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I think I buried the lede, as they say, in my original post as a few people seem to have overlooked it so I'll quote from it and emphasise the relevant section: Additionally, he had a young dog - unlikely he walked very far. It's open country to the south and east - 6 miles to Painswick, the...

Good idea, but no temporary buildings yet other than a set of a portaloos. I did pre-empt this one in my original post, there's nothing newer than the 80s in the immediate area and the nearest estate that could be remotely described as "new" is about 4 miles away. The 80s estate has a specific...

Thanks all for the replies, I will try to reply thoroughly tomorrow. Actually, I didn't recognize the breed. It was light-haired, quite young looking but already almost as large as my adult Beagle who is actually on the large side for an English Beagle, think a small Harrier. Looked stocky-ish...

A few days ago I was walking my dog, along a footpath that we often take. I have never seen anyone along this footpath, it is quite out of the way and people seem not to use it. This has always been the case; for 20 years or more, I have used this footpath and never seen anyone else using it...

Nothing but nightmares for the last few days. One particularly unsettling one where I was looking out over the city, it was dark but warm like a summer night and although there were no people all around was a noise of what seemed to be birdsong, very loud coming from nearby and the distance at...

Ah I see, I misunderstood and thought it had been killed. Though I don't imagine the fly spray was particularly good for its long term health!

Ah poor thing, it was just being social and welcoming, you didn't have to have it murdered by your heavy. I like spiders, I can't say garlic has much effect on the thousands of spiders in our shed which is storing last year's garlic crop in several strings. We have probably a 400 heads of garlic...

It is interesting that it has descended into theft and violence. Normally increased demand triggers new suppliers to enter into the market, as described in the article Mr. Mburugu removed his tea plantation in favour of avocado orchards a few years ago. Still, interesting to see the knock on...

Interesting timing given the tense situation on the Russian and Ukrainian borders at present.

In England, too. I created a Ha-Ha once, just a little one at the end of a garden, raised up the end of the lawn so that it optically blended with the fields beyond and made the boundary fence invisible. Two years later a new housing estate was approved on the fields beyond :hahazebs:

Fresh blackcurrants in summer are delicious, especially with a bit of vanilla ice cream. They don't seem to travel that well though, hence their near total unavailability in supermarkets. Can't beat Ribena, still my favourite blackcurrant drink.

That's a pancake anglais, not a crêpe. The American pancake has more in common with a drop scone than a pancake, the pancake should be as you describe.

The Centennial light is very dim, Trev. One of the things I like about the LED bulbs is that they are bucking that trend, the lifespan is much higher than the old filament bulbs. But don't let evidence (anecdotal or otherwise) get in the way of a good moan. I too channel Victor Meldrew...

The filament ones are pretty low impact environmentally, just glass and metal so not really too worrisome for the environment. The low value of the materials make recycling cost ineffective though they are largely recyclable. The compact fluorescent (CFL hereafter) contain mercury, necessitating...

100 hours? That'd be very short, even an incandescent should last 1,000 hours or so. Modern LED bulbs should last 10,000 hours or better. I fitted long life LED bulbs in 2014, they're still fine now. My lamps are on a timer from 4pm to midnight meaning an 8 hour per day service. That makes...

Personally I would only eat them with fish and chips. I do like them though. I don't think they fit the definition of foods everyone likes though, I know lots of people who hate them.

I also have a HP OfficeJet printer. I rarely have any problems with it but I use Linux (Debian). The HP OfficeJet series has a variety of methods of connecting to your PC. It can use your wireless network, its own wireless network (to which your PC will connect), wired network e.g. over...

Just came across a good one: Alfred Breed was a horticulturalist who bred vegetables (to create new cultivars) the most famous of which being the Kelsae Onion.

Haha beat me to it, came here to see if anyone had posted that yet. Good old Irving Finkel, always such a colourful character.

Fine, but articles published to rubbish his reputation can be held to a reasonable standard too.

I notice that they focus on denigrating his work by association: published in the wrong kind of journal, that "leading academics" have refuted his work. They go on to say that his work has "questionable analysis of Y-DNA and mtDNA" but don't elaborate on why his analysis is questionable. I...

Yes microplastics are a serious issue. The marine conservation society is lobbying washing machine manufacturers to fit filters, I think that is probably the best approach. I do agree many people are unfortunately wasteful of clothing, just chucking it in the bin rather than finding out how to...

Hmm. I have a pair of Craghoppers trousers from 2011. They are 100% synthetic. They've also been in near constant use since 2011, more than ten years. In the same time period I have had about 20 pairs of cotton walking trousers. Not only do those cotton ones last less long but they are also...

EnolaGaia, I wouldn't trust anything written by Gloucestershire Live since about 2010, or I would certainly suggest taking their articles with a large dose of salt. Gloucestershire Live is nothing more than the ghost of some very old and prestigious publications, the Gloucester Journal (1722 to...

