Oh, FFS. Here, have some .pdf
Thanks, mnem. Yeah, moment. Sorry, Spec, brain was elsewhere.
If everyone was to convert their documents into a pdf file then anyone on any platform can open and read the file without any fuss just by using a simple pdf reader which there are many and they are free on the internet. Many pdf creators are paid for programs but there is a lovely free one that works well and also a free pdf editor from the same source which can be downloaded from here www.cutepdf.com/. Once installed you activate the pdf writer in the same way as you select a printer, you select the print option of whatever program you use to create the document, Open Office, Notepad, MS Office, etc etc., select Cutepdf from the list and click print. It will save the file to your desktop as a normal pdf with all formatting preserved.
Perhaps this might be made a "sticky" for all to enjoy the simple means of exchanging text files without all the fuss?
Well, yeah... but the reason bitseeker was embarrassