test please delete

[NickFitz]

Morning denizens

Cloudy, but with a glimmer of sunlight getting through occasionally. The wind's died down a lot, though there's still a bit of a breeze. It's 11°C ("feels like" 5°) and aiming for 12°, and the barometers are heading back up at 999/1007mB

[ladymuck]

Afternoon all

Damp from overnight rain but otherwise dry. Bright despite the cloud cover. Currently 12 degrees with a high of 13 expected. Sun expected to make more of an appearance as the day progresses with low chance of rain. Barometer up to 1013 mBar.

Sunrise 07:01; Sunset 17:29

HWMBO arrived in from Amsterdam yesterday evening and has now gone home. He'll be back on Thursday evening.

I went to the farmers' market and returned home with sausages, bacon and bread.

Now to spend a bit of time tinkering with my work laptop to see how best to make it work for two clients. I am thinking of VMs but I can never get Teams to work properly - namely to make sure that camera and headphones/mic are properly picked up.

[ladymuck]

Has someone broken Scrambled Maps? The option to change the number of tiles and automatically launch in full screen seems to have disappeared. It just now defaults to 3x5 which is a bit naff.

[ladymuck]

So it would seem that you now have to go to 'Scrambled World' and set your preferred dimensions via the gear icon to the top right. Whether it retains the setting, irrespective of whether you choose to 'sign in' and have your scrambled maps progress saved, is unknown at present.

[NickFitz]

Lunch: sausage bap

It's sunny! Turning all Simpsonesque out there now

[NickFitz]

So it would seem that you now have to go to 'Scrambled World' and set your preferred dimensions via the gear icon to the top right. Whether it retains the setting, irrespective of whether you choose to 'sign in' and have your scrambled maps progress saved, is unknown at present.

On the bright side, it seems to have started keeping track of how many you've solved even without signing in - I was exploring the new stuff yesterday like you, and noticed that in the start screen it has a little bit at the top saying "Completed Cities:2 / 11236 (0%)"

By my calculations, it'll take nearly 31 years to get to 100% on the basis of one puzzle a day

[ladymuck]

Not sure how late 'brunch' can be before you really ought to call it 'afternoon tea' but nonetheless a very nice bacon baguette has been snaffled - being some of the provisions purchased earlier today. I ate about half the baguette just with butter, one diagonally cut slice at a time, and now there's about a quarter left.

[ladymuck]

Looking at the world map, I saw that Littlehampton had been scrambled so I did that one in addition to today's random offering.

[NickFitz]

Tea has been brought up the hill from Nando's

[NickFitz]

Lots of Monkey Life today as usual, and more wildlife stuff later including the macaques in Singapore

But the benighted TV people are doing something weird: they started this week's Monkey Life episodes with four that were repeated last weekend, and the final four episodes of S16 get shown during the coming week BUT not next Saturday!

Maybe they'll have them next Sunday. But I think we may have to prepare for one of those fallow periods when there's no Monkey Life on at all

Anyway, later I read some more of Inventing the Renaissance, including some interesting stuff about the way justice was administered in those times. Despite the law appearing very severe with the death sentence for all kinds of things, it was actually pretty uncommon for the full penalty of the law to be imposed. There was even one chap who'd tried to sell his soul to the devil, for which you'd expect burning at the stake, and they just sentenced him to listen to a series of lectures by Dominicans explaining why doing that was wrong. The most likely reason for somebody to be executed, massively fined, imprisoned, and so on was that they'd fallen out of favour with a powerful superior, who therefore didn't have a quiet word with the judge asking them to go easy on them

Goodnight all