Episode: 3594
Title: HPR3594: Peely-wally in Edinburgh
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3594/hpr3594.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 02:00:06

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3594 for Thursday the 12th of May 2022.
Today's show is entitled Peely Wally in Edinburgh.
It is hosted by Dave Morris and is about 68 minutes long.
It carries an explicit flag.
The summary is, Brooks and Dave Morris chatting about this and that.
Hello everybody and welcome to Hacker Public Radio.
Now today we're doing another two-part episode with myself and Mr. X.
Hello Dave, how are you doing?
Good to catch up with you again.
It's been a while since we did this one.
I've forgotten how long ago it was.
I was in March, we did it.
I think it was, isn't it?
Yeah, March, actually.
It just whizzes by.
It feels like the last week.
It does and I think at the time we say,
must you're a second part to this and a few weeks,
Tim and it's never happened.
Oh no.
It's the few weeks thing that no one gets here, isn't it?
Things get in my way.
I think there are many things I just know.
The world's so mad and everything.
I'm kind of bad at catching up with people at the best time.
I'm really glad when you do catch up with me because otherwise I just fly by.
I think you spoke caught me.
I can't quite remember, but just on a wee note from the last time show.
Remember we were talking about dampers and stuff.
Remember a bit of dampers for us.
So I had myself, I thought, I'm just curious.
So I did a research on YouTube and in the link in our notes here,
I actually found a rendition of the dampers songs that really did exist.
And I was visiting my mother last night and I mentioned to her about that.
She says, oh yes, yes, yes, yes.
Granny, the song that song.
She says, oh yes.
It's one of the the tamer ones that she used to sing.
She says, yes, I remember some of the other ones.
Oh, so we can share it on the SPL without being marketing.
Oh, yes.
That one's all right.
I couldn't tell you any of the other ones.
Oh, that's good.
That's good.
Yeah, okay.
Well, that's great.
I see it in your notes out.
So I'll add that to the final final show.
Sure, sure, sure.
Yeah, yeah.
It's always good to be able to follow up.
Yeah, I didn't realize it.
I think it came from the second world war.
I think I didn't realize it went that far.
And I didn't know that there's bits of it here.
The song is a very, very simple song.
And then bits of it disappear as you go through the song,
so you'll miss a little bit out.
And you'll miss a little bit more out
until there's hardly anything to say at all.
But I didn't know that.
Yeah, I didn't.
I guess my granny just sang one wee bit of it, I suppose, you know.
Yeah, yeah.
That's the way with family songs and stuff, isn't it?
Yeah, yeah.
My father was stationed in India and Burma during the second world war.
He ended up with loads of weird songs, you know,
like on the road to Mandalay and stuff like that.
I mean, he's just sing it to my sister and I when we were kids.
And that somehow sort of stuck in my head, you know,
all these sort of marching songs and those sort of things.
Oh, right.
It's weird, isn't it?
How you collect these things?
Yeah.
And I get a certain age, a particular age of like a sponge
and just soak everything up, you know.
Yeah, that's right.
And sometimes it surfaces when you don't want it to.
That's right, that's right.
Actually, it was actually a funeral and they were around the table
and one of the relatives was saying, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah,
your mother, your granny.
You know, remember, you should just sing those songs, you know.
And she started talking, I can't remember how it went.
And I really, really can't bring this up at this table big.
It's so, so wrong that I can't possibly know.
I can't remember at all, I had to say, you know,
keep trying to put them on.
Hope, hope, you never, ever remember that.
So, it's really embarrassing.
Oh, yes, yes, yes.
This is a time when it plays, I guess.
It's still, it's easily done.
Indeed, indeed, indeed.
So, you've been having a wee bit of,
I'll see you in your last year,
you've been having a catalogue of computer problems, haven't you?
Yeah, I, yeah.
I don't know, I don't, I'm very good at sort of absorbing
the age of things, you know.
I'd buy a thing and then I assume it's the most important point for ever.
Yes, I'm the same.
So, I, I think I said last time I built myself a PC,
I think it was 2013, so that's a long time ago.
It's nearly, nearly 10 years old, you know.
Yeah, and you think, of course,
oh, I've not had it very long.
How did it break down in your favourite for 20 years or something like that?
Yeah, yeah.
And it had all hard disks in it when I built it.
Not many, don't think.
But I've, I've got the biggest disk I could afford at the time.
And anyway, I've done various jiggling around with it and put SSDs
and this sort of stuff in it.
But, yeah, so I had a, I had a four terabyte disk in there,
which was where my, I put my home disk,
because I'd lost the other, the other disk that I'd had it on a original image.
Right.
Snag it before it completely died.
And so, yeah, so this one is failing.
I need to do something urgently.
The fail messages I get are through smart.
I've got a smart monitor.
I think you were, you were asking about that,
or made a comment about that last time we were talking about it.
I'm running a smart monitor.
I don't remember how I set it up now,
but it's running out of the system D.
Right.
I do remember that, looking at smart,
so I was going to say that,
I think I've maybe said, told this story before,
I'm making it very brief,
but we were in blackpool,
and me and a friend bought a hard disk,
and I may have been a one gigabyte,
so that time was huge.
It was like half the price it should have been.
And, you know, about month later, his failed,
and about a week later, mine's failed.
Her heads failed completely,
but I was able to,
mind on the floor a few times and get it to,
to power back up again and manage to copy this.
Yeah, I was, I was very lucky,
but I think on retrospect what happened was,
it was about the time where smart had just come into fruition.
And obviously, they both reported smart errors.
We wouldn't have smart on our machines,
but at that point,
and they both subsequently failed,
so it just shows you,
but I looked at smart and learning briefly, very briefly,
and I think, you know,
clatty did I show on it,
and there's some command line things you can run,
and whatnot,
but I just wasn't sure how,
you know, normally on a window system,
you have like a window that pops up at the bottom,
and reports and tells you,
reports on your hard drive or whatever.
I wasn't sure how you,
how you would ought to meet all of that sort of thing
so that it would warn you.
Well, that might be a good show.
Yeah, well, absolutely.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I just set it up.
I can't remember where I got the information from to set it up,
but maybe it was kind of too show,
but triggered me to look more into it or something.
I can't remember,
but I've been running it for years,
and these two incidents have been both alerted by smart,
and I get a pop-up window that says,
you know, this is looking a bit to Yucky,
or, you know,
a little too many retries on it,
or we're unable to write to a sector
or something of that sort.
That's right.
You get quite a detailed breakdown,
and you also see stuff in D message
if you go and look.
That's right.
But yeah,
it's the way that I spot an error coming up,
and that's the point of which I,
but in this particular case,
copied my home directory off it to another disk.
