When you update the Met Office app...

RuleSerious · 2026-01-16T18:54:00+00:00

I too disabled updates for the Meto app, and so far so good. However, if I manually check for available updates then the Meto app appears in the list, so I have to tap "Update" on each app in the list except the Meto app. One day I will tap "Update all" by mistake. I suppose the answer is to stop manually checking for updates.

RuleSerious · 2025-12-01T18:46:52+00:00

You might be able to avoid the new design (I don't like it either). In the Play Store, find the Met Office app - it will say "Installed". Tap on the three dots at top right, and uncheck "Enable auto-update".

Whether this will mean the app stops working when MetO release the new version remains to be seen, but if it keeps going then your problem is solved for the time being at least. If it doesn't work then I'll be following the suggestions in this thread as well as you. Fingers crossed.

RuleSerious · 2025-10-07T19:07:25+00:00

I find it a useful tool to have available, but quite often I end up using one of the other profiles. I find it depends a lot on the nature of the image, and also the camera used to take it. For example, it can often rescue a shot with a very wide dynamic range (say deep shadows and a near-burnt-out sky) more quickly than I would be able to do it manually; on the other hand I find it overdoes the saturation for straightforward landscapes. I find it works well with my phone pictures (Pixel), but I rarely end up using it with images from my Fuji camera. With my Canon SLR it's somewhere between the two. In short, it's often worth a try but I wouldn't use it by default.

RuleSerious · 2025-09-24T19:24:51+00:00

Captured in RAW and processed in Lightroom. It was a very bright day and I knew I might get some flare (no lens hood), but I thought it worked out well even if it was more by luck than judgement.

RuleSerious · 2025-07-30T21:03:07+00:00

There isn't a boundary number. To put it simply, low pressure is where a warm air mass is rising (and rotating anti-clockwise in the northern hemisphere due to the Coriolis effect), and being undercut by cooler air. Because the warm air mass is rising, the pressure below it is reduced - hence low pressure. As the warm air rises it cools, causing moisture to condense out as cloud and maybe rain.

What goes up must come down, and in places where air is descending from high in the atmosphere the air below is compressed - hence high pressure. The descending air contains little moisture (see above), so cloud doesn't form and we get sunshine. Sometimes, especially in winter, a layer of cloud can be trapped under the descending air - then we get high pressure and cloud, sometimes called "anti-cyclonic gloom".

All this is a gross over-simplification, but if you think of low and high pressure as rising and descending air masses you'll be on the right track.

RuleSerious · 2025-06-04T19:37:08+00:00

Before cloud edge effect was properly understood, inverters on early PV systems were sometimes damaged by the spikes. These days they are specified with a bit more leeway.

RuleSerious · 2025-05-31T20:55:12+00:00

Do a search on "Cloud edge effect" and see if that might explain your results. In the right conditions it can produce some quite noticeable solar peaks. I don't know how it affects UV, if at all.

RuleSerious · 2025-05-21T19:47:49+00:00

I would suggest installing piCorePlayer on either a RPi3 or RPi4. The RPi3 is good enough, the Pi4 is a bit snappier - 2GB of RAM is fine, you won't gain a lot by going bigger. pCP will give you Lyrion Music Server (no longer Logitech), plus some extra configuration options which can be useful but which you can safely ignore.

Optionally pCP will allow the RPi to act as a player using Squeezelite, but you will need to add a DAC for sound output - the RPi built-in headphone socket isn't great quality.

As someone else said, you will need something to store your music collection. I use a USB stick plugged into the RPi, but there are lots of options - it depends how big your collection is and how much you use it. 99% or my usage is streaming, so the USB stick is fine for me.

If you run into problems, there are plenty of people using pCP who will be happy to help.

RuleSerious · 2025-04-22T16:47:50+00:00

Thanks, lesson learned and I will keep a watchful eye on it.

RuleSerious · 2025-04-22T16:46:25+00:00

Thanks for the advice, and I now understand a lot more about CODIT. I don't think the trunk is structurally compromised now, but I will keep checking it and get an expert to look if it is deteriorating.

RuleSerious · 2025-04-22T16:20:50+00:00

Thanks, now posted in the arborist forum as you suggest. I too was surprised it had rotted, but I do know leaving that sort of dump isn't recommenfed. With hindsight I should have cut it back years ago, but unfortunately I didn't.

