did not see much of proofs ....

It doesn't necessarily have to be that some vendors have improved the spec from standard

Other possible modifications that occur to me are the quality of the TEC and fans, what coatings are used on the windows, and the amount of RAM provided for buffering (I'm sure I've seen similar cameras where that is different).  There may be other types of changes too that don't relate to the materials but to the processes.

It's just impossible to be certain when looking at these cameras that we're comparing like with like.  Equally, we can't be certain either that the vendor isn't just setting a price that they think the market will bear.  Or perhaps Touptek charges different vendors different amounts depending on what they think they can get away with.

James

9 hours ago, Stuart1971 said:

Risingcam / Touptek are one of the original manufactures of this camera, and Altair Astro and Omegon and other dealers use this camera with there own name on it, other than Touptek it’s only ASI and QHY that build there own cameras with this sensor…so don’t think you would go wrong with the risingcam version…

I certainly would but it rather than the Altair version which is almost double the price for just having Altair Astro etched on the side….👍🏼

I would be wary of suggesting that all the Touptek-sourced cameras are 100% identical.  I don't know if they all are or not, but I am aware that when setting up a deal like this it's often possible to, say, require that the components meet a certain standard.  So it may be that different companies are actually selling something that looks the same but isn't internally.  I'm pretty sure for example that the Mallincam cameras made by Touptek use a higher grade of sensor than is standard for those models.

It seems to be the same with all sorts of products made in China.  I recently bought a chipper for shredding stuff that wouldn't go through our little electric "garden shredder".  When researching possible candidates I found perhaps as many as ten different versions of what was basically the same machine sold by different vendors at wildly different prices.  The basic machine was clearly the same in all cases, but some had electric start and some were pull-start.  Different vendors used different engines (eg. a genuine Briggs & Stratton vs. one of several Chinese copies of it), the emergency stop mechanism was slightly different on some, as was the design of the output chute.  The stands varied slightly in design and so on.  From 20m away though, they'd all look pretty much identical bar the paint job, and in fact the video demonstrating assembly of the one I bought in the end (it arrived in a crate) actually used a machine produced for an entirely different vendor.

None of which means that if people are happy with what they're getting for the price they're paying that they should buy something different, obviously.

James

10 minutes ago, Laurieast said:

What about roundabouts where they meet up with even-numbered 'A' roads 🤔

Drivers at the front of the queue have to stop and draw straws to see who gets to go first.

James

22 minutes ago, Louis D said:

You're kidding.  There's no consistency, and yet they're pronounce the same?

Steady!  Or I might have to go to the kitchen and pare a pair of pears.

James

Can we go back to driving on the left yet?

James

1 hour ago, michael8554 said:

I vaguely remember hearing that now we've left the Common Market (that's what we joined, but like a virulent virus it mutated into the EU), some weights and fluid measures can revert to Imperial ?

It would now be possible to change the law such that products could be sold using imperial units as the primary measure, though actually I believe it has always been legal to display measurements and pricing using imperial units as long as the metric version was more prominent and that metric units were used for making the necessary measurements.  So for example I have always been able to sell honey in 1lb jars, but I'd have to weigh it out as 454g (or whatever the correct number is if I've misremembered) when filling the jars, and 454g would have to be the most prominent weight on the label.

However, given that few people under the age of sixty have ever been taught anything other than metric units at school, I'd be inclined to describe such a move in terms that would be highly likely to contravene the CoC in any number of ways and none would be complimentary.

James

Where accuracy isn't absolutely required and because I find it awkward to use fractions of an inch smaller than quarters, I occasionally find it convenient to combine metric and imperial at the same time.  So I might measure something as "sixty-eight inches and four millimetres" for example.  I'm quite comfortable with this, possibly as a result of being taught only metric at school whilst having parents who habitually used imperial.  I don't know if my dad used metric at work (he worked in engineering at the time), but at home his lathe was imperial so that's what I was exposed to.  Even now I have my own (metric) lathe, I'm not sure what the modern equivalent of "taking another ten thou off" is.

James

1 minute ago, johninderby said:

A wrench on the works just doesn't sound right. 😁

An idiot in the works certainly does though

James

Of course in British English, "spanner" does have another meaning along the lines of "idiot".

James

57 minutes ago, Louis D said:

Spanner has at least one specific usage for spanner wrenches with pins on the ends for rotating round retaining rings with holes in them.

That sound like what I would call a "pin spanner".

58 minutes ago, Louis D said:

Just like no one here calls flashlights torches.  Torches have actual flames coming out of the end.  I have no idea what Brits call the latter.

"A torch", probably   Without looking anything up in a dictionary, I'd suggest that in British English "a torch" might be any hand-portable source of light, whether flaming, (other) chemical, or electric.

James

Oddly enough, this morning I needed a spanner for a somewhat corroded bolt that might have been 13mm or possibly ½" AF.  Fortunately I have a set of  these, so I didn't need to work out which.

James

54 minutes ago, Zermelo said:

Give me any thread subject, and I guarantee to (mis)direct it eventually to Doctor Who ...

https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Trap_Street,_London

I feel like a proper Doctor Who geek now, because I knew what that was without needing to follow the link

James

1 hour ago, Tiny Clanger said:

When I was small , I thought my Yorkshire born & bred gran was calling people (affectionately) a silly monkey when she said what sounded to me like  'Daft apath ' , but later I realised it was a contracted version of half pence worth , ha'penny worth , (h)aypath ! 🙂

My (Lincolnshire born and bred) dad still does this

James

Some sort of aircraft?  Given that it is a bit wobbly, perhaps a small aeroplane or helicopter?

James

Or perhaps not.

I'm a night-time person.  Really, really definitely a night-time person.  Left to my own devices, my natural "going to bed" time could quite happily slide around to the point where it's actually starting to get light in the (southern) UK summer.  Which sounds great for astronomy.  But in a piece on the BBC website it reports on research that "owls" have higher rates of depression, anxiety, diabetes, cancer and heart disease than people who identify as "larks".  And apparently the good news doesn't stop there either, with "owls" being more likely to be unemployed, underperform at work and have to retire early due to disability.

So if you're struggling to stay up as late as you'd like on those rare occasions that the clouds part, maybe it's not such a bad thing...

James

20 minutes ago, Paul M said:

We need a good, local supernova to burn all this cloud away. So what if it takes the atmosphere with it? Think of the dark nights and excellent seeing ..

Irradiating the planet would probably solve a lot of the climate change issues, too

James