Right. Right.
Because I think I've got, I mean,
it's a second hand,
a Dale OptiPlex 780,
I think I just couldn't label here,
but it was a second hand office machine
that I got online cheap,
and it's just a pretty low-spec thing,
and I think I took the hard day with my old computer,
and I did that to have two drives sitting on it,
and God knows how old they are,
and yeah, whether they're lucky or not,
I mean, it keeps working.
But I think I like about it,
it's lovely and quiet.
I could really do with adding some more RAM to it,
I toyed with that,
and that would make a big difference,
I'm sure.
And I mean, I have no,
because everyone's now using these,
what do you call them, flash hard drives.
You know, I'm spinning rust disks,
I've got you in here, so.
Yes, yes.
I've got a mixture of them,
because I bought SSDs,
as the prices began to drop,
but they weren't very big ones, you know,
250k, 250k,
but yeah, I'd quite like to get into NVMe,
but I don't think my machine will handle it,
I don't think it will handle it.
But anyway, yeah,
so I lost the Ford Terabyte disk,
found an 8 terabyte on Amazon,
ordered it, I don't use prime or anything,
but it came within the week,
so I was able to put that in,
copy stuff to it,
and everything was good.
I mean, it was very risky,
though I did make copies of stuff
to some spare disks I had.
I have one of the little HP,
ProLiant, desktop-y mini servers,
or whatever it was,
they were sold by HP,
loads of people bought them,
they were costing about 150 pounds for this,
with no disk or anything in it,
but then you just bought it and wrote in,
you've got a refund of about 50 quid or something,
so I don't know,
when you're about 100 pounds,
so you get this,
so I'd bought,
and there's a lot of four bays in there,
so you can just open the front door,
and then slide out one of the bays,
put a disk in,
and away you go,
but these are for hard disks.
Right, right, right.
They're sat up,
so you could put an SSD in there,
but I don't know how to have a
caddy thingy's work with them,
so I had some disks in there,
I was going to try,
I was trying to use,
what's it called,
LVM, logical volume,
manager with a couple of disks,
but I didn't,
I thought I was being really stupid,
I'd screwed it up,
so I'd left it, left that project for a while,
and,
or I can grab that,
they were like two terabyte disks,
so Western digital green ones,
of course they were cheaper.
All right.
Okay.
So I used them as my,
as my emergency backups,
what I should do is actually put them in this machine,
so I can, I can do, you know,
rapid backups if I need to.
Yeah, yeah,
I, I,
it's a pretty,
I sort of have a,
a very low-tech solution,
I've got to,
I feel a large number of Western digital,
it is, it's my book,
these, you know,
I'm not my book game,
but,
passport,
plastic,
so what's the passport thing?
So I've got,
I must have six or eight of these things,
all over the place,
and I'm rather each one,
so it's a bit,
it's a bit,
it's a bit,
it's not ideal,
but it works, you know.
Yeah, yeah, yeah,
I know what you mean, though,
it's, I'm doing,
getting a really good backup scheme,
it's,
it's a bit of,
a bit of an art.
I,
years and years ago,
when I was at work,
I,
because I used Linux,
all the time at work,
I got into using a thing
called back in time,
which I think is,
is, is,
is meant to look similar
to the,
the Apple thing that,
it's called similar,
similar,
so I've,
I run that now,
I have a external disk,
so if I lose a five,
if I delete something,
then I can just call up,
back in time,
and find the thing
in the last backup,
and then,
restore it very, very easily.
You okay?
Yeah, sorry,
I, I, I had the space bar,
rather than,
than my other key,
so I've stopped at a chord,
things like that,
that's handy.
That's okay.
Whatever,
we can, we can
stitch it all back together again,
I'm sure.
Oh, dear, dear, dear,
not so good.
It's, it's,
it's, it's right,
it's, I'm using the old,
old GR key,
right next to the space key,
I'm,
I might used to
having the space key to do things,
you know, so, you just,
yeah, I'll need to remember that.
Oops.
I've,
I've got a key with a,
not, uh,
keyboard with a numpad on it,
the zero key on the numpad.
Oh, that's a good idea, which is a good,
it's well out of the way of everything else
and I don't use the numpad much.
So, it's useful to have,
soon have a keyboard with one with you.
Yeah, so I like the numpad keyboard out,
you use it quite a lot from the same time,
but yeah, but first, I think you could map it to that.
Yeah, that's a good idea,
that's the key as well, so.
Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly,
so you can't miss it.
And if you're fumbling, I do.
Which key is it?
Oh, is that one?
Yeah, I think I'll remember that.
Yeah, I've tried all the olds and controls and other things,
but you find that they suddenly,
you try and like scroll or something
and scrolling doesn't work or, you know,
you suddenly make your windows smaller or something like that
because it's mad, of course.
It depends on what desktop using,
I'm on KDE here,
so there's a lot of key combinations already programmed,
so you suddenly find you close your window.
That means you need to.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So I'm just thinking about that,
another issue you had,
which my father-in-law has had a number of these problems as well,
is you had a power supply failure, didn't you?
I did, yeah, yeah.
It's funny, my father-in-law has had,
I don't know, three power supply failures,
could be least three anyway,
and you know, and he's had numerous buyers,
batchy failures as well.
And I've never had that problem,
not once, and my machine's sometimes even older than hers.
And I'm coming to the conclusion that,
in fact, it was the most recent problem
with these buyers, I was saying to me,
I think all these problems you're having is because
you're switching it off at the wall every night,
and it's the right thing to do
from a safety point of view
and saving electricity and all this stuff
as well and environmental and all that as well.
But I think these modern power supplies,
you know, and I'm infinitesimally small
of electricity compared to the other older ones.
And if you think about it,
your machine set up at least,
most of the modern ones I've got, like, wake on LAN facilities
so they can turn on, you know,
and IT, you can bring a PC up remotely,
so I think, yeah, yeah.
So that they're intended to be left on,
and I think turning them off and on
leads to, my hunch is at least the failures
for the power supply,
and obviously the burst back up batchy as well
for that matter, you know?
Well, yes, yes.
You'd mentioned this before, offline and stuff,
and I was, I would've been pondering that one.
I used to use a remote, you know,
on these radio controlled switches, you know?
Oh, yes, so did I.
Like, yes, me too.
And I would just press the button at the end of the day
and switch it off.
And, you know, after having shut it all down
tidally and all the rest of it,
and also, no, I didn't use the switch,
it's power button off,
but I would switch off from the mains
with one of these things.
So now that was killed by the dying
of the power supply,
and I haven't bought an equivalent,
though I do, I did buy, just by the way, actually,
I did buy a son-off one,
which is incapable of building into your IOT system
if you want to, but it's just sat here where,
one of them said it's lid taken off,
so I can see where the connection points are,
so I can confirm it.
