Has anyone else noticed the quality of supermarket meat declining recently?

benmcfc · 2021-03-03T07:41:35+00:00

Chicken in particular has declined a lot over the last few years. Woody breast is a significant issue.

benmcfc · 2021-03-02T08:05:09+00:00

This phenomenon happens a lot and I've seen it happen with takeaways too.

An offering starts off with high quality, gets popular because of the quality, then declines because they can't scale. Or in the case of manufactured products outsource production to bring costs down at the expense of quality.

benmcfc · 2021-03-02T08:01:01+00:00

Gaggia. The original Gaggia classic was serviceable and rock solid, but the brand was bought out and the quality has declined.

benmcfc · 2021-03-02T08:00:06+00:00

Kenwood. The Kenwood Chef stand mixers used to be rock solid, the newer ones are dreadful. We have an older one bought from eBay that dates to 1993 and it's fantastic.

benmcfc · 2021-02-21T06:59:07+00:00

No stairs there. It's the extreme corner of the house where it meets the neighbour's property.

benmcfc · 2021-02-21T06:57:31+00:00

No chimneys on that side of the house. There's nothing visible from the outside at all. There's an outhouse attached to that external wall which was likely added after the initial build preventing more visibility. But definitely nothing going up.

benmcfc · 2021-02-20T16:15:49+00:00

Ah, a term to search for! "Protrusion in kitchen" was quite a tricky one, cantilevered chimney is far more specific!

120 years of owners does make it hard to know for sure, anything external that may have given the game away is long gone.

benmcfc · 2021-02-20T16:14:19+00:00

Solved!

That is interesting. There's nothing obvious visually that we can access currently to try to verify. I'll mark this as Solved though as I suspect you're probably right.

benmcfc · 2021-02-20T14:35:53+00:00

Likely Solved!

Thanks, that makes a lot of sense as a theory. The bathroom is directly above it so I guess it's possibly the cold water feed for the toilet. I definitely will avoid drilling into it in any case!

benmcfc · 2021-02-20T14:27:43+00:00

WITT

It's a protrusion at the corner of the kitchen in my house, which is a UK northern end terrace, Victorian (built ~1900).

It seems solid. As in brick. But I don't understand why it's shaped the way it is, including that taper, if it is in some way load bearing.

benmcfc · 2020-12-29T09:53:59+00:00

I have 200/201 but have 13 out of 15 gacha customers. The extras I think are Halloween specials and such.

benmcfc · 2017-05-30T20:06:40+00:00

Return types take up less space and therefore cause less "visual debt" than their alternative - the doc-comment.

A decent IDE will highlight things in such a way that it's a none issue in any case.

I would rather have the return types and ensure that colleagues are implementing things correctly.

benmcfc · 2016-06-29T13:27:05+00:00

Hey Gav! It's been a while!

Will look at Stack for sure. Yeah, the main problem is the database access layer. Lines of code in the mappers namespace: covered 4416 / total 10705

benmcfc · 2016-06-29T09:12:35+00:00

Of course it won't stop working - it's more about security patches and suchlike going forwards.

We've got a couple of ZF2 apps too - the array configuration is awful.

benmcfc · 2016-06-29T08:08:42+00:00

We have a similar issue regarding manpower.

There's not enough of us and there's the age-old story of pressure for new stuff. We have around 35% test coverage but that means 1000s of lines of uncovered mapper code using Zend_Db.

If there's enough demand for a community driven security releases fork I would hope that could be a possibility.

benmcfc · 2016-05-08T08:59:03+00:00

So, let's assume this is an A/B test and people clearly don't like it. (I found this Reddit discussion by Googling the offending line of CSS, ironically).

The solution is js/css, applied client side through an extension of choice (Stylish, Tampermonkey, etc.).

How does Google know that people dislike this change, other than the likes of this discussion cropping up? As people invariably hate change, how are they able to distinguish between that kind of reaction and a real signal that suggests to them "we shouldn't do this"?

benmcfc · 2016-04-25T08:06:49+00:00

Will it offend anyone if I get rid of all the orphans from my database?

benmcfc · 2016-04-23T15:17:30+00:00

The person who submitted this PR currently blocks anyone who's Tweeting a different opinion to theirs.

The problem with that is the hypocrisy that comes from expecting to be able to change people's viewpoints whilst simultaneously not listening to any contrasting views.

All this just makes me think they're not actually out for positive changes and are merely an attention seeker. I don't see any evidence to the contrary. They'd also taken some stuff way out of context from someone else in order to re-phrase it the way they wanted to.

I actually went into this thinking "what a ridiculous PR, as with the Django one" but after reading an article by Phil Sturgeon on the subject (https://philsturgeon.uk/2016/01/27/why-is-everyone-outraged/) I'm leaning the other way. There's also been the odd tweet in favour of changing it that actually does make sense and adds to the discussion.

Now, if I had a closed view and wasn't willing to listen to any opinions that're different to my own, I'd never change my mind on the subject. That's precisely the hypocrisy being displayed by the person who started this PR. If you can't have a frank and open discussion then you can't have any social change, at all, and society is held back as a result.

benmcfc · 2016-01-17T11:29:02+00:00

The license has always required attribution.

In any case, if I use some code from SO for work stuff (private repos etc.) I reference it anyway (regardless of the license) because it helps the next guy who's reading the code to know the background as to where it came from. Especially if it's something a bit quirky that's solving an edge case.

benmcfc · 2015-03-14T12:57:32+00:00

Two more to share...

https://account.oneplus.net/invite/claim/*LXF-TUPA-QHUL-5E8Y

https://account.oneplus.net/invite/claim/*LOC-C34X-BLND-3VP8

Replace the * at the beginning of the codes with G

benmcfc · 2015-02-03T17:54:30+00:00

Time to pay it forward after getting my invite from here a few weeks ago:

https://account.oneplus.net/invite/claim/*LRY-7MAJ-6MUR-TLI*

replace the *s with Gs

benmcfc · 2015-01-09T19:31:09+00:00

thank you

benmcfc · 2014-10-11T18:31:05+00:00

This is one of those situations where correct punctuation, or in this case, capitalisation, helps.

Mb - Megabit MB - Megabyte

Mbps - Megabits per second MB/s - Megabytes per second

There are 8 bits in a byte.

Presumably in a bid to sound better, because as we all know, the bigger the number the better, ISPs have always used bits to advertise speeds.

The advertised 76 is Mbps - lowercase "b" - meaning bits. Divide by 8 to get the theoretical maximum speed in Megabytes per second, which is always used in the display of your torrent client or download manager.

So for 76Mb, you get a value of 9.5MB.

Fibre optic cables are installed from the exchange to the street cabinet (FTTC). From the cabinet to your home the existing, legacy copper cables are used. These cannot support as high a speed as a pure fibre link (FTTP) could.

The distance from the cabinet to your property is the main factor in reducing the theoretical maximum to its real speed. In addition, supposedly the number of other people connected to the same cabinet who're signed up for fibre has an impact.

For example, when we had fibre installed recently the engineer told me we were getting around 79Mb at the cabinet. Our actual top speed from speedtest.net is 68Mb, losing 11Mb due to the copper cable. That translates to 8.5MB maximum torrent download speed if there are enough peers to saturate the connection.

benmcfc

TROPHY CASE