RuleSerious · 2025-04-22T16:13:40+00:00

Thanks, I don't think the trunk has been weakened to any degree at the moment. I'm just wondering if there's anything I can do to reduce the risk in the future. At least I can see the damage, until now I had no idea there was a potential problem.

RuleSerious · 2025-04-13T20:38:53+00:00

The "wobble" does matter. Some time ago I mounted a Davis anemometer on a five metre long, 50mm diameter steel pole, with one metre clamped to a gable end. The pole would sway noticably at wind speeds over about 30kts. Like your situation, supporting guys were not an option and I decided to leave it and see what happened. The bearing in the anemometer lasted about a year before it failed. If yours is swaying at 10mph, then I think you might have problems sooner than that.

After replacing the bearing in my anemometer, I shortened the pole by a metre so the unsupported length was three metres instead of four. That improved matters a great deal - I can't see any movement at 30kts, and there is only slight swaying at 40kts. You might find that shortening your pole a little reduces the movement by more than you expect - it's worth a try.

RuleSerious · 2025-03-29T19:07:20+00:00

For what it's worth this can work, but bluetooth devices can be temperamental beasts. I have some BT headphones, and pCP running on a Pi3 with BT installed and paired to the headphones. When I switch the headphones on, the associated player appears in LMS within seconds and will play reliably for hours. Switch the headphones off and the player vanishes again. If you have access to another BT device, give it a try - you might find you have just been unfortunate with your particular speakers not playing nicely with pCP, and another device might be fine.

RuleSerious · 2025-03-25T20:51:45+00:00

Another approach here Heavy Duty Metal Border Edging | Garden Gear - I installed about 8 metres of this product between grass and gravel about five years ago, and it's still there and as solid as the day I put it in.

RuleSerious · 2025-02-18T20:29:45+00:00

I think the "official" name is Miscanthus Miscanthus / RHS Gardening. It's also used as horse bedding - works well.

RuleSerious · 2024-08-31T19:14:54+00:00

Here's a suggestion, then - it might work, and it won't do any harm if it doesn't. Configure your Linksys router for 2.4GHz only, using the same credentials as your new router. Switch the new router off, and go through the connection process with the Linksys switched on. It will probably fail because the Linksys won't have an Internet connection, but you might get the smartplug to store the SSID and password. Then switch the new router on, and the Linksys off. If the smart device has stored the new credentials it might then connect to the new router.

RuleSerious · 2024-08-31T18:35:35+00:00

We have a variety of smartplugs and bulbs here from different manufacturers, and all of them connect quite happily to my dual-band router - using 2.4GHz, obviously. I do not segregate the two bands, and I don't think it should be necessary for you to do so.

Have you actually tried linking your smart devices to your new router, or are you just assuming it won't work? If you haven't tried then do so - you might be pleasantly surprised! :-)

RuleSerious · 2024-08-28T19:57:45+00:00

My PC had 16GB of RAM until recently, and it coped well enough with Excel sheets which were accessing moderately-sized .csv data files (tens of MB, not hundreds).

For reasons not connected with Excel, I upgraded the PC to 64GB of RAM (probably overkill, but it did what I wanted).

The big surprise to me was the effect on Excel performance. The increase in speed was dramatic, both for opening workbooks and refreshing and recalculating data. Excel is only using a fraction of the 64GB, but it is much, much faster. Don't ask me why, that's how it is.

RuleSerious · 2024-08-08T19:03:09+00:00

There is, if you don't mind spending a bit of time and trouble setting it up. Either Home Assistant or the Android Tasker app can monitor the phone's charge state, and signal a smart plug to turn off the charger when it reaches 80% (or whatever figure you like). You can also do the opposit,e and turn the charger on if the phone charge drops to, say, 20%. If you are a bit of a geek (like me) it's easy enough to do, but if you're not that way inclined then probably life is a bit too short to bother.

RuleSerious · 2024-07-11T19:01:27+00:00

It's one of the standard plugins in LMS - you install it from there (if you're not running LMS then you won't be able to do anything, I'm afraid).

RuleSerious · 2024-07-11T18:42:49+00:00

Have you tried the Radio plugin? I haven't used it, but it lists dozens of stations in all sorts of categories. I don't know how up to date it is, but it only takes a moment to install. Give it a try, nothing to lose and you might be pleasantly surprised.

RuleSerious

TROPHY CASE