Stuart McConnachie it’s also waterproof

@@crawleycreaper3351 Low energy too

And it's from some 'lite' wine without a doubt.

@@Arachnoid_of_the_underverse Use it to fish with lures!

I reckon Extinction Rebellion got his address - he's killing babies and puppies, polluting the Earth with blobs of lead and exploding PSUs, not forgetting using too much electricity. The heat from his soldering gun alone has put the temperature up 20 degrees over the IOM (latest IPCC findings) and the Aurora Borealis flickers over Douglas when he plugs in his Hopi...

I don't know about laws in the UK, but in the US, vendors have a limited number of days to deliver their product. If they don't, they're subject to significant fines. Doing this in the US might be a strategy to avoid fines and extend the time period.

@@jfan4reva Yeah but they didn't actually deliver the item, they delivered something but not the advertised item. In fact they made a scam so it's much worse than not delivering, I think. Hopefully the seller says the truth and he will deliver it, but this cork and note can also be a tactic to delay everything and he's hoping to make the client forget about it while waiting for the second package that will never arrive.

i thought if the item is not as described you could file for a refund in paypal?

@@Jamal_Tyrone which idiot and why the fuck still uses paypal? go watch Louis Rossmann coverage of recent paypal greedy scumbag changes.

Louis Rossman is an asshat.

Send them C.O.D.

It's not even a good cork of the sort you'd get in a bottle of wine. It's a "cork" made of bits of cork.

Sadly, most corks you get in bottles these days are like that. Really hard to pull off, and almost impossible to stick back in. More like rubber than true cork. I guess it's cheaper to recycle cork shavings than it is to buy new sheets of cork, and saving 2 cents on that 25€ bottle of wine is apparently a top priority for the producers...

I think Clive hid is address because he lives in Cork Street and knew that a lot of comments would bob to the surface.

i think clive is more worried about getting a box full of cocks than corks

Nick F In basic AC electrical theory, if the voltage and currents are all sine waves at mains frequency, the currents will all add up to a single sine wave. Using trigonometry, the current wave can be converted to the sum of one wave that is in perfect sync and one that is 90° (1/4 of a full 50/60 Hz period) delayed. Only the in-phase current delivers actual power to your house, but the out-of-phase current still causes power to be lost in the miles of wiring from the power plant to your house. Traditional electricity meters only measure the power delivered via in-phase current, while out-of-phase current is traditionally regulated by having the terms of delivery (indirectly) demanding that you keep the out-of-phase below a few percent of the total. With the new meters they finally have gotten the ability to know who actually exceed the limit and take action against such customers, either one by one or by setting a fee for the out-of-phase load. An important twist is that when the rules were written, the big problem was inductors causing currents that is up to 90° late, with the usual corrective action being to plug in capacitor loads to cancel it out. But modern electronics often do significant capacitive or off-frequency loads.

@@johnfrancisdoe1563 Oh wow. Thanks for the quick and super informative response. It makes sense but I'm a visual learner and it would have been entertaining to watch Big Clive doodle it out. Thanks again so much for explaining it:)

How would it work though? The buyers will all leave negative feedback and then the seller will lose their discounted eBay fees and eventually have their account closed...

@@Berkeloid0 The note is what flipped it to scam territory for me. Probably counting on folks forgetting they ordered something.

It is 100% a scam. They tell you it will be 5 days so that they can delay you form investigating it for a bit longer, they also tell you to contact them first (the seller) so that you will not open a claim with ebay immediately. Then when the fifth day rolls around and you still have no item, you've either forgotten about the item you ordered, or you contact the seller, instead of ebay. Once you contact the seller they will give you the ring around and make you jump through hoops, until the time frame allowed to open a claim has come and gone, so that ebay will no longer help you with getting your money back. It is also more than likely a very high volume seller, that works in a scam ring, so they all leave each other wonderful reviews that drown out the negative reviews.

