This all probably sounds nuts, but here are my oil systems:

I wash out and recycle glass jars, but peanut butter jars are difficult to clean and will end up getting fat into the water system. So I keep the peanut butter jars for oil.

I also keep a bendy, steel decorating pallet in the kitchen for scraping out fat from the grill tray and rack. You’re left with some fat that you can wipe off with kitchen paper, which you can also use to wipe the pallet knife. Then washing up liquid and a splash of boiling water from the kettle.

There can be quite a lot of oil in leftover food, like sauces, too. I use a silicone spatula to scoop it off before washing.

Yes, but not just your own pipes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatberg

Thank you. I think the decades-old chemistry-class flashback distracted me from thoroughly absorbing the full post!

Good idea, but apparently not possible: According to Sky News “Mr Steele says he has no means of recouping his costs from UK assets owned by Trump, because the golf courses that bear his name in Scotland are held in trust structures.”

Apple News link

Thank you (4 now added!)

They told me at school that ‘p’ meant ‘negative log’. So ‘pH’ means ‘the negative log of the concentration of Hydrogen ions in moles/litre’.

pH 1 is 1 x 10^-1 (strong acid)

pH 7 is 1 x 10^-7 (neutral)

pH 14 is 1 x 10^-14 (alkaline)

(Chemistry was a long time ago, though)

Yeah…it’s worth checking that your face is centralised.

Last week my wife ran a video call at work with the camera on her cleavage.

I have used OpenOffice on Macs.

Also there are some free Apple apps that aren’t installed by default. (GarageBand and one for making gifs)

That sounds right. I think I remember paying for iWork back then too.

I can’t remember the make but I went to wedding at a vineyard in Surrey…their wine tasted pretty good to me. Also good British wine around the Welsh marches (3 Choirs?).

My Spanish friends don’t believe British wine exists.

Oh, same problem as flammable and inflammable.

Thankyou! I can not stand it either.

Ouch!

I lost about an hour of my life trying to create a historical timeline in MS Excel. Eventually learned this is impossible with dates earlier than 1900.

The roads are only 2 lanes wide in most part of this city, so you couldn’t really have separate lanes there (unless all the traffic only went one way). The tram goes in/out of the city from the suburbs on its own railway line in most parts, so that works well although it was slow and expensive to build. And in the city there are cycle-only lanes but cars and trams share the rest of the road.

But cyclists would still be at risk, even with separate lanes. The two accidents (both a lot of skin grazing and one broken arm) that I know of were when cyclists have turned on/off the tram road to/from a side road and have gone over the track at a very acute angle. That said, both accidents happened just after the tram lines were built, so I think cyclists are able to avoid accidents but just need to be aware of how to cross the track safely. I have cycled there an it seemed pretty obvious how to cross, but clearly not so for everyone.

The best solution would be to have electric buses, but I’ve never heard of them (except for the ones with overhead power that they had in the 1950s). Same environmental benefit as a tram but no tracks to trap cyclists. Routes can be changed, when needed, and breakdowns don’t stop the flow of other trams and cars.

Oh, and two other problems with the tram system, at least in this city. 1 it’s funded by a ‘work place parking levy’, as well as the ticket price. So people who can’t use the tram to get to work and have subsidise people who do use the tram. That wasn’t well received. It also creates a lot of bureaucracy for employers who have become responsible for paying for it. The city council claimed that the tram system would still benefit motorists because there could be less traffic. This turned out not to be at all true. 2 And residents who were unhappy about having tram stations (raised roads, booths, lots of people, etc) built outside their homes were told by the council that they should be grateful because the transport convenience would add value to their homes.

We have trams in the city where I work. Two problems have been: 1 cyclists having accidents when wheels get trapped in the tracks 2. Reliability problems because if a tram beaks down the whole line is interrupted.

Is there an option under Preferences… to turn off notifications entirely?

Maybe turn off, shut down Slack and reboot your Mac. Then turn Notifications back on…?

How is it not fit for purpose? You’ll wish you never asked! 🤣

I guess it’s worth bearing in mind that, AFAIK, organisations’ O365 suites are in part bespoke so things that are bad at one company might be just to do with its specific implementation. But this is part of what makes O365 bad: if you need to find out how to get something to work, the on-line help is often useless, because it won’t apply to your own company’s set up. E.g., menus & buttons might be different.

OneDrive is probably the worst offender. Here are problems that I’ve noticed, or heard about:

1. General MS problem with characters in file names—i.e., files won’t sync them until you’ve worked out which file needs to be renamed. There’s no built in renaming tool, which I imagine is pretty easy to implement. But the bigger problem is that I’ve been in the situation where I’ve had to retain and share original documents, for quasi-legal reasons. I can’t change anything. The workaround I have to implement is to zip the original file and name it something that OneDrive likes.
2. Many people in my organisation work on projects with people out of the organisation. It is possible, though not easy, to achieve this; but sharing ceases after a few weeks.
3. Apparently, OneDrive has problems with subfolders: they disappear!

I’ve used several other cloud services which don’t suffer from any of these problems.

SharePoint:

1. Sharing is confusing. I’ll often receive links to Office documents that don’t have the right permissions, or somethings failed. Lots of emails get sent from recipients to sender asking them to fix the permissions so that they can do their jobs.
2. Excel in SharePoint is really poor. Many important desktop functions are missing. Worse, filtering and sorting operates on the SharePoint document, not on the specific user’s view of it. This has created problems where one person filters an Excel spreadsheet so that they can process things for their job and this means that another person, with a different role, can’t see things that they need to for their job. Some people download the Excel file to work on locally, then edit the SharePoint version, as a workaround; so that defeats the whole point of SharePoint.

Teams

Perhaps not-fit-for-purpose is an exaggeration; but these features are, at least, inconvenient.

1. Often poor quality, video; often with cut outs.
2. You are muted, by default, on joining. This makes sense for big meetings; but it happens even on one-to-one meetings.
3. Excessive power use. My laptop needs to be plugged in to use Teams and it’s the only time that the fan kicks in to keep it cool.
4. You can’t mark a message as unread & pinning is not salient. So if you read a message that you can’t process at the time, it’s easy for it to get lost in the swamp.
5. New messages, within a Team, are not indicated at the top level. You need to go into the individual Teams area to see if anyone has contacted you there.
6. You can’t use Teams on Safari—I think that this is something to do with the security settings+weird things that Teams want to do.
7. As with OneDrive, using Teams with people out of the organisation is not straightforward.

Outlook

1. As with Teams, new messages that are sent to subfolders are not indicated at the top level. This means that you either need to keep the uppermost folder open, defeating the point of sub-folders; regularly check; or miss emails.
2. The mail rules are useful, but there are some important Boolean operators missing so you often can’t get them to work in quite the right way.

Oh, I didn’t know that.

It threw me when I first heard it. Present and future tense all in the same sentence!

Yeah we have the whole 0365 package at work. It’s just not fit for purpose.

Teams also worries me in that it’s incompatible with Safari’s security settings. I don’t fully understand what that means it’s doing but MS’s fix is to turn them off. Great.

Nah…that’s not unique to Wales.

”where you to, now?”

“I’ll be there now, in a minute”