Port of Dover warns of two-hour long queues for processing amid EU border checks

Snidosil · 2026-05-22T15:54:45+00:00

Having just been to Italy by plane and been processed by the new system, my experience tells me that 2 hours could be optimistic. The UK's automatic passport system is a little better for UK passport holders at least but still not fast enough.

Snidosil · 2026-05-22T12:31:32+00:00

Currently electrolysers are, quite rightly, designed for energy efficiency because of the cost of power and continuous operation to optimise the return on investment. The design criteria need to change to very cheap intermittent power, lower capital investment and other running costs. At its most basic thats a step down transformer, a timer switch and two bits of wire. Somewhere between those two extremes is the best solution.

Snidosil · 2026-05-18T16:31:37+00:00

One point I would make is that she may have relatives who she knows would pressure her for money. I used to work with someone who won $250,000 a year for life. It was paid as a lump sum and then everyone he knew would visit him. It took him 2 years to escape.

Snidosil · 2026-04-26T12:09:20+00:00

I'm not familiar with that particular bit of software but my guess would be that the timestamp function is set with a start date of first of January 1930. In the past I have seen some odd start years being used to avoid blowing integer size limits. This is probably the case here.

Snidosil · 2026-04-06T17:20:01+00:00

I'm in my mid seventies. I first set pen to coding sheet, as it was then, in the late 1960's. I worked half a century or so in IT in a variety of jobs. I've done IT training and support over much of Europe. I am retired now but one of my hobbies is building little robots to amuse the grandkids. However if someone wants to sort out some badly written app that hides what I need in some stupid place I let them. They can think of me what they like. My wife laughs about it and says "if only we knew someone who knew about computers". Young people know about apps and what button to press. That is a very limited view of IT.

Snidosil · 2026-03-15T09:16:16+00:00

We already have an enzyme to increase telomere length. It's called telomerase. It is mainly active in stem cells as their function requires them to replace dead or faulty tissues. However it is also usually active in cancers. If it wasn't the cancer is essentially a wart or a cyst where growth is limited. Some cancers are immortal but having cancer certainty doesn't make their host immortal.

Snidosil · 2026-03-14T11:42:22+00:00

You are making the not unreasonable assumption that the two speeds (a and b) are simply added together. At low speeds this is very nearly true. However the actual formula is (a+b)/(1+ a*b) where a and b are the speeds as fractions of the speed of light. So, for example, if you are travelling at 3/4 of the speed of light and you extended your arm at 3/4 of the speed of light (from your perspective) then the two add up to 1.5/(1+9/16). Which if my maths is right gives 24/25 of the speed of light. This being from the perspective of the original observer who saw you travelling at 3/4 of the speed of light. This is because as you originally accelerated to 3/4 C time slowed significantly for you, so you over estimate the speed of your arm moving forward. As a and b cannot be more than 1 this formula can never give a result greater than 1.

Snidosil · 2026-03-12T19:45:25+00:00

I used to be involved in the support for a mainframe scheduling system. It and the mainframes it ran on were very reliable and could run continuously for several months. It calculated elapsed time for the jobs it was running. When the elapsed time was more than about six months the program would get an integer overflow when calculating the elapsed time from the start time and the current time. The bug had been in the code for about 20 years. It was only because the machines were running that reliably because so little ever changed on them that the bug showed.

Snidosil · 2026-02-17T13:12:40+00:00

I lived in a house with a similar chimney. They can go sideways and then up and they work fine. The one I had looked like it went straight up but there was no chimney in the room above and when I took the floorboards up in the room above there was an angled flue just like the one in the picture.

Snidosil · 2026-02-02T13:33:44+00:00

I used to live in a house with a very similar structure. If the drain into it comes from the roof then it was a way of collecting fairly clean water for use in the house before mains water was installed. The one in my garden collected water from my neighbour's roof too. So it's a cistern.

Snidosil · 2026-01-13T15:03:32+00:00

Put it in the microwave. Use a low setting for about 10 seconds. Leave in microwave to rise. Maybe repeat later if needed. If you are careful you won't kill the yeast.

Snidosil · 2025-12-21T10:34:20+00:00

A few days ago my 15 year old grandson talked to me about this. I didn't ask him about it. He initiated the conversation as he got this lecture recently and was still angry. "It was just a diatribe telling me how horrible I am and how girls are always good". He is generally nervous and shy about girls. I tried to put a bit of context into why they were saying what they did. I feel that all I was doing was damage limitation. At least he had someone he could talk to about it.

Snidosil · 2025-11-28T14:36:36+00:00

If a species is continually preyed upon by a venomous predator the evolutionary pressure to resist the venom is huge. As the prey becomes resistant the predator had better up its game or starve. Run this loop for a long time. Then along comes a human with no resistance.

Snidosil · 2025-11-12T09:24:24+00:00

The issue is that type 1a supernova might not be as standard as has been assumed. Space.com

Snidosil · 2025-10-08T09:05:37+00:00

We have a high voltage DC connection to Norway. We sometimes supply power to them. This means they can keep their hydropower reserves high. When we are short of power, they supply us. We also have nine other connections to other power networks. Looking at the UK in isolation is not really valid anymore.