And the other one is just sat there in this box,
so I've not done anything about the number of them.
Right, right.
Is that one of these ones that by default
are set up to run with Google or something like that?
Is that one of these?
Yeah, it's actually the, it's a Chinese company,
and it uses their software,
which you can put on your Android phone
and so probably other phones,
but it needs their servers to, as part of the chain.
So, no way am I having that.
I don't want any remote systems poking around
with my house.
Oh, yeah, it's including Google, aren't it?
Yeah, it's all right, hi.
And Amazon.
So, the plan is to turn one of my device
repising to probably home assistant machine
doing which will control these things, so.
But you could, you can just use it as a standalone thing
that's controllable by MQTT if you really want to.
Oh, it's quite primitive, primitive setup if you do that.
So, I've got too many projects.
I feel like that, the cartoon man in front of two lips,
and they both arrive at the same time,
and it just stands there frozen, which one,
which one do you want to be sure?
So, too many projects,
and I can't seem to bring my brain around this time,
and I don't know how to resume it.
Oh, dear.
This is good to have things to do.
Well, yeah, this is it, I think it's funny.
I miss, it's funny to talk about that,
but I miss, because I know I miss busy other things
that I really can't get a chance to do,
and I'm almost very little Linux.
And though, just recently,
I managed to persuade myself to do a tiny, tiny bit
of bash scripting, I mean, the most basic thing,
and I based it on an old bash script that I wrote previously,
but I couldn't believe my mistakes I was making.
I just, I've got forgotten all this,
and I'll look at this script,
so I'm making that mistake in this mistake.
It was basically just a simple snooze script
to make it a little bit easier to snooze mock,
you know, when I go to bed,
occasionally, I want to,
excuse me for 10 minutes, I don't use it very often,
just occasionally, it's the handy thing to do,
but yeah, I can't believe how rusty you get,
if you don't use it, you know?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
When I was working my last job, literally,
last job I ever did,
we were working on Vax cluster originally,
and the main development language for that
was very strangely, was Pascal.
Pascal?
Right, yeah.
He's Pascal all the time,
he's writing in it every day, you know?
And, but if you ask me,
you wrote Pascal program, now I could not for the life of it.
And I just got begins and ends in it,
but I don't remember myself.
So, you know, if you hadn't said that,
also it does, and you've got to declare everything,
it's might have been declarations and all that, yes, yes,
thank you.
It's a bit of a, a bit of a toy language,
but compared to modern languages,
but did the job.
Yeah, yeah, this is it.
And a little, a tiny little bit of experience of Vax
and also Pascal.
And then there's a, there was a,
there was a visual version of Pascal.
It's a bottle of Pascal.
I like that.
I was getting pressed for that.
I could go on Pascal.
Was it Delphi?
Was it Delphi?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Delphi.
That was the one that was really, really popular.
I think they'd extended it quite a bit by then,
I don't know if it had object oriented stuff in it or whatever.
Yeah.
It's funny, the head of this software department had said,
you know, because the member,
well, what a colleague of mine,
he actually became a software programmer
and or two colleagues became software programmers, actually.
And, and I think there was a bit of tension
between see the IT department and software department
about programming the, using, using a,
was it a, a, a, a, well it was a,
bowling them in Delphi, actually.
So, bowling did it so far.
Yeah, so, yeah.
He also took us as well.
Yeah, that's right.
And of course, their argument where the software people
was argument, well, the head of the software said,
you know, it's a, it's a far better, far more rapid,
easy to build things up and,
and bowling than it is in, and mix of C++.
And, you know, I had a, I mean,
because I was familiar with the, with the Delphi,
when I had a look at the C++,
it's obviously the way that you,
you can look up commands and help with stuff.
It was really nice.
And you look at the, the, the, the, the mix of fun.
It was rubbish.
Absolutely rubbish.
I could see what you're talking about.
It's just so clunky and comparison, you know.
But they end up dropping it.
And I think they end up going for the,
the mix of fun, of course.
So, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Yeah, it's usually the way, isn't it?
Yeah.
We, um, one of my colleagues had written a thing
in the ball and C++, and then he left.
So, I found myself maintaining this.
I was sort of shoved in to, to write and stuff in,
and I never, never really had, had me training in C++.
It wasn't a particularly complex thing.
But it was, it was doing quite a lot of network-y type things,
you know.
Right, right.
It was fun.
For students, new students come to the university,
would go to a PC anywhere on campus,
and they would fire up this thing,
and put in their matriculation card details.
And it'd say, here's a username,
because we created the use names way, way before they arrived.
And end your password now, and here's your mail address.
So, this was the front end to let them do this.
And so, I wrote the back end, and he wrote the front end,
but I ended up booking up both the back end of it.
With the whole law, yes.
I was sort of pre-webbed stuff.
So, well, at least the web was very, very basic
and primitive at that point.
So, we didn't dare use the fear of being hacked.
Ah, right, right, right, right.
I mean, I've got a tiny one week course on C,
which I didn't, I mean, I'm not quite sure at that point,
the company was happy to let you do a bit of training and stuff for that.
I'm not sure it was particularly relevant to the internet
I was doing, because I wasn't working on it,
I wasn't programming on it like that.
But, yeah, it was, and everybody else, it was on the course,
was way ahead of me.
And I was like, I was like, the dunce of the class,
and then I was just, the slowest,
even log on into the system and stuff like that.
They were much quicker than they were, obviously,
they were just more familiar with everything.
But, it was, I can't enjoy it,
but, C++C isn't my favourite language,
let's just see, you know.
No, I haven't ridden much in C,
I haven't ridden a little bit,
but not very much,
and I wouldn't class myself as anything,
but a newbie in it.
And it's a fairly simple language to get to grips with,
but the sort of background stuff,
things that are not obvious behind the scenes,
really, really difficult and bite you so easily.
Yeah.
So it's always to get yourself in a mess with it,
as well, of course, this is, so.
Yeah, I know, it's certainly had that experience
with a few, few things separate.
Oh, right.
So I think if I didn't go that deep,
so I was okay with it, yes.
Indeed, indeed.
Well, there we go.
So, what else do you, have you got on your,
on our last, I think I just found on,
I was just, I was just listing some of the shows I've done,
but that's not really very interesting.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But I don't know why he's here,
but it's a carry on, yeah.
No, I'd started off writing these notes,
saying, no, I've not done anything.
I've not done any shows,
and I started adding them in as I did them,
because I've sort of woken up from the,
from the COVID sleep in terms of doing shows and stuff.
