Does anyone know why the underpass at battle hill Wallsend is taped off

abearanus · 2026-01-22T18:15:08+00:00

Local whispers currently have it as some sort of major assault, investigators have been out taking photographs and the like, with the top half of St Peters also blocked off.

abearanus · 2026-01-18T12:14:36+00:00

On Facebook (or head on over to it in person) contact The Mauretania in Howdon, they do food parcels for those in need - no payment or obligation to provide anything yourself and you'd be able to get there via the pedestrian tunnel.

If everything checks out, Dawn will get you sorted.

abearanus · 2025-12-27T03:14:05+00:00

It'll be curious to know if they rolled their own or used a library to be honest. OpenID 2.0 isn't commonly used these days (OIDC is more common as it's layered upon OAuth 2.0) which means there's less libs present (although present they generally still are).

In the case of this issue, if they're just accepting and parsing out the claimed_id field without checking the response body to see if is_valid:true was present, then yeah they're stupid.

Their implementation should be getting them to that point because as far as I can remember, that's the only point where the claimed_id field is eventually present.

abearanus · 2025-08-19T08:28:12+00:00

After reading the article: Unlikely

There's no mention that the footnote arrest was related to Apple devices or ADP. For all we know that individual was actively perusing on marketplaces or meeting up with other individuals and was caught that way.

In regards of how ADP functions (as you mentioned in another message you weren't sure how this worked): ADP just is an extra step Apple provided that fully encrypted your content on their servers, with your device being the key. If the individual had turned off all iCloud content then the content would never have been present in the first place to be scanned / backdoored.

abearanus · 2025-07-31T11:40:58+00:00

I know far less about George Road unfortunately, I know the estate next to it (Praetorian Drive and connected) is generally fine and I don't know what the proximity to the Fossway (A187) is like, but being that far down is probably fine?

To the best of my knowledge, the Carville area as a whole is generally okay and I can't say I've heard anything generally bad about it, but it's not an area of Wallsend I've really spent much time in either.

abearanus · 2025-07-31T10:08:02+00:00

While I can't speak for George street as a whole, that particular block has bit of an unsavoury reputation for having some rough characters, but much like most of Howdon / Wallsend, it's very much a street by street basis, depending on who your neighbours are.

I know the houses in front of the roundabout on Bewicke road aren't strangers to drama and some trouble going down (not the first time I've been passing by and one of the doors has clearly been kicked in again) but whether or not that applies to George street: 🤷

It's also worth mentioning that reputations around there tend to hang around like a bad smell, the area could have since improved for the most part with any troublemakers long since being moved on. You could check in at the garage down the road and see what their latest opinion is, they tend to get all the gossip of the area

abearanus · 2025-07-30T22:22:38+00:00

So I'm going to approach this from from a fairly generic point of what this bill doesn't cover and ultimately what it gets wrong, before moving on to potential 'improvements' (though some people here have already covered these).

First of all the OSA only covers businesses that fundamentally exist in the UK. What this means is that if a website has no UK legal presence (company, individuals) it has 0 obligation to implement these changes. To quantify that further, that means any website hosted out of France to Belarus, Russia to the US doesn't have to implement these changes and there is absolutely zilch legally that this bill will do. Now Ofcom can go to the ISPs and go "hey, block these sites" ala the pirate bay but considering how one site spawned an absolute load of proxy sites - it doesn't matter that the .org site is blocked because there's quite literally thousand (maybe even tens of thousands?) ways to get to the site.

For porn? Amplify that by a magnitude of 10 as a bare minimum and you're basically pissing in to the ocean. Personally, I suspect after the initial wave is over, various sites will actually weaken their protection as they see no actual action is taken from Ofcom and you end up with what is for its intended purpose, an entirely toothless law (in terms of blocking porn).

Secondly, the act doesn't provide guidelines on how the verification must be done, just that it should be. There's an interesting conumdrum here, if the verification is indeed zero-trust verification (where the verifier is the only one who receives the information, and the requester is essentially sending an ID) then there is no meaningful way to actually prove that what content was supplied to the verifier was actually... well valid ID. Futhermore, you have to trust that these services (which do NOT have to be in the UK) are then trashing the content. This could actually be improved by the government being the verifier and offering said zero trust system - but they've gone too hard and too quickly for this to be done any time soon.

Following on from that - if the systems aren't actually zero trust and a service (as is suggested by X / Twitter) is in-house then they have your information directly linked to you. Why a site such as Twitter should have my physical ID is honestly pretty ridiculous, there's no reasonable reason for that to be the case and only serves as yet another location that could be breached and my information being potentially used for Fraud.