Doesn't surprise me. When it's been rainy for a few days I often see snails on the outside of the window of my home-office. It's upstairs. Snails and slugs are surprisingly good at climbing up walls.

According to the 1904 OS 25-inch (c1:2500) map of the area, it was once a quarry.

In my experience over about 25 years in my house, it has hugely reduced after we started very deliberately ignoring all and any strange phenomena (anything occurring inside or the house, garden and close by). We still experience some strange things from time to time but when I first moved into...

Don't talk to it, these things seem to feed on attention. I have found ignoring all odd happenings to be the best approach. This seem to be the case in your experience too as the atmosphere normalised after you began to talk normally and calmly. I have not posted about my haunting publicly...

Great post! Very evocative. That doesn't sound that minor of a haunting all things considered.

There's a lot of petrol related posts in the natural gas thread, perhaps these could be moved across to the appropriate thread.

Yes, that is what EnolaGaia was quoting but it is nonsense. It won't do any harm following that instruction but it doesn't make it true either.

I know you are quoting their instructions but this part is nonsense. USB plug and play uses a device and vendor ID system that the OS uses to fetch the driver. The device and vendor ID is transmitted in the handshaking process, the OS then checks if it has an appropriate driver and/or downloads...

I use Firefox and I don't have to log back in after closing the browser. Sounds like some sort of misconfiguration specific to your particular device.

The bonewell is near the ruin of Richard's Castle, itself west of the modern village of Richards Castle which is on the border of Herefordshire and Shropshire, south of Ludlow.

Perhaps that one is more luck of the Irish? :-)

You aren't wrong Cloudbusting: every individual device will have its own IP address (or even more than one) but your router will mask this. IP addresses come in two general types, public and private. The public ones are getting scarce (so many devices online) so your router is usually only...

I wasn't suggesting this was a Tolkien edit rather perhaps a later editorial choice by a publisher. Since length and verbosity has been brought up a couple of times, I'd like to say that in my opinion nothing in LotR strikes me as excessively long or verbose. If the poetry is not to your taste...

So, inspired by the resurrection of this thread, I am now re-reading Fellowship again and I am wondering if some editions omit some of the poetry. The copy I originally read as a child was a 1950s or 60s edition (might have been a first edition, come to think of it) but nowadays I read a reading...

Aragorn just hands them some swords on Weathertop in the film.

Trouble is you can hardly have the Barrow Wight without Tom Bombadil to rescue them (or another intervention in the story to erase the need for him) and if Frodo and co can defeat a Barrow Wight then why not the Ring-wraiths that pursue them in Bree. It would damage the sense of suspense, while...

There's a lot of dog theft stories doing the rounds in these parts too. An elderly relative of my other half is frightened that her Labrador is at risk. I pointed out that the only dog thefts locally that have been reported in the media are of puppies and young dogs (1 year old pedigrees etc)...

It is the combination of pressure and the provision of an easy way out (pay with vounchers you can buy virtually everywhere). Stick and carrot, oldest motivational trick in the proverbial book. Sadly not everyone thinks things through, and even the most cautious person can be overwhelmed when...

That was a very thoughtful reply, @Endlessly Amazed, thank you. I am in the UK, and the OU is the Open University, an alternative way of taking higher education courses in the UK. Truthfully the course fees are not really the problem, though they have been going up a lot, but I have suffered a...

I sometimes idly fantasise about committing a minor offence so I can go to prison and get the university education I never had a chance to have. When they announced this thing about breaking travel rules being a 10 year prison sentence it was my first thought! I have been saving up to do an OU...

I could read at an early age. Also this business of not being able to remember really early stuff, well I very clearly remember when my mother and I found an abandoned kitten on Christmas Eve. He was in a brown cardboard box in a public telephone box. I remember being distressed that he was...

SZ, regarding your kitchen tile incident, I agree that the logical explanations offered earlier are likely. It has been remarked, however, that renovations and changes often precede reports of poltergeist-type activity. Of course, it is to be expected that altering any space will also alter the...

These sound very much like vardøger experiences, particularly the ones where your wife thought you had arrived early. If you search this site for that term you should see plenty of similar accounts. I am fascinated with such events though I have only experienced a handful of those kind of...

Great account of a weird set of events! This sparked off something in my memory. About 20 years ago I kept losing a particular mobile phone, though I would usually find it had slipped out of my pocket and I would find it if I retraced my steps. The odd thing was that it was quite large and...

Unicode: universal encoding scheme Encoding: how the computer knows what character to display, encoding schemes ranging from the old Morse and Baudot to the newer like ASCII (well, it is newer than Baudot!) and UTF-8 all work on the same basic principles Emoticon: a smiley character like this :)...

Just tried to use a unicode emoticon in a post but it didn't make it to the published post. As XenForo supports full unicode I suspect this means that the forum's database tables are using an encoding that doesn't support full unicode, probably MySQL with utf8 - for full unicode support the...