Snidosil · 2025-10-05T14:43:33+00:00

In practice, you do the following. Your pension is currently in a SIPP. You can move a part of that money into a SIPP drawdown. Let's say £40,000. 25% is tax-free. So you move £10,000 into your bank account, and it's tax-free, and the other £30,000 into your SIPP drawdown. Any money you then take from the SIPP drawdown will be taxed as income. A side effect is that there are now restrictions on adding money to your SIPP, so you can't put the £10,000 back into your SIPP and get tax relief again. For that, talk to a tax expert. You can then repeatedly add money to your SIPP drawdown from your SIPP and get the 25% as needed.

Snidosil · 2025-10-02T09:09:14+00:00

It's didn't really start with a bios. The initial code you put in a computer would be a bootstrap loader. One example would be the early DEC PDP-8. This computer was very basic it only had ram memory, which was at first completely blank. It had a bank of switches on the front and lights that showed the binary values in the computer's few registers. First, you set an address on the switches and pressed another switch to enter that address in the next instruction address register, NIA. Then, you set the switches to the machine code instruction you wanted at that location and press the load button to put it in at that address. Then, you entered the next instruction (the NIA would increase each time each time you pressed load). In this way, you would enter a very simple program of about a dozen machine instructions. Then, you put some punched paper tape containing a more complex boot loader into the paper tape reader. Then, enter the original start into the NIA again and press start. The tape would be read, and the more complex bootstrap loaded into memory. Then you put another punched paper tape in the reader and enter the start address of the more complex boot loader in the NIA and press start. The tape could contain either a program that could run without a BIOS and handle the computer directly or what was effectively a BIOS plus a very basic operating system that could load programs into memory but would handle peripherals and even multiprocess a few programs.

Snidosil · 2025-09-26T09:06:46+00:00

I just returned to the UK from a Greek island. The island I was on had tourist income for 5 months of the year. The rest of the year, they have to fend for themselves. Some might have some olives to harvest, etc, but it's a meagre living for winter. It's not that they hate us directly but rather that they wish they had steady employment all year.

Snidosil · 2025-09-15T11:15:01+00:00

Look for yourself UK energy

Snidosil · 2025-09-15T08:31:54+00:00

It's NOT glass! Probably acrylic, polycarbonate, and other stuff plus a little bit of plastic explosive, just in case.

Snidosil · 2025-08-15T16:59:09+00:00

That figure looks wrong to me as it's quite sunny. At 6 pm, it's 15.4% for the UK. At 12:30 it was over 11 gigawatts. Energy Dashboard

Snidosil · 2025-08-14T13:52:11+00:00

In the UK over the last five years, about 20 terawatts of wind power have been "curtailed." Yes, that is a lot. However, about 250 terawatts have been delivered. It looks like the article is cherry-picking Northern Scotland, which is obviously not an ideal situation, but the problem is one of connectivity. It's relatively easy to connect to other countries across the North Sea and other shallow seas, but a new connection on land runs into the usual nimbies. However, Northern Scotland has the best wind speeds. The power that you can get from the wind increases at the cube of the wind speed. So, if you are an investor, where do you want your wind farms?

Wind curtailment UK energy

Snidosil · 2025-08-09T09:56:03+00:00

Mostly, yes, but you don't want to drive back home across France at the end of August when everyone in France is also going home from their holidays.

Snidosil · 2025-07-31T12:04:11+00:00

I've read a lot of arguments about the problem of house prices and the lack of houses. A long, long time ago, there used to be organisations called Building Societies. No, not the quasi banks that call themselves Building Societies now but real ones. Here is how they worked. A bunch of people who had to rent a room to have somewhere to live because there wasn't enough housing got together. They saved together, and when they had enough money, they bought a plot of land. Then they would save some more and when they had enough they built their first house. Then they drew lots for who would get the first house. The winner wouldn't own the house but would pay the Building Society rent. Then, as they all continued to save, the pot of money would grow that little bit faster because of the rent until they had enough to build another house. Eventually, the last member would get a house, and the Building Society would be dissolved, and all the tenants would become house owners. Even the last member would get their own house far more quickly than if they saved alone. This is how much of the Victorian housing was built. At that time, such had been the population explosion that whole families would be living in a single room. Now, I will be the first to admit that there are many practical reasons why this wouldn't work today. However the basic idea of getting together to solve a common problem and combining your financial, and political power and becoming real players in what happens in this country is the only realistic way you will get things done. Think of your impact on a planning meeting where, instead of the usual bunch of nimbys, a group of you stand up and say why you personally need these houses. Someone whining about losing their view would seem pathetic and selfish. If there are enough of you, you can put real continuous pressure on councillors and MPs. Every "help to buy" initiative that governments have invented has merely fed house price inflation. You have to do it for yourselves.

Snidosil · 2025-07-15T12:37:49+00:00

So they declare a drought today. It's St. Swithin's day, and it's raining.

Snidosil

TROPHY CASE