@@FnordOok I currently have an item that was abnormally low priced with abnormally long shipping. Not expecting it to show up but I think they hope I'll forget about it. I've had this before but usually end up getting a note from ebay pretty quickly about the account being closed down. On the other hand, I've got that note and still received the correct item so it can be quite random.

​@@Berkeloid0 The scam is the tracking info, along with possibly an admission of having received whatever the seller shipped. It can make it much more difficult to get a refund. I had that happen to me. I reported it to Paypal and Ebay. Neither made it easy even though the seller was getting a lot of bad reviews from other victims, and then the account was terminated. After jumping through a bunch of hoops and a few weeks, I finally got my money back. Because they usually take over an old account and the package was tracked, Paypal only holds funds for 3 days after delivery, so in my case the scammer got their money long before I got my money back.

"Specifically attractive" might be related to GFP and the squid's natural choice of prey? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_fluorescent_protein

@@theskett Either something of that avenue or their sight receptors potentially being more sensitive to light around 5-600nm

You forgot the climate

They taste like chicken, don´t they? :)

@@gerthalberg9735 hmmm tastes like heat, not the meat.

@@gerthalberg9735 It's difficult to eat the climate, the others... not so difficult.

jellybabies ? :-)

I do intend to be back in Glasgow for Xmas tat purchasing.

Yeah, I have pretty much the same feeling. (To be fair, easing recyclability *was* cited as an argument in favor of removing lead, particularly in Japan where they were running out of landfill space; if anything, this may be stronger than most of the other arguments for lead-free. Recycling is still very far from a panacea, though, given the gross inefficiency of electronics manufacturing in the first place, especially of semiconductors.) I'm just not sure of a really good way to reduce e-waste in the first place, given technological obsolescence - beyond reducing demand for the services it provides, and discouraging unnecessary upgrades (how to co-ordinate those at large scale?). I'm of the type that keeps my old devices as long as they're still usable, so that should help a bit. For items which rarely (if ever) become obsolete, of course, the best thing is to make them last as long as practical. Frankly, I even consider video sharing a privilege, given the amounts of storage and bandwidth used (vastly greater than for text-based media); so to be worthwhile to me, a video has to offer something a text-based page (even with pictures) couldn't… Back on topic, if we were *that* worried about lead, then surely phasing out lead-acid batteries as swiftly as possible would have been the best thing to do (after having taken care of petrol and paint)? (Indeed, some campaigns to move away from lead batteries did exist around the same time RoHS was introduced; but where are the results?) Are we hypocrites or what? (I'm not saying it's effortless to change to other battery technology; but I don't quite see the logic in banning leaded solder from electronics while giving lead batteries a legal pass. Unless Big Battery was too mighty for legislators to confront, that is, but it still makes the solder restriction seem like a token gesture; I know the batteries are meant to be recycled, but since they're the dominant remaining use of lead, only a small fraction have to be wrongly disposed of to make up a large portion of lead waste.) In fairness, a considerable part of the trauma of the transition was due to misapprehensions in the electronics industry (which for the most part lacked much metallurgical insight, as it was the first time they had to deal with substantially different solders) about how to work with the new alloys: www.solderrecovery.com/pdf/Lead%20Free%20Article%202.pdf It even suggests that the understanding gained from the experience may eventually outweigh whatever underlying metallurgical shortcomings remain. But in a nutshell, I can see valid and reasonable arguments each way; I don't doubt that significant improvements in lead-free solder have been made (although the poor versions are still in use by low-end manufacturers), but I'm still not sure RoHS took a very good approach (if they were a bit gentler, say by requiring mandatory declaration and/or a tax on lead content, then they might not have generated the same resentment). As for the 'no safe level of lead' party line (not that I deny the claim outright), to be fair, I'm not so sure if there are completely "safe" levels of other poisonous substances (that aren't necessary nutrients at some level - although there are suggestions that *extremely* low levels of lead may be vital to at least some organisms) either (of course, they are qualitatively different in how they harm). As for what DIY and repair people use, I've adopted the "live and let live" approach. (So far I've been using Sn60Pb40 in my stuff, of which I have more than I'll need for a while; I'll decide what to use after that when I come to it.)

naa stabbem with a cocktail stick

Why?

That's exactly what you think of right AFTER you fought 20 minutes getting those damn wires into the holes :D

As long as you can solder them together well enough that you don't end up with a blob of solder that won't fit through the holes. Or perhaps use really thin magnet wire as the pull wire, and just wrap it around instead of soldering it.

I think Clive might be able to solder wires "well enough". Beginner's luck and all that. ;-)

@@RFC3514 Of course, but I was thinking of anyone in general.

Well, I don't think people _in general_ will often find themselves in the situation of trying to reassemble an LED lamp after having disassembled it, reverse-engineered it, and removed one of the diodes. :-P Basically, anyone with the confidence necessary to do this is probably able to solder wires properly and fix any accidental blobs.

Flatbed scanners work well

I believe he's mentioned having a macro lens for taking those, which is the main part. The other is just having a nice photo printer with the right paper

I believe he has a bulk inkjet printer, so he can dump loads of cheap ink onto good quality photo paper.

Sounds like a failing electrolytic cap, that causes high frequency flicker. That is, if it's on an inverter type driver. CFL's also start to flicker the way you described when the big cap fails in them.

It could be, it happens when it’s been on for a while but changes the “strobe” frequency over time, and it’s never enough to get a definitive “on/off” it’s like the shimmering from a camera but irregular timing. Very bizarre!

@@chaziboy2468 - Time to take it into bits. :p

Nothing ordered around that time has arrived yet. I'll guess it's being sent from China if at all.

@@bigclivedotcom scam for sure

@@bigclivedotcom Record all your unboxings on video, so you have proof for eBay customer service that you're not trying to scam.

I sincerely hope you filed a dispute, my man.

@@SodAlmighty yeah Item Not As Described should see a refund.

With a cork to finish the job!

But only the good ones, from International RectumFryer

@@johnpossum556 It will be needed for the diarrhea.

Brendan White Have you gotten the specific blood test for workplace lead poisoning? Because otherwise the doctor won't notice the early symptoms.

@@johnfrancisdoe1563 I did that out of curiosity about a month ago. Came back all within normal levels. Lead from solder doesn't really penetrate the skin a lot and the vapours that come from solder are mostly flux chemicals and very little metal vapour. It's not like using lead water pipes or the soluble lead used in paints. I would not strip lead based paint without protection as an example :)

I get the cheesy puffs from Lidl instead and they are nice :).

The long skinny ones? They're awful. The ones I bought tasted almost burnt. I was tempted by the big container of cheeseballs when I bought a bunch of halloween candy the other day.

Did they fit OK? Or were they the usual micro oriental size.

@@bigclivedotcom It says xl on them but I have not investigated further.

Did your wife fall for that?

@@petehiggins33 how do I know you dont work for number 2?.

I've used them and a couple of others. No troubles so far. They often have offers so it's worth shopping around if you're pinching pennies plus you get to see how the process varies.

​@@chaos.corner Any recommendation? I have tried JLCPCB and FreewayPCB and FPCB is a lot more expensive. Any other manufacturer?

@@drgusman The last I used was BasicPCB. They have a very cheap tier. The PCB was thinner than standard but for my purposes, that's fine. There's a website out there that will find the cheapest if you're working on a budget. Some of it's going to depend on what you want. Fast delivery and special options will up the price.

@@Okurka. Thanks for the info. I have checked and adding the shipping at the end the cheapest one is JLCPCB. I will stay with them :)

Cue Motörhead's song.... Killed by Death kzfaq.info/get/bejne/fLJnYNaTzq3Qqqs.html

That's a good idea. I've never thought about soldering on a thin wire guide like that.