You are more than welcome.
We have bright sunshine :-)

Raining here, 05:00 hrs, 25°c
Forecast is showers clearing, top of 31°c, the RH should drop to below 80% at some stage.

It's days like these i'd have to bring the clothes inside for them to actually dry if i didn't have a tumble dryer.

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Grant
Darwin NT.

Sounds like what a friend in Namibia is enduring, bar the rain and RH. ;-)

-10 C and lots of snow here. In the northern part of the country though, it's -40 C, and even more snow.

I saw an article about the issues at Schiphol airport- they're used to dealing with snow, but not the amount they've had for the duration they’ve had.
Almost 3,400 flights cancelled over a 5 day period.

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Grant
Darwin NT.

No, our country is no longer used to dealing with snow, or anything else for that matter. Schiphol had de-icing anti freeze for just 2 days. Guess what? Winter set in for a lot longer.

Our natural gas storage was only filled for 75% so now we're quickly going through our gas to warm our homes, and we can't replenish from our own sources because they've been filled with concrete by a previous cabinet - whose parties are the same that just yesterday came to an agreement to be a minority cabinet, so yay, more destruction of NL.

Trains stopped because in the past some geniuses at the railroads decided to switch from gas-warmed track switches to electrical warmed track switches and these electrical warmed switches are breaking down because of the snow they are supposed to melt... Aside from copper being stolen and our electrical net being so underwhelmed that several thousands companies and houses are waiting to get added onto the national power grid.

In the past months we got told we need to be prepared with emergency rations for a possible power outage of up to 72 hours, and seeing how immediately in Germany Antifa blew up power cables, plunging part of Berlin into eternal winter blackness, it's probably coming soon.

But no, we can't deal with anything anymore.

UK similarly not ready for significant amounts of snow. (Not that it has caused us any problems so far. Cambridge is clear, with just rain.) I think the problem comes with giving all the storms names. It just makes them get more uppity.

Even de-icer doesn't work anymore. Tried it on my car windows, and it froze just as fast as I sprayed it on. I just hope my battery survives, need the car on Tuesday.

Of course, they named that last storm the wrong name, shouldn't have been Gerotti, but:


(I hope that you in the UK can see this image, because as I understand it, Imager (Imgur) is blocked)

Hi Jord.
Image works fine for me here. That is using Firefox. I didn't have to go to Tor which often works when things are blocked.

Sounds like they thought they moved to Los Angeles, Sunny 21°c day.

Glory: While having other work done, we set up guttering so all the water from our roof goes to either 2 IBCs (those 1 metre cubes often seen on farms or to our pond/soakaway. Yesterday I completed the online form to get the £35 discount this allows us. This morning, Anglian Water wrote confirming we are eligible for it.

I came across this website with all these old Mac OS images, you can run them in a web browser, they run in a VM on the server. For the Macofilians out there, have fun: https://infinitemac.org/

In reply to Jord's message of 17 Jan 2026:

I came across this website with all these old Mac OS images, you can run them in a web browser, they run in a VM on the server. For the Macofilians out there, have fun: https://infinitemac.org/

What?! It doesn't have the Turkey Day Finder?

40% of kids in the USA cannot read. They can write, they can read words, but they don't understand the meaning of the words. Little kids are sat in front of an iPad these days with ChatGPT on it, and when these kids go to school to learn... they don't want to because AI is there for them to read, to write, to do math, to do science.

Teachers in the USA are quitting their jobs because they're no longer teaching kids, they're managing them, as these kids only have a TikTok mentality. An attention-span of seconds.

A very frightening video on this and more, by Vanessa Wingårdh: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTugyu2F0pc

40% of kids in the USA cannot read.

Some interesting statistics here.

About 50% of Americans have reading skills so poor that they cannot complete simple tasks like reading the labels of prescription drugs.

Due to their inability to read, 46 to 51% of American adults have an income significantly below the poverty line.

I haven't looked at the video linked yet but your post made me look up some more information. Perhaps most telling is the link between literacy or lack of it and involvement in the criminal justice system.

Closer to home for me, around 3 million people have difficulty with reading, writing, math, and using a computer or smartphone. This number grows still, despite monitoring and help.

In reply to Jord's message of 19 Jan 2026:

Closer to home for me, around 3 million people have difficulty with reading, writing, math, and using a computer or smartphone. This number grows still, despite monitoring and help.

A significant issue here too though I haven't looked up our stats.

and of course there are all those who don't have a smart phone for whatever reason, or, even if they had one, it would be of little use as the mobile phone coverage in their area is, at best, very poor.

You still don't have reliable internet on your boat?

Internet in the marina is better now, but still not brilliant.