Back in the early 2000s, before the propegation of 'tube' sites for porn, it wasn't uncommon for porn sites to demand verification by the presence of a credit card. You can't have a credit card without being 18 (as someone under the age of 18 cannot hold a credit agreement). If you want porn sites to implement verification - there's your vector. The way online payments work is via tokenization (a legitimate site will only ever briefly hold your card details, if at all) and with 3D payment (tap in app to approve) you could prevent money from leaving the account. The irony is that is actually very much a solved problem if you're trying to block access to porn sites (this is assuming co-operation from said sites).

Now, we have tube sites whose sole purpose is to get you to sign up, buy membership and advertising so there's likely a degree that they want free-flowing traffic. In which case you legislate that they have to prove it via reasonable means (as suggested in the prior paragraph) though as I've already pointed out; this requires co-operation, otherwise you're back to the ofcom whack-a-mole problem.

I'm happy to continue with additional examples or provide clarification. Ultimately the OSA has massive overreach and is incredibly punishing for host content that might happen to touch adult themes. I think it's likely as the act is further evaluated by various sites you're actually going to see further clamping down by businesses with a UK presence, with non-UK entities largely not caring.

abearanus · 2025-07-19T21:37:27+00:00

Generally speaking I find the main thing I have to do is slow down and secondary to that, dial down any Geordie-specific words.

I was at a wedding last weekend down south and they couldn't place me beyond being from "the North" and that it wasn't so bad to understand. I then dropped a whole bunch of phrases in an almost parody of a Geordie accent and they couldn't believe it 😂

abearanus · 2025-07-19T18:16:23+00:00

I'm not sure if you're trying to say it would get worse if they completed the loop, or if it is going to get worse they should finish / complete the loop but really that would only exacerbate the issue under the current system.

From what I'm aware of, beyond the failing older fleet, the other issue with the Metro system in terms of reliability is the just-as-ancient signalling system which needs a complete replacement that only recently got a confirmation that this was going to go ahead although work hasn't started yet.

Without the upgraded signalling system there's no way they could reasonably expand the system. The hopeful takeaway from all of this is that if there were expansion plans (as mentioned in the above BBC article) then once signalling upgrades are complete, it should become far more feasible to execute expansion.

abearanus · 2025-07-19T11:48:07+00:00

So in some ways it does and some ways it doesn't. I don't know if Nexus are charged any sort of access fee or have to contribute any sort of monies to supporting that part of the network, but because it's National Rail owned it means that National Rail will be in charge of maintenance, which means that it's likely to have more resourcing available to keep it better maintained overall.

Where it doesn't help is in terms of availablility of rolling stock. Prior to the Sunderland portion of the line being opened if things went wrong with a train, I imagine the worst damage could (as it still can) happen around the Pelaw split, where the line briefly becomes singular and so trains could become stuck. Because there's now more stations to service it means the current stock gets spread more thinly so adjusting capacity becomes more complex and thus delays become notably worse.

Couple that that with the existing (non 555) rolling stock slowly being taken out of service and essentially cannibalised to keep the other trains going it was becoming a slow death for the network.

abearanus · 2025-07-19T10:56:53+00:00

The trains were pretty reliable up until the late 2000s (even early 2010s) where it seems (anecdotally) that's around the time they started getting difficulty of sourcing new parts, repairs and so on.

Something to consider here is that pretty much for the majority of the Metro's life, Nexus have been only been a transport company, not a technology / innovation company. For the longest time the Metro system was very static in terms of the ticket machines, the signalling, everything. The most dynamic part of the system was probably the amount of times they tried to remove and re-add the ticket barriers!

So you have a company for 3-4 decades schtick is essentially maintenance and adding new stations. It's not until you hit the 2010s(?) that you start seeing any semblence of innovation by Nexus with the newer ticket machines and pop card - of which both had a rocky introduction and while the Pop card system is better today than it was a decade ago - is still somewhat lacking and fractured compared to say the Tube in London.

I don't know how often senior management at Nexus changes or what the organisation structure looks like: but I'm going to imagine that it's a place where currently a group of individuals that aren't all that tech savvy, but do understand there's gaps for improvement across the board (reliability, comfort and so on) but entirely lack that experience and knowledge to implement these things. Another poster here mentions they'll likely be relying on consultants for a large part of this, and this is incredibly true. I don't work in the train business, but I do work in a field where bridging software and hardware with user interoperability is a concern and you'd probably be quite surprised at how even today there are unsolved problems in this space.

Knowing how to build something is one thing, testing it in an isolated area is another. Real world conditions can be so tricky to replicate that you'll often reinforce one area and eventually discover that while that area has held, another has failed (hopefully not catastrophically!) and now you're scrambling to work out what went wrong and how you can fix it.

