Used to work with an Australian woman who described her headlights as on full beam on a cold day in the UK

Yes, I think the US pint is 16 Oz (2 cups), whereas the UK pint is 20 Oz (4 gills).

See what you mean: the Yamaha Revstar doesn’t have Yamaha on the headstock, but does have the tuning forks.

But other Yamahas don’t have the tuning forks but do say Yamaha. Eg. https://uk.yamaha.com/en/products/musical_instruments/guitars_basses/el_guitars/sg/index.html

I think there was a period, pre Revstar, when motorbikes had the tuning forks but none of the Yamaha guitars did.

Yamaha makes lots of other musical instruments too.

The thing that puzzles me is that the Yamaha logo, 3 tuning forks, makes sense for instruments that you tune. But I’ve only seen it on their motorbikes.

I encountered something like this at work. It wasn’t pass related, it was just a means of getting people to make text responses. Ampersands were replaced with some gibberish format, which annoyed everyone.

I got some kind of explanation from our tech people, which I understood to mean that ampersand was used to indicate that what followed was live code. Turning the ampersand into gibberish text was a safety measure to stop mischief.

I’ve noticed ampersand replacements in some news feeds too

Yes, that’s true. Keychain Access helps a lot.

My understanding is that your GF will be using Apple’s KeyChain, which is pretty good except that it’s hard to look inside and manually edit. It’s not just in Safari.

The upcoming Password app is just a nice user interface to KeyChain. So no change to the functionality as such, but I think it’ll make a big difference to how it’s used.

This has changed since I did biology. I remember:

I (interphase) Pissed myself At Tracey’s

…same feeling about Shottr for the Mac. It has much nicer editing features than the standard Mac system and you can add extra screenshots or files.

https://shottr.cc/

My student accommodation had cockchafers. The university didn’t believe us until one of my friends presented them with one in a matchbox.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cockchafer?wprov=sfti1

It would be more efficient, for researchers and for funding agencies, if the dice-rolling occurred first.

And titles (e.g., Miss, Ms, Mr, Mrs, Dr, Prof.) aren’t used with only the first name.

(Though the BBC likes to do this with their ‘celebrity’ doctors).

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

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 don’t like it either but I just remember D for despatch.

What I struggle with is the inconsistency in Zoom shortcuts in Apple apps.

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.

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.