Member postings for Stuart Bridger

I have a 70 series Fluke handheld, that I have had since the mid 1980's. It is bulletproof in its rubber holder.
The only thing it lacks is capacitance. It gets used regularly. New Fluke pricing is eye watering though. I also have an analogue Avo, which hasn't been out of its case in well over 30 years.
Screwfix have a LAP model for less than a tenner, it lacks a continuity test buzzer but at that price....

Iain, agreed cloud backup is very viable. I use Carbonite to back up my files from my home PC

As "one of the pros" I worked in backup and storage for over 20 years. I would say that home grown backup solutions are not the way to go. This is one time to get in the "pros". As others have said, it needs to be implemented, documented and restore regularly tested. I have too many "war stories" of data loss and inability to restore data when it is really needed. There a lots of network backup solutions out there, but also remember you need copies offsite as well. What if you have a fire? A simple copy is NOT good enough, If you have bad data (virus, corruption, etc) having an exact copy of bad data on your backup drive is not good enough...
Your solution will be determined by two objectives RTO and RPO Recovery TIME and Recovery POINT
The first how quickly you need your data back and the second, how much data you are prepared to lose. I.e. if you backup daily at 7PM, your RPO is 24 hours. The smaller both these values the higher the cost, but this has to be compared against the value of the data.

One of the worst situations I encountered was an administrator who was religiously changing the backup tape every day and putting the tapes in a fire safe. I was called to help to restore data following a disk failure. I test read the tape before restoring and the date on the files was 8 months previous. There was no backup process running on the server. So the tapes had been changed daily, but nothing had been written to them

Not just the fuse rating (100A is normally recommended), but some older buildings have a "looped service". This is where the main incoming supply cabling is daisy chained in and out of properties along the street. This you can tell if you have two big cables coming into the fuse block. If this is the case you will not not be allowed to connect an EV charger until the looped service has been upgraded to a conventional star type feed. This means running in a new cable.

The ideal situation for home charging has to be Solar PV plus a power bank. But how many homes can accommodate this? Suitable roof layout and direction, plus it is a significant investment. It certainly doesn't work for my property. Sucking huge amounts of power off the grid is not attractive to me and if everyone goes that way can the grid support it? I already have a ground source heat pump, which is not cheap to run

Second point is whole life cost of the vehicle. I have an 11 year old diesel Saab. It passes the E5 emissions MOT fine and owes me nothing. I have no plans to replace it in the short term. I generally try and avoid cities. Locally Oxford is so car unfriendly, so I tend to use public transport anyhow (diesel bus??) I know at some time I will have to make a decision, but I am holding off as long as I can.

Last time I got the washing machine warranty call, I decided to play them. Showed great interest and got transferred to supervisor to finalise the contract Then came the key part they wanted my bank details. I say no, I am paying you money, give me your bank details. The guy soon got tired of this and dropped the call.

The Microsoft one can also be fun. Once I told them that I have worked in IT for 30 years. The cheeky scammer then said I should know how serious the problem is.... Either that or play completely dumb. Anything to tie them up and delay calling anyone more gullible

Nottingham Knockers, usually have fake ID and have nothing to do with probation https://www.oprepeat.co.uk/nottingham-knockers/

I agree the voice-over is very poor. What did for me last night was in relation to the Napier Railton.

I will paraphrase "it was a racer and weight was everything, it doesn't have electrics, it doesn't even have ignition,,,"

Still got mine from the late 80's. The plastic clips locking the legs down failed recently, but replacements available at a sensible price. 8

As for the ROHS lead free solder, I have been out of the IT hardware game for over 10 years, but went through the pain of its introduction. The vast majority of the kit we sold ended up getting exemptions as it was intended for data centre use which could be supporting business critical applications. The long term reliability of lead free solder had not yet been proven. Not sure how that has changed recently.

I will have to dig out my apprentice log from my tour of the process shop at BAe Weybridge in 1981. Lots of "nasties". As others have mentioned, Chromic acid, cyanide salts, trichloroethylene vapour phase degreasers, molten salt baths for heat treating aluminium alloys, etc. Cadmium plated fasteners were standard specification back then. All my steel apprentice pieces were phosphated and are still rust free after 40 years.

This is a bit of fun, an web page that allows you to superimpose the ship anywhere on a world map to get the sheer scale **LINK**

Tracy Tools have a good range of threaded shank milling cutters

I am in 100% agreement with everything being said.
"safety" systems like lane deviation, surely i you can't keep between the lanes, you shouldn't be behind the wheel.
My biggest gripe is reserved for multi-function touch screens. With physical buttons, you instinctively learn the location and adjust the temperature. enable demisting, etc without taking your eyes off the road. How do you do that with a touch screen?
I will be hanging onto by 10.5 year old Saab as long as I can.

I would also recommend a gunstock oil finish. I am a fan of CCL products.

I will put my hands up and admit that I am a hi-fi fan. My investment in Hi-Fi way exceeds the value of my workshop.

That said the digital part of the system uses standard Ethernet patch leads costing a few pounds. The argument used for the esoteric USB and network cables is reducing the noise transmission from the digital to analogue domain rather than the quality of the signal itself. I don't buy it and I agree that there is a lot of snake oil in the industry. None of purchases have been made without auditioning first.

The comments about made about no difference between bell wire and a quality speaker cable clearly come from those who have never heard the latter. I will happily admit to spending £40/m on cables and it was the best investment I made, with a dramatic improvement.

I have had friends round (before lockdown) who like music but don't have a quality playback system and they have been blown away by the sound quality.

I started with a 2 axis console and X and Y scales on my Warco VMC. I did miss the ability to set depth. When the console failed I replaced it with a 3 axis unit. Eventually i fitted the z scale on the knee. This made a lot of difference. Ideally I I would like to put a scale on the quill with a summing unit to complete the setup.

Mitutoyo all the way. I started out with a couple of cheap no-name calipers.
They ate batteries. Moving to Mitutoyo means that I don't have to change the battery virtually every time I go into the workshop.

I have had the Vertex VA4 for a number of years and rate it like all the Vertex kit I have.
Nominally a 4" vice with 102 mm width and 103mm opening.

Good overview here Link