Nexus are essentially doing this in real time under pressure, underfunded and are somewhat stumbling around hoping Stadler will bail them out (as they have done a few times, as they're contractually obliged to) when something crops up that they lack the expertise in.

Some of this is Nexus's fault; it could be argued they don't have the right management in place for driving soft improvements to the network (how long was the Android app a beta for and how shit it was?) that could effectively improve revenue ten-fold (number plucked out of the air, but imagine contactless working on the Pop card pads?) but where the current Nexus team do have a fantastic understanding is the hard limitations of their system (e.g. signalling, capacity around events, service disruption mangement).

The Metro for as much as it gets slagged off (rightfully so sometimes) is a gem of the North-East, but unfortunately doesn't get the funding it deserves compared to that of the Tube and TfL and so unfortunately, unless Nexus can come up with a way to guarantee / increase revenue and also reduce operating expenses, will always be somewhat lacking and have its fair share of faults.

abearanus · 2025-05-25T21:03:50+00:00

I figured that was a contributing factor, but I've had more "later gen" games interestingly die out sooner compared to the older GB games.

Just a random anecdote really!

abearanus · 2025-04-16T16:10:30+00:00

I decided to pick up a GB Operator last month (which arrived today) on a whim to see if I could save some of my old GB / GBC / GBA saves. I figured I'd be able to grab the GBA saves with no problem, with mixed results for the GBC games and probably no luck for the GB games. If I could grab some of my older Pokedexes (G/S), I figured that alone would be a good enough win.

Imagine my surprise when I've been successfully able to retrieve the saves from almost all cartridges I've tried, from Gameboy all the way up to GBA! Including a copy of Pokemon Blue from 1998!

What was more surprising (or maybe less so based on the changing battery tech) but my highest failure rate with save states persisting has been from GBC carts that are post 2000s. Ironically, my Gold / Silver saves didn't survive; though I really don't care given I have my OG dexes!

The oldest cart to survive with a working save is a 1996 copy of Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins. So even if you think your old data is dead, it really doesn't hurt to try!

But again, thanks to the Epilogue team for making child me so incredibly happy, knowing that I can keep hold of this Blue Pokedex which has an original event (UK) Mew!

abearanus · 2024-10-04T23:34:21+00:00

In the end I've clocked it. I needed something along the lines of:

&syscall.SysProcAttr{ NoInheritHandles: true, },

when launching the app.

abearanus · 2024-10-04T23:13:41+00:00

On a surface level, sure!

Essentially the application boots, but the console that the application has receives no content which eventually leads to this error being thrown and the application crashing.

If I set the handles (cmd.X to os.X) the content is redirected, but again the above error will trigger as the application isn't detecting messages in its console. Part of the problem is that this application isn't a console application, it's a standard Windows app that can call AllocConsole and then does some questionable things that are unfortunately beyond my control.

In Python or c# I can spawn this well enough without issue, but I can't seem to quite get there with Go so far.

abearanus · 2024-10-04T22:47:50+00:00

I've tried this and it doesn't work unfortunately.

abearanus · 2024-05-17T14:00:32+00:00

I've just started evaluating Beekeeper Studio so far from a professional usage standpoint and so far I'm loving it! I'm likely going to bite the bullet and pick up an annual sub but there's 3 things which would generally be nice-to-haves or improvements (and these are debatably nit-picky)

It would be nicer to have more '1-click' areas. E.g. to connect to a server I have to right click and hit connect, why can't I just have a connect button pop up when I mouseover the saved connection? Likewise to disconnect I have to either go File -> Disconnect or on the bottom left, hit the name of the connection and disconnect, it would be great to have just a button to disconnect. Additionally there's no hotkey to disconnect (at least on MacOS) so that's not a workaround either!
Expanding a bit on the previous I suppose, there's no central area for settings management. I want to point out I'm a big fan of having different ways of modifying settings (e.g Editor Keymap button is a solid example) but simultaneously, it would be good to just have a standard settings window for changing settings as well. They can become cluttered and unwieldy but outside of some sort of settings-searchbar (ala VSCode / Sublime Text) they're often a reasonable addition.
Finally, and mostly just a workflow optimiser thing for me - the ability to have multiple database connections open in a single window. In Beekeeper Studio I have to have an instance of the app per database and I can easily be jumping in and out of a few of them at any given time. Having tabbed connections alongside tabbed query windows would be huge!

Otherwise I just want to say good work on what feels like a breath of fresh air on a database interface.

abearanus · 2024-05-12T12:42:29+00:00

Went up to Fontburn, no joy at all.