So trying to do one a month or something,
still woken up from that.
I got half way through one,
and I think I maybe did actually,
kind of half complete it,
but it's, I'm not happy with it.
So, yeah, I'm not, I'm not sure.
And I just can't,
I think because also,
you know, where I'm sitting here,
this is, this is,
this is quite neat.
This is obviously a very nice, actually,
and I enjoy these charts,
but the position I'm sitting in just now is,
is exactly what I sit,
and I did the basis, well,
I'm working sort of thing,
so that's also a bit of a binding.
I can only get to the set,
the set up at the weekend,
because I would dismantle all the set up for work,
so it's a bit,
it's a bit awkward, you know,
so we're in the past weekend,
like a junior week,
I could write up notes and stuff,
I can't really do that,
so it's so easily, so.
Yeah, no, that's quite difficult, isn't it?
Yeah, I know, I,
I don't know, I just got out of the habit
of doing shows,
just couldn't quite bring my,
get my brain in gear enough to,
to do them,
yeah, and I'm kind of like that as well,
so this is a, so,
yeah, yeah,
you can see it,
yeah,
you can see everyone's,
probably stuck on in that respect,
maybe that's part of the reason why,
the show queues are,
it's gonna be a bit in the,
on the law side, you know.
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Anyway, we're getting back,
and we're getting shows in,
hello,
yeah, big, big, big surge,
and that's great for a few weeks,
and then you suddenly realize,
oh, that surge is just about to end in a week,
or, yeah,
two weeks or something like,
we're gonna be dead back in the hole again,
so, yeah,
it's a strange sort of,
process of,
as Ken puts it,
feast and famine that you see.
Yes, yes.
Indeed.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I,
obviously, I enjoyed your shows,
they were very good,
and you know,
they were always very thorough,
I think, when I,
I said just shows,
I,
it's really nice to listen to,
the,
the,
the,
well,
the,
the,
the images,
and I remember,
you were saying,
you're writing up some notes about how to deal with,
with pictures and whatnot.
I think of only,
maybe,
once or twice,
send it in,
send in pictures.
I think the first time,
I thought it was a bit daunting,
because I wasn't quite sure what was expected,
so,
but it is,
must be difficult to deal with these sort of things.
Yes.
Yes.
It's the,
the issue really is
that the way that we do it,
is we put
anybody's pictures,
or scripts,
or whatever,
in a,
in a sub directory,
of the mind directory,
or stuff is held.
And,
if you want to write notes that use it,
you need to know
of which
bit of,
of path
you need to,
to provide
to get to your picture.
And that's not,
immediately obvious.
So,
what I've sent to people is,
if you just send in your pictures,
by whatever means,
I mean,
with the show,
it's preferable,
you can put them all together
in a zip file,
or a tar file,
or something,
send them in like that.
And then,
in the show itself,
put some indicators,
some comments,
or something like that.
So,
put picture one here,
picture two here,
or preferably,
if you call them,
picture one,
picture two,
that's great.
And that's the order
they're coming in.
Or you can call them
something relevant
to what it is you're showing.
And then,
just say,
put this file name here,
and put that on there.
And give
this title,
and those sorts of things.
That's the sort of
schema.
Yes.
And that,
that seems to be working.
Okay, for me,
I must admit,
I think that's,
I think that maybe,
maybe that was,
whether I spoke to you
and you gave me some advice,
but I can't remember,
I'm sure I used
picture one, two, three, four,
and that,
what,
if I didn't have that,
it was nice and simple.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So,
I've refined that,
so it's less detailed,
less manual for me,
and I come to glue it all together,
and I've automated it,
and stuff.
So,
yeah,
but I do need to document it,
I can understand that,
but I'm the same.
Yeah.
It does need to be,
yeah,
to be written up in some form,
but I'll,
I'll get that,
to get to that,
I'm trying to do a,
do a regular amount
of documentation,
Ken and I
need to share
the way the bits
of the system
that we've built
for our own use,
because we sort of have
our own areas
that we work in.
We need to document
as to the other one,
can handle it,
with it.
Yeah.
So,
it's tricky.
It's tricky.
I think you,
you obviously just take,
take ownership of a thing,
and then,
it becomes a,
so a segregated
from another person,
and they're not aware
of what's going on,
sort of thing.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So,
it's not,
not good practice
to do things that way.
So,
I'm currently writing
documentation about stuff
that I've done,
and so,
I'm saying that I'm going to try
and do
so many an hour
or something a week
or something about it.
So,
I just keep,
the documentation moving forward.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So,
I was talking about Matt,
the,
this,
this news
script I was writing.
And then, of course,
we're leading
onto that,
we're,
we're,
we're,
I got,
when I was with,
a,
current service provider,
and they said,
well, you know,
if you stay with us
for another X,
just for a month,
and we'll give you
a three and you could either choose, I think you could get a camera or an internet camera
thing or you could get a smart speaker sort of thing. So anything I would never have
been the sort of person to get a smart speaker but my brother previously filed back
gave us a speaker and you get one and you end up with two and then you know that's
better over the future. Now we've got two speakers, one in the kitchen, one in the living room
and so this internet provider supplied us with a free Alexa thing. I thought, well, I
hadn't Alexa before, we'll try one of these. I didn't like during the senate process
asking for phone numbers and stuff which I left blank and all that and I got it working
and I thought, right, I'm going to do that and I put it back in the box and never used
it since and then Mrs X was saying, well, you know, I've got this bedside radio here
and I've never used it and it's in the buttons not getting sticky, you know, the rubber buttons
are getting sticky sort of thing anyway because we're trying not to buy stuff you know
because it was usually by lots and lots of gadgets and whatnot. So if you still got that
Alexa thing, I said, yeah, just certain of what I could try that then. So took it and plugged
it in and whatnot and oh, just couldn't get it to kept saying it was me not her and
then so you couldn't set up a voice profile and you couldn't, we couldn't get the BBC stuff
to play a BBC radio stuff with a link to your BBC iPly account which I wasn't very happy
with. I tried that, that failed as well. All right, so it's just, it's just a little
little rubber just going back in the box and forget about it. Yeah, yeah, that's a shame
mind you but yeah, I know it's a sort of a trap in a way isn't it? It's a snare to drag
into things that you probably don't want. I mean, you probably feel certain thought about
them. Don't you really don't want to have to be giving your details to whoever and whatever
and stuff? No, no, no, and as a fact, Alexa, you can you can buy things like, I'll
get me some utility rolls and stuff like that, you know, but you could, you know, who you know
as you could say, you know, Batman, you cut, you know, a bit mess years what you're saying
and you end up buying a new car or something, you know, I'm not too keen on that, you know, so
yeah, yeah, I know, I know, I've managed to avoid all of that stuff really, really don't want it.
Well, I wouldn't have if it hadn't been for my brother getting me one,
and he said, you know, I bought you this, I wasn't sure whether you would like it or not or
whether you'd even accept it because he thought I'd be quite kind of, guess it's not something I
would definitely, I would definitely, I would definitely buy, actually fact, now that I've got it,
it's quite good, the Google one's quite good and it's really quite useful. I don't think you can
buy stuff directly from it, so it's, it's a bit more passive and, you know, the BBC content works
and you can sign up a free account with Spotify, so that doesn't cost anything. So you can
play different kinds of music and what, you can't specify, like you pay, you can't specify specific
music, you know, I want to hear it able to see second track and such and such, you can't do that,
but, but, but you can see I play some jazz or whatever, you know, and it's really very handy,
and I wanted to catch you and you can be, you know, doing dishes and whatever you say,
set a five minute timer, enough of it goes and does that, you don't have to get hands
all over it or, or wait and what, it's very, very handy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that, that I can see,
trouble is that unless you're, you're tied in with, with somebody like Google or, or Amazon,
then, you know, the, you haven't got the resources, the computing resources to, to do that sort of
voice recognition and that sort of stuff. Absolutely, absolutely, no, no, no, it's all, all,
all behind the scenes, but I mean, obviously I've got a tablet and what not, we're googling it,
and so I'm quite, I'm quite comfortable with, with that, with that sort of thing. So we've got,
is there, we've got two, and I think, you know, my six was so disgusted that they're like,
something, and she started looking on the internet, and I mean, it's not like it at all, and she's
all, look, they're doing this, Google Home, which is, which is, it's one of what downstairs,
which is a kind of middle size, a lovely nice, rich sound to it, and it's, it's old hat,
because everyone's moved to these nesting, so she's even bigger. So they're actually
flogging that, there was one left in stock, and it was, it was cheaper than the many ones, so it was,
you know, less than half than the normal place. So, so she just, that's just, so that's,
they're coming in, and that likes us getting just chucked. Yes, yes, if you strip it down for,
for bits of a part or something. Well, yeah, make something, make something for something,
that sort of thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The speaker might be quite good, you can drive it off
at Raspberry Pi or something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm sure you'll
let me, that you don't like to throw anything out, you know, no, I don't, hello, they came back
to bite me when I had to clear my attic. What is that 132 column matrix printer? Oh, no,
what would I do with that? It's, it needs a, do you remember what, what were the printer
interfaces they had back in the day? Oh, it's in tonics and the face. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a
centronics printer, I think. Yeah. With a massive big plug with lots and lots of connectors in it,
and I say, yeah, yeah, I used to write software on my BBC micro and print stuff on there. It was
nice to have 132 column papers. Oh, yes, of course. My friend and I were, we're developing stuff in
assembler on the beam and printing stuff on there. So yeah, nice big sheet of paper, you scribble on
the right hand side of it, you know? No, no, don't do this, it's a blubbubble. That was quite
convenient. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember, it worked. It's a job,
I liked, I liked getting the job to do when I was just kind of quite young at the time and
you would go into the, they had a heart that you would go into and you got going with a barrel
sort of thing and you bring in a big, a big Diablo disc, it's a big, you know, it's like a big
pizza disc basically. I think it held five megabytes. I think it was five megabytes and you
pulled the front door down, you slid it and you clipped it shut, you went from, from load to run
something like that and the disc spun up and then a flag popped up, which meant that the disc was
ready to engage with it with the hard platter sort of thing. And then you would get the computer
using flops, searches and whatnot and binary and whatnot and you would use, and then there was a
keyboard you could load and print in less things. And of course, you'd have, you'd pick the
program and we'd go for it, oh, half an hour or something like that, your big, big rims of
paperwork, you bring the paperwork and the discs back into the factory sort of thing. So I enjoyed
all that kind of stuff. That was good fun, you know. That sounds very similar to some of the stuff
I've done in the past. Those discs like a pizza were, they had to sort of handle on the top,
is that the sort that you had? These were really quite flat. I'm trying to think how wide they
would be, oh, a fair old width, I mean, I don't know how to save out two feet maybe, not sure,
not sure, but it's quite wide anyway, quite a wide disc, thin and flat. And I saw that once in
there was a zerox commercial, the office of the future, and the sector is slid this flat pizza thing
into the drive bay. I think it was an American drive sort of thing, an American thing.
Hmm, okay. Now I had a job when I worked at Lancaster University. I was given the task of
developing some networking software and I worked on the software at Lancaster, but the compiler
was only available by going physically to Liverpool University. So it's okay, it's a train with
your disc, which I've written stuff onto, and Trotov, which is Liverpool, and build the thing on it.
That's even more remote, let me just walk it to the, to the heart, to the heart, to the heart.
The computer center in Liverpool, not far away from where we've had various old camp meetings
in the past. And then I bring back the compiled thing and try running it on the machine we had.
Because at that point, all the, I was, Lancaster was part of the Northwest network, as it was called,
which was an inter-universities network, and each node. So it was a sort of network of nodes with
least lines in between them, and each node consisted of a particular class of machine.
I think it was an ICT mod one, and nobody will know it's a finished machine. Nobody will know that
anymore, but, but yeah, so, and then those, those machines were connected to all the terminals,
and to the main frame, and that sort of stuff. Wow, it was supposed to be writing some things for
the terminal. Why nobody was supposed to be writing a thing to enable broadcasts, the operators to
broadcast a message to everybody in all of the universities like Manchester and Solford and Liverpool
and Keel and, and Lancaster. They say, oh, we're going down in a few minutes and we'll be back up
in an hour, and that those sorts of things, I think. Thank you.
Pizza will be available outside the four-year app for the closer.
That's right. Yeah. All these people from Liverpool come running down the road. Oh, it was a pizza.
I think I know, I just have how things have changed. Absolutely. Wow.
I must do a show on primitive networking back in the day.
I think I can remember, I'll say a little bit of Vax, and then a lot of the network can use,
what was it? What was it called that? What was the company called? It was running
on DOS. What was it now? It was DOS, I can't remember now. It used to
coaxial cables with, to terminate them and all that. That's kind of, remember that as well.
That sounds like all-fashioned ethernet, was it? Yeah, that's right. Is it network?
Where was it, network? Oh, network. Yeah, network. We were networked inside my last job for a few
years, so yeah, we had a lot of network all over the place. Yeah, that's right. So many
seconds, if you were reconfigured on the network, you would pull them apart and you had so many
seconds before the network crashed, sort of thing, because you had to terminate the ends,
basically. There wasn't much in the way of switches and stuff in those days, I suspect.
Not the sort of resilient networking switches that you get these days, it would have been
helpful. That sort of thing. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, very good, very good, very good, very good.
So what else have I got on the list here? What could we jump to from here then?
What about, what we think about the, I don't know if it's even going to be a bad weather,
but I suppose it's an abundant even to expect that, I suppose. Did you have any damage
in the bad weather, Toldev? No, no. I'm not quite sure why, because in the past with really
strong winds, I've had tiles come off my roof, but everything seems to be pretty solid. Probably
because of the wind direction, more than anything else, you know, if it gets under the edge of a
tile, it can sometimes rattle them loose. Yeah, yeah, my mother's had had the, or tile, so she thinks
what I said, one tile, I think, came off once in London on the day we, I never since then, she's
absolutely paranoid about her car, and she's just be so right there, they front the day we,
and I had to, I was helping her with a problem with her car at the moment, and I left my car
at her driving, so you better not leave it there, it'll be fine. But she might end up being
right when I come back and kind of tailed in the middle of the roof or something like that.
Well, yeah, that sort of thing crosses my mind from time to time, but I had a rougher coming
into some work for me, you know, clean the gutters and that sort of thing, but you also did the
the ridge tiles on the, on the tile. Oh, yes. And those are often a point of failure if you get
some really nasty winds and stuff. Mostly other tiles have been replaced anyway, the ones that were
loose. Right, right. It was checking for that, as he was up there, not a job I could do personally.
No, no, no, no, no, no. Yes, that means there's no no, no, no, no, absolutely no.
Hopefully that means that, you know, there's no, no incipient problems.
Right, right, because I think around here, I obviously walk in with a fuller companion, and
the number of fences had fallen flat, you know, and my mother's fence, it was very rickety,
and it felt flat. So she's had to get that replaced. And my father-in-law's got a bit loose,
But he managed to brace it up with a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of read which we were
to go to the a sort of a builder's merchant thing that we that somebody recommended to us
and they were sort of went in and and got the bits and pieces of it so he's quite happy with that.
So so so everybody say okay now I suppose and hopefully whether it's now we're now into April
where should be the hopefully at the end of that because it was it was nice last weekend but of course
this weekend has been a bit kind of a bit kind of windy and a bit dull so yes that was it's reasonable
it was I was out doing a bit of gardening yesterday and it was fairly cold actually
it wasn't even though you know the sun was out it was still quite calm it's it's
about 10 degrees here according to my little display here so that's not cold really
it's sort of on the tolerable end of things but there you go. Is that on your display it's just a
mirror display thing you've got already. Yeah the the what's it called magic mirror thing
which isn't it isn't on a mirror it's just on a monitor I got a spare monitor on the shelf
above my desk here but that just runs day and night I turned the monitor off when I got
it but the the raspberry pie behind it keeps going it's yeah that's really useful it's telling me
in use headlines and temperature and upcoming weather and this sort of stuff. Yeah
because you were saying and that that the you that the we've got a bit of a
long and a tooth thing and it's not going to do it yeah yeah I'm like I know but absolutely that's
that's one of those projects that I'm still is it is swithering that's a
good no Scott yeah swithering yeah yeah so we'll we'll add that one to the vocabulary
actually swithering yeah yeah I first came to Scotland now 40 years ago I remember
somebody saying oh I've been swithering all day what is swithering exactly
all these I think it's a good gesture yeah it's lovely though I enjoy all the
all the different language but yeah so I've been swithering over these
projects which want to start we'll just start one year so you know and mushrooms
the thing is it's actually you know I hadn't I hadn't sometimes you're
suffering some of these words that I hadn't even considered that was Scottish but
of course there's yeah yeah so yeah I get laughed at for not to not
saying them right stuff I mean my my children are effectively Scottish
having been brought up in Scotland they don't speak with much of an accent
but my son's girlfriend she was brought up in the borders area down near bigger
area so she she's got a bit more of an accent and if I say stuff like
Peely Wally she says what are you saying what say you said
did I add too much English that Pula Wally so I have to be careful I can't
use these as if I don't I'm talking about too much yeah yeah yeah it's
difficult it was it didn't it was simply not quite there but I couldn't
quite pinpoint what wasn't quite right but yeah again for the vocabulary
it means pale and and one and stuff doesn't it is it sort of yeah yeah yeah yeah
I think I think I think my my mother-in-law used to describe me as being
Peely Wally that's right so I just finished I know she said she was saying to me
oh you know you know you know a bit whether be in that much better so
obviously I'm not walking the dogs that much you know I yeah yeah we've all
been been indoors too much lately I guess yeah I think so I think so yeah yeah
I've talked talking about that and so I'm I've actually now know
now back at work more regularly and I've just counted some of the things
I wrote here so it's changed the backpack is about 75% full yet the fact
it seems abandoned it's like a very strange atmosphere going back into
office feels like a previous lifetime strangely familiar yet totally alien
don't doing hot desking with new desks new locations and new people
working basically I'm only in once a week I need to bring all my personal
belongings including paperwork laptop headphones in with me keeping track of
everything is proving a ticket as I'm not always the most organized person
at the at the best of times and the piece of office work seems frustratingly
much slower than at home yet paradoxically the day seems to pass much quicker
so yeah and I'm now I'm going more often than that I'm not going in sort of
like two days a week I've been kind of dragged in twice a week which
frustrating because it's going to I've got so much to do and it's just
slowing things down and try to catch people and then trying to concentrate
in offices is is really difficult and I overheard
it's been an interesting conversation something I've never even
contemplated whether it's these two people talking in office and say
they've never worked from home and I'm commenting on more people
returning to work and then nobody had asked them how they feel about this
and how safe they felt with all the new faces so because you don't think
about that you know these or these because you think well they've been in
work all the time so they mustn't care about you know
I'm not too worried about about about the about the Covid but if they're
seeing the same people every time and suddenly all these new people appear
yeah and I've even gave that I thought of course yeah
No no it's quite an issue isn't it yeah it's yeah I don't
obviously not having worked now for the past nearly 10 years
so that one yeah more than 10 years then you know it's not a thing
but I did used to work at home fair bit my work would let me you know
right going on quite a time developing stuff at home and stuff but yeah
Of course they've they've now in Scotland they've now you know no
longer need to wear a mask and so that happened on on on a Monday
there and I was although they said in an email they said in the email
you know well but we do still recommend where you're in public
areas to wear a mask and I was quite pleasantly surprised how many
people were still wearing a mask but you know it's more and more people
don't wear a mask you feel subconscious you know and there's
all these sort of things and I know people say well if they're not wearing
