The really boring and totally pointless snippets thread IV

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Ex-Ascot
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Re: The really boring and totally pointless snippets thread IV

#12221 Post by Ex-Ascot » Mon Nov 11, 2019 2:48 pm

This robbery thing is getting more intriguing. Just had a phone call from a lady friend here who says she had a phone call from the security guy who found our passports because her phone number was in my passport. Impossible, maybe Mrs Ex-Ascot's note book. Anyway we meet with him on Wednesday. Perhaps all will be revealed.

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Re: The really boring and totally pointless snippets thread IV

#12222 Post by OFSO » Mon Nov 11, 2019 2:53 pm

Works for all payments made in any country I visit on one bank account located in middle of Europe. ( Guess !) Always receive one time pin. Also works mostly in any country on UK banks a/c. YouGov HMRC one time pin also works anywhere...
But again if phone and card are stolen together you are f*cked. My phone app has a 'lock bank card' button. Same applies.

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Re: The really boring and totally pointless snippets thread IV

#12223 Post by CharlieOneSix » Mon Nov 11, 2019 2:58 pm

Rwy in Sight wrote:
Mon Nov 11, 2019 2:30 pm
However now you mentioned it, I don't know if the single use code is visible on a locked screen.
The single use code comes in as a text so is visible on a locked screen.
Rwy in Sight wrote:
Mon Nov 11, 2019 2:30 pm
C16, I am not sure I understand the issue here. Let's suppose someone finds your cc details and make a purchase. At the last part before he concludes the transaction he needs to insert the PIN sent to your mobile which they can't access even if they steal it from you. What's the point then?
As far as I am aware the one time code can only be used for online purchases. I suppose the fraudster is gambling that the card issuer is one of those who haven't yet set up the single use code system.....but using the old way of confirming an online purchase how would the fraudster know the 3 digit number on the back of the card anyway - the card is still in my possession.
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Re: The really boring and totally pointless snippets thread IV

#12224 Post by Rwy in Sight » Mon Nov 11, 2019 5:14 pm

CharlieOneSix wrote:
Mon Nov 11, 2019 2:58 pm
Rwy in Sight wrote:
Mon Nov 11, 2019 2:30 pm
However now you mentioned it, I don't know if the single use code is visible on a locked screen.
The single use code comes in as a text so is visible on a locked screen.
Rwy in Sight wrote:
Mon Nov 11, 2019 2:30 pm
C16, I am not sure I understand the issue here. Let's suppose someone finds your cc details and make a purchase. At the last part before he concludes the transaction he needs to insert the PIN sent to your mobile which they can't access even if they steal it from you. What's the point then?
As far as I am aware the one time code can only be used for online purchases. I suppose the fraudster is gambling that the card issuer is one of those who haven't yet set up the single use code system.....but using the old way of confirming an online purchase how would the fraudster know the 3 digit number on the back of the card anyway - the card is still in my possession.
One more thing: On Android you can arrange what is seen on a locked screen - on my mobile you can only see "C16 sent you a text message".

For the second part - it has been some time since I bought something online and I don't remember the 3 digit number on the back of the card being asked.

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Re: The really boring and totally pointless snippets thread IV

#12225 Post by Ex-Ascot » Mon Nov 11, 2019 5:15 pm

Must have about 400 pelicans just fly in. Bit of a problem with an African Tree Squirrel nesting under our floorboards upstairs. Think we have managed to poison her and I have just extracted the nest with three youngsters just days old in there. Threw them into the bush. Will not survive the night. What else can one do? Folk who do not have thatched roofs think we are unreasonable with resident squirrels and rats. We do not wish to share the house with them.

These pelicans are being very noisy. Imagine the sound of 800 big wings hitting the water to attract the fish.
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Re: The really boring and totally pointless snippets thread IV

#12226 Post by Fox3WheresMyBanana » Mon Nov 11, 2019 5:35 pm

One of the locals here informed me that a squirrel took up residence in his sister's car engine bay. Bill for $2,000 for rewiring. My former neighbour's house burnt down, traced to an electrical fault in the roof area. He informed me he had heard squirrels up there starting the week before. He was not insured.

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Re: The really boring and totally pointless snippets thread IV

#12227 Post by Ex-Ascot » Mon Nov 11, 2019 5:57 pm

Fox3WheresMyBanana wrote:
Mon Nov 11, 2019 5:35 pm
One of the locals here informed me that a squirrel took up residence in his sister's car engine bay. Bill for $2,000 for rewiring. My former neighbour's house burnt down, traced to an electrical fault in the roof area. He informed me he had heard squirrels up there starting the week before. He was not insured.
Fox, they are absolute bastards. The only thing that they are good for are snake spotters. They go crazy when there is a snake around and follow it from the trees.
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Re: The really boring and totally pointless snippets thread IV

#12228 Post by llondel » Mon Nov 11, 2019 6:01 pm

They keep the dogs occupied, too. When one runs along the cables strung behind the house, the dogs cheer it on.

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Re: The really boring and totally pointless snippets thread IV

#12229 Post by Fox3WheresMyBanana » Mon Nov 11, 2019 6:33 pm

From a couple of days ago here
viewtopic.php?p=201302#p201302

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Re: The really boring and totally pointless snippets thread IV

#12230 Post by TheGreenGoblin » Mon Nov 11, 2019 6:39 pm

Squirrels, terrible alcoholics, always drinking beer.

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Re: The really boring and totally pointless snippets thread IV

#12231 Post by ian16th » Mon Nov 11, 2019 8:19 pm

Perhaps, like many sensible citizens, you read Investor’s Business Daily for its sturdy common sense in defending free markets and other rational arrangements. If so, you too may have been startled recently by an astonishing statement on that newspaper’s front page. It was in a report on the intention of the world’s second-largest brewer, Belgium’s InBev to buy control of the third largest, Anheuser-Busch for $46.3 billion. The story asserted: ‘The [alcoholic beverage] industry’s continued growth, however slight, has been a surprise to those who figured that when the economy turned south, consumers would cut back on nonessential items like beer.’

‘Non what’? Do not try to peddle that proposition in the bleachers or at the beaches in July. It is closer to the truth to say: No beer, no civilization.

The development of civilization depended on urbanization, which depended on beer. To understand why, consult Steven Johnson’s marvellous 2006 book, ‘The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World.’ It is a great scientific detective story about how a horrific cholera outbreak was traced to a particular neighbourhood pump for drinking water. And Johnson begins a mind-opening excursion into a related topic this way:

‘The search for unpolluted drinking water is as old as civilization itself. As soon as there were mass human settlements, waterborne diseases like dysentery became a crucial population bottleneck. For much of human history, the solution to this chronic public-health issue was not purifying the water supply. The solution was to drink alcohol.’

Often the most pure fluid available was alcohol—in beer and, later, wine—which has antibacterial properties. Sure, alcohol has its hazards, but as Johnson breezily observes, ‘Dying of cirrhosis of the liver in your forties was better than dying of dysentery in your twenties.’ Besides, alcohol, although it is a poison, and an addictive one, became, especially in beer, a driver of a species-strengthening selection process.

Johnson notes that historians interested in genetics believe that the roughly simultaneous emergence of urban living and the manufacturing of alcohol set the stage for a survival-of-the-fittest sorting-out among the people who abandoned the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and, literally and figuratively speaking, went to town.

To avoid dangerous water, people had to drink large quantities of, say, beer. But to digest that beer, individuals needed a genetic advantage that not everyone had—what Johnson describes as the body’s ability to respond to the intake of alcohol by increasing the production of particular enzymes called alcohol dehydrogenises. This ability is controlled by certain genes on chromosome four in human DNA, genes not evenly distributed to everyone.

Those who lacked this trait could not, as the saying goes, ‘hold their liquor.’ So, many died early and childless, either of alcohol’s toxicity or from waterborne diseases.

The gene pools of human settlements became progressively dominated by the survivors—by those genetically disposed to, well, drink beer. ‘Most of the world’s population today,’ Johnson writes, ‘is made up of descendants of those early beer drinkers, and we have largely inherited their genetic tolerance for alcohol.’

Johnson suggests, not unreasonably, that this explains why certain of the world’s population groups, such as Native Americans and Australian Aborigines, have had disproportionately high levels of alcoholism: These groups never endured the cruel culling of the genetically unfortunate that town dwellers endured. If so, the high alcoholism rates among Native Americans are not, or at least not entirely, ascribable to the humiliations and deprivations of the reservation system. Rather, the explanation is that not enough of their ancestors lived in towns.

But that is a potential stew of racial or ethnic sensitivities that we need not stir in this correction of Investor’s Business Daily. Suffice it to say that the good news is really good: Beer is a health food. And you do not need to buy it from those wan, unhealthy-looking people who, peering disapprovingly at you through rimless Trotsky-style spectacles, seem to run all the health food stores.

So let there be no more loose talk—especially not now, with summer arriving—about beer not being essential. Benjamin Franklin was, as usual, on to something when he said, ‘Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.’ Or, less judgmentally, and for secular people who favour a wall of separation between church and tavern, beer is evidence that nature wants us to be.
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Re: The really boring and totally pointless snippets thread IV

#12232 Post by OFSO » Mon Nov 11, 2019 8:50 pm

But beer is a name for an enormous spectrum of drinks, some so unalike that an alien landing on this planet and ordering a pint would not believe they are the same. IPA, Guinness, Heferweisse, Laager, Bockbier.....

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Re: The really boring and totally pointless snippets thread IV

#12233 Post by Fox3WheresMyBanana » Mon Nov 11, 2019 9:27 pm

Tea also works as a means of water disinfection, and is the reason Tokyo became the first city to reach 1 million people, and why the rich in London didn't die off whilst the poor beer drinkers survived.

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Re: The really boring and totally pointless snippets thread IV

#12234 Post by ian16th » Mon Nov 11, 2019 9:59 pm

Fox3WheresMyBanana wrote:
Mon Nov 11, 2019 9:27 pm
Tea also works as a means of water disinfection, and is the reason Tokyo became the first city to reach 1 million people, and why the rich in London didn't die off whilst the poor beer drinkers survived.
Surely its the boiling of the water to make the tea, that kills the bugs?
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Re: The really boring and totally pointless snippets thread IV

#12235 Post by TheGreenGoblin » Mon Nov 11, 2019 10:00 pm

ian16th wrote:
Mon Nov 11, 2019 9:59 pm
Fox3WheresMyBanana wrote:
Mon Nov 11, 2019 9:27 pm
Tea also works as a means of water disinfection, and is the reason Tokyo became the first city to reach 1 million people, and why the rich in London didn't die off whilst the poor beer drinkers survived.
Surely its the boiling of the water to make the tea, that kills the bugs?
ian16th, I am apt to go with your thesis! ;))) Boiling water will do for cholera and most other pathogens... but not all.
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Re: The really boring and totally pointless snippets thread IV

#12236 Post by Fox3WheresMyBanana » Mon Nov 11, 2019 10:17 pm

Yes, of course, but who on Earth drinks plain hot water?
Answer: the English before tea arrived, according to Asterix in Britain ;)))
asterix-brits1.jpg
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Re: The really boring and totally pointless snippets thread IV

#12237 Post by ricardian » Mon Nov 11, 2019 11:36 pm

This afternoon my cleaning lady reported seeing signs of mice under the kitchen sink at chez Ricardian so I put down a trap baited with peanut butter. So far it has caught three mice in quick succession. It's been reset once more and is back in place under the kitchen sink. I think that this cold snap has driven them to be more adventurous, they live in the walls and I often hear the noise as one trips and drops several feet, bouncing off various obstructions in the air gap; quite unnerving until you get used to it. I never use poison as I'd hate for an owl to eat a poisoned mouse and thus succomb
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Re: The really boring and totally pointless snippets thread IV

#12238 Post by llondel » Tue Nov 12, 2019 12:11 am

We just unleashed the cats. A few dead mice in the shower (very considerate cat[*], made it easy for us to clean) and the rest just vanished.
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[*] actually, I think she'd somehow discovered that they couldn't escape up the side so she got to play with them before the final crunch.

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Re: The really boring and totally pointless snippets thread IV

#12239 Post by TheGreenGoblin » Tue Nov 12, 2019 1:12 am

Fox3WheresMyBanana wrote:
Mon Nov 11, 2019 10:17 pm
Yes, of course, but who on Earth drinks plain hot water?
Answer: the English before tea arrived, according to Asterix in Britain ;)))

asterix-brits1.jpg
French and Italians who had summed up the silly English even as Concorde was still flying!
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Re: The really boring and totally pointless snippets thread IV

#12240 Post by Fox3WheresMyBanana » Tue Nov 12, 2019 1:24 am

My first winter here, I had mice living in the space between the floors. Every now and then, one would tumble down the vertical heating ducting with accompanying noises. I found their main entry point the next Spring so have stopped that problem, but they still occasionally find a way in. I have also used peanut butter with success, but mainly use cheap processed cheese, as they seem to prefer that to any decent stuff. My former neighbour's cat still inhabits the area, and without a guaranteed food source has now stepped up his mousing. Mickey's mates have been pretty rare this year.

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