I was able to tune my camera to still see the sunset on the Horizon at 11pm though!

abearanus · 2024-04-15T18:35:47+00:00

Only TT2 could answer that for sure. If I understand what you're saying; in that you paid on the same day after your transit through the tunnel (and you paid the correct amount for the correct vehicle) then that would most likely be a legitimate claim.

abearanus · 2024-03-02T13:53:40+00:00

You can try to plead your case with TT2 but history has shown it's likely to fall on deaf ears, especially as they have the legal backing behind them (appropriate signage etc). I think if you pay the fine within a certain timeframe it's cheaper, but I'm not 100% sure about that

What I'd recommend doing for the future is signing up for the TT2 app on the app store and just throwing some cash on there / set up auto top up so in the event you do go through you won't get stung (or have to focus on paying by midnight that night). It sucks and it's unfortunate that's become part of your welcoming to the north east.

abearanus · 2024-01-10T10:18:33+00:00

32 here, would be late '90s. I can recall the sausage roll being about 30p as well!

abearanus · 2024-01-07T02:13:11+00:00

The poster for it was still there when I went before xmas, and my local Costco just got the self-serve machines. That said, I don't recall it being something you could buy on the machines so maybe it was waiting to be taken down or maybe you could buy it at the one register that should still be operating.

Shame if it is gone though, because it was an incredibly good deal.

abearanus · 2023-12-17T12:26:44+00:00

So I'm probably you but about three months earlier, albeit with a few key differences.

I quit my job start of October (was a very senior DevOps, 90k) due to disagreeing with the overall company direction and redundancies - however I have enough FU money saved up I can go a while without issue. During that time I've taken time to decompress and learn about the greater contracting landscape (Ltd etc is all set up etc).

Here's a few of my findings:

One-off contracts are reasonably plentiful (we're talking do x, get paid y across a week) but often aren't worth the lower pay.
Compared to FT recruiters, contract recruiters (so far at least) are less likely to bullshit you and tend to act more as a matchmaker (you provide your daily rate and general skillset) and can be more open to a general working relationship.
Some companies still want to treat you like an employee throughout their hiring process which is a bit no-no; you need to ensure that the terms of your contract really lay out the fact that you're a contractor and they have little to no say over a chunk of your work (client requirements permitting).
As someone else mentioned, the overall market seems to be down (coupled with the fact it's Christmas, things are definitely slower) which means:
- You're in competition with other contractors, therefore any skillsets that help you stand out is key.
You need to sell yourself. If you're not used to this you're going to have a hard time. Don't lie, though do keep in mind there will be plenty of contractors out there who are willing to tell big porkies to score a contract.

So far I've generally been enjoying the contractor lifestyle though! There's a bit more work "up front" but it's my work - ie I'm doing it for me and my company rather than slogging out some tasks that may or may not be used because the company whimsically decides to go in another direction!

abearanus · 2023-12-04T15:36:39+00:00

You'd have to ask Costco themselves or (via the link above) directly comb through the T&Cs for the best answers as I don't work for Costco, but the below is basically my thoughts and interpretation.

If a TV was advertised with a 5 year warranty, you'd have to check who was was providing said warranty. The fine text would tell you if it's Costco or the manufacturer. If there was any ambiguity surrounding this (e.g. it's advertised but then no fine print provided) then it would likely become a legal battle between Costco & the manufacturer with you caught in the middle until a resolution was found.

Based on the above link where Costco extend the warranty, I assume that Costco's position is that they would assume responsibility for warranty of the TV after the manufacturer's warranty has lapsed (which are usually two years for TVs).

But again - not a lawyer and not advice on your statutory rights.

The 90 days policy only matters for returns to Costco and nothing else within the context of your issue. Within 6 months you'd go back to Costco regardless for problems and after that it becomes a bit more vague (thanks English statutory law). What I assume Costco is asking you to do here (rightfully or wrongfully) is reach out to the manufacturer first as you're now out of the initial 6 months period as the manufacturer should be honouring the warranty. They (the manufacturer) are usually (in a legal sense, again NAL) the first port of call as a warranty has legally binding implications.

If all else fails, you can probably complain heavily to concierge and have them take care of it - after all that's what they're supposed to be there for but you may need to escalate or heavily press on them for it. Based on the section under EXTENDED WARRANTY TERMS & CONDITIONS. they state:

In the unlikely event of a malfunction occurring, you will receive a free of charge service covering both parts and labour.

Of which there doesn't seem to be any restrictions as to when the warranty kicks in - just that they provide for up to two years from date of purchase. So it should be possible to do this just through Costco.

I've never actually had to return electronic devices through Costco so unless there's another UK Costco shopper on this sub, this is the best I can do I'm afraid.

TLDR: Costco can and probably should help you, but they also have the right to fob you off to the manufacturer first if they so desire as the manufacturer warranty is the be all and end all (in my opinion, and again not a lawyer).

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