that's why they hitched out wearing a mask and it's it's it's a difficult one
and I know I understand that you've got to live with the got to eventually live
with this thing you know but Tim at the back I mean it all depends on how
to my mind what matters above all else is how is it any NHS coping that's what matters
Yes indeed indeed when people are still getting it and getting it badly
if they've not had not have not been vaccinated or they are
have immunological problems that prevent the vaccine from really being
very effective so you know it can still kill in those sort of cases
So and I think and even even with the most
virulent right you know it's so it's so spreadable now that maybe the masks are
are less effective but it still means because I remember that Dr Campbell
saying that I have occasional listened to he was saying that the
viral load is as important so if you've got a mask on
you know you're going to get less of a viral load as you're walking through
the particles or whatever so even if you are likely to become
ill you're likely to become less ill let's like to become else
things so it all helps you know yeah my neighbors said this last time I
remember their little boy went off to nursery I think he's at nursery age
and when things started to ease up and came back home with the
COVID no sign of it they all got it you know and they were
or you know they weren't they weren't they didn't have very
serious effects they're fairly young couple yeah yeah and they've got
another young child and everybody had it but only in a very mild way so
but you know it's it's just but then it just takes one of those to yeah it just
takes one of those to get somebody to make somebody else really early yeah yeah you
want to see yeah your granny thereafter who maybe yeah more
susceptible and you know the kids got it or whatever then it's gonna yeah it's
gonna be you yeah pretty devastating it's interesting I was speaking to
a friend and I'm off a few people actually and so I was speaking to a friend
and he was saying oh yeah all the family I've had it every one of them had it apart from
the wife he says he said you know and he he's he deals with the public
all the time so he can't understand how he hasn't hasn't caught it he can't understand
how his wife hasn't caught it and one of their their daughters
she went to work for the first day a first day at work and she came back
now wouldn't this have been the work she got it obviously so quickly but she
came back and disappointed the next day sort of thing so and then
I think some of my wife's friends were saying similar sort of things where they've
had it and they've just thought they would have so remember that whether there are some people that just
won't catch it or whether they've had had constant sort of fine
what's the word they've been
cutting at the bottom but they've basically been subjected to it all the time and so the
they've come out immune to some of the community yeah
yeah only certainly the case that some people are more
affected by the others you know some people's just basic
genetics or immune systems or whatever
just shrug it off without any great difficulties but yet
their immune systems will be will be triggered by it but
they won't be very ill or even noticed that they're ill because they've been saying you know
if you are prone to hay fever seasonal allergies as people
would put it then you need to be cautious
that you don't ascribe the symptoms to just to hay fever
and they could be COVID so doing a test right
it might be a smart thing to do you know
particularly if the symptoms are a little bit
unusual but it's just hard to say I had a really nasty bite
at my age you're supposed to shed it you're supposed to stop it when you get
India for like 50-60s but I'm still getting it
you know I think I
discuss this I mean I don't I don't really
feel it's it's a strangest thing I have I have suffer
with hay fever or my life and something really quite badly
as well I can open my eyes and really bad and I sort of
just to be second I'll just see if I can I think I've got a bottle here holding to be second yeah here it is
so I've got this stuff it's it's it's it's
it's advertised it is mixed pollen but then it says this
30 C which is this concentrate now obviously that is it's just not this
but it's such a small amount that can't possibly do anything so it's
it's basically you know it must be
would you would you call it when it's in your mind
it's um what's that I'm looking for
oh yes I'm suddenly having a having a blind itself
yeah you know it's it can't possibly do in them because
they're conscious I'm so somatic
yeah that's right now I've had I've had really bad hay fever all my life
and I think when I've got this I didn't realise what this really was and I took it
I thought this is never it's just isn't going to work because I've tried all kinds of
things I've put stuff up my nose with the you know the stuff that you with the
ultraviolet light and all that and I've tried
um putting um there's even this high-tech stuff that's supposed to be
charged particles is supposed to get a minimised pollen going up your nose and all kinds of stuff
I've tried nothing is what this worked and I am virtually
cured of hay fever now and I can't explain it I cannot explain it at all
yeah yeah it's hard to know because
if you look at it from the point of view of an experimental study then
you do not do studies on one case you know you have it you need one hundred
thousands of people in or all going through some sort of regime that says
they were bad hay fever given this thing
how many of them recover so you know it's just you because
I mean not not to not to throw cold water on this
idea but you know if if you just happen to be
the point where your immune system has backed off
getting bothered by this thing because I mean
it's a nonsensical thing for your immune system to do but
if it's just you just happen to reach the point where it's
said okay that's the end of this and
and you know it would have happened anyway you know
yeah but it almost seemed the
the day that I started taking this you know
so it just it defies logic I know it doesn't make sense
it shouldn't have worked and yet it's almost
I must be 95 so I can walk through
cut grass fields and I think sometimes
get a wee occasionally get a tiny wee um
a bit symptom and again I've got to go to this bot lot
take you know I think the first time I had
I took it you know I maybe took 10 12
and one and one year these pills or so and in the next year I was
about three or four and then I think
last year maybe I took one or something like that
maybe none at all so I'm I'm basically
cured I mean it's a most bizarre thing I can't
I can't defy logic that that's the bottom line you know
so I don't know well
if you're out of it then good luck
that's my deal that's really good because
it is a miserable miserable
or it is it's really and you know
the thing was when I read when I bought the
bought the pills
just sugar isn't it's nothing at all
the fake medicine when I bought the fake medicine
when I bought the fake medicine there was
the all these clean people that say
oh it's really good some people say no I didn't
I talked about there was a lot of people that were
quite positive about it but of course the
could all have been fake reviews I suppose
and there's a lot more of these fake reviews now
but yeah who knows but
you could give it a go
well what happened with me was I get
a prescription every 56 days because I
yeah I'm on quite a lot of tablets
for various things
and one of the things I put
on the I get to fill in the
request you know every 56 days
what I want for the next batch
one of them is satirazine
which is a yes
an immune suppression thing
anti-histamine isn't it
which which I find works for me
find but I had not
appreciated that there was going to be a
pollen surge coming up
and and I was hit by that
before I got my satirazine
so it's that look that really
really destroyed me you know
as you come out of the winter
where there's not much pollen around
and you go into the spring well
the wind pollinated trees start up
then it's quite a lot of
relatively large amounts pollen
in the the forecasting websites
will show you stuff about pollen
counts and stuff and they don't
trigger it but I think I'm maybe
just allergic to tree
particular tree pollen that
yes I think when I'm cutting the
the bushes at the front
that that could sometimes trigger a
husband in the past
but prior to that it was really
grass pollen because my mother
was always saying you know
oh you see it from the rape she'd know
that doesn't bother me at all it's grass
grass is the thing that really
triggers a dead and you know
I have had various anti-histamine things
but I do remember again
being peculiar because I was given a
a more modern one of the more modern
anti-histamines and they're supposed to be
you know not not not make your
josey sort of thing and I remember
taking it and being really
josey and I mentioned a dog
to him and so on and this more modern
one shouldn't do that probably
more time on the more traditional ones
but you might find you get tired
of that one and I can't remember what it was
but anyways I was fine with that one
you know everyone's different
basically yeah yeah yeah
once I got onto the
Saturazine I was fine again
I've not I take them
take one tablet a day just now
so I'm like just keeps it
at bay I thought I could stop
when I reach this age but
obviously not
actually I think I think I may
just recently I may have
told them to remove the
the anti-histamine from
my my prescription because I've
just just not needed them at all so
yeah yeah just
yeah it's just amazing
I just wish I had this has happened
20 years ago you know because it's
yes I know I feel your pain
and it's horrible yeah
the weird thing in my case was
I was a student
in the 1970s
in Manchester and
I got asked if I wanted
to help out on one of the
field courses that they did in the
department this was a
biology or a
suology department
actually and the field course
was the undergraduate students
would go on mass
to on a coach to
to a field
place down in Gloucestershire
and they would do spend a week
doing various observations
and studies and statistics
and writing up what they were doing
and stuff so I joined in with this
and that was the year
where there was an incredibly
hot summer it was the year
when all the ladybirds
were landed on people
and apparently biting them
can you remember what year
I think I can remember that actually
I don't know
76 77
maybe I don't remember that
yeah I remember that
what they were doing was
the ladybirds was
so it was hot so you would
have sweat on your skin
and they would come and try and drink it
but they didn't have the mouth parts
to do that without
because they're predators
so they got some pretty vicious mouth parts
so they tended to nip
nip people
but they just nipped in the process
so people were getting caught
in these things and
panicking
the point of the story was
the sort of field study center
in a valley
in Gloucestershire
and one area that we went to do some
study in was just a
field of grass
just grass from as far as you could see
and as you look closely
you could see there was a sort of
haze over the grass
and it was because the grass was
at the stage of maturity
where it was generating pollen
so it was like
totally pollen atmosphere
and I had not had
hay fever until that point
and then I would have had it for the rest of my life
I just could
check out it and in that
so it didn't miss that
would happen
so perhaps if you had
never been in that area
we never would have got it
it's possibly
I don't know that
that caused
hay fever
whether it would just you know
I'd had it in some mild form
but this sort of
increased the erection to it or whatever
I don't really don't know how that works
but yeah of course
you could go on another big route
but there's so many people
having autoimmune diseases around the world
now it's only in case
everything isn't
and another quite knows exactly
is it plastic pollution
from you know
rhinitis
so it runs in the back
you thought something
and I've had
steroids spray for that
and I think I've suffered
from my mother's suffer
from my mother and father's suffer
from it
I think my person who hasn't
is a fuller companion in my wife
you know
yeah yeah
there's a lot of things
that have been you know
causing people problems
over the years
are being ascribed to
to autoimmune stuff
my mom had
quite bad rheumatoid arthritis
that's an autoimmune thing
of course it's because
yeah it's because
you're particularly
your hands get all distorted
and the knuckles
she had it
no she had it
and then it disappeared
after maybe 10 years
or something like that
so I don't know quite
what that was all about
yeah sorry what were you going to say
like a flare up
yeah it's my mother's
mother's suffer
my mother's suffer
a little degree
my mother's suffer from that
I didn't know you could do this
she's got she must have
arthritis as well
so they scraped it
whatever that means
that sounds horrible
and then they set the bone
so that the big toe
no longer bend
but that's cured all the pain
so I think that's a novel
we deal with it
I suppose it means
you know you scrape it
in the joint
so that the sort of
cartilage surfaces
of the two halves of a joint
that rub against one another
normally and it's all
lubricated and everything
that all inflames
and in many cases
it wears right through
and so you end up with a really
swollen, painful joint
as a continental
probably you know
mum's time they would do these things
sometimes they would fuse
effectively they fuse
the joint so that it becomes
rigid and
that gives release
release because
it's you no longer bending
and getting all the pain from
damaged cartilage and all that
so that's obviously what my mother's
friend went through as well like that same thing
so that makes sense
yeah I didn't have a new that so
sometimes yeah
yeah
yeah well yes I absolutely
I hope I never have that
that problem but
I think it's very very common isn't it so
yeah I know I
am just on the medical front
I just recently did
I've got a thing called trigger finger
which is where you're
as you clasp your hand
one of your fingers stays locked
in that cold position and you can't
that's due to a
nodule on the tendon
because your fingers are driven
by tendons
oh from muscle
yeah it's a bit like
I think I'm a mechanical
or when you pull it
a latch or more so latch
it does like a latch finger
wow that's why they call it
trigger finger because it has a
much longer medical name I
can't remember but it
things like you can't straighten the
finger because the tendons
jamming in one of the sort of
sheets
and then this thing where you
clasp your grass things
and it goes clunk and it won't
open up again
how do you at least use your other hand
yeah if you just move the
tip joint of the finger
backwards a little bit then it
releases and comes through
I got steroid injection
in my in my hand
which is enormously
it's not fixed yet
they do an operation
to scrape the tendon apparently
or more skipping
come on can I say something
or skipping
yeah
I don't know why I like
sharing these things but I'm
always fascinated by the
mechanics of
physiology of
being a part of
it's like you
said you know if you're a doctor
you're much better
to know about all these things
good things we go wrong
we'll mention that in the last
episode yeah
I never heard that
that's fascinating
yeah yeah
look at that because I don't
really heard of it my neighbors
I never had it as well
yeah because I was thinking
oh you know is it somebody who's
been using a machine gun a lot or maybe
a road gel or something
maybe some of those things
would do it that that business
of the the white finger
thing you get when you use it
white background
road drill or something
yeah yeah yeah yeah
I don't know much about that
no no me no me no me no
I know I know I know
I think our audience might be
turning off in droves
I think so I think so
maybe a good point
to end I think maybe
I think it is I think it is actually
we're over an hour again so
I know last time I
well we did start recording a bit
before we started doing the show
for real but still we're still
around an hour and last time I
thought I'd be able to cut
a bit of silences and stuff
but there weren't that many
I thought we talked pretty
so
oh well there you go
good stuff is about that very
enjoyable indeed yes yes
it's always fun to chat about
all these things so yeah we
do it again when we when we built
up our stock of
to make things talk about
preferably not too much in the medical
perhaps yes indeed
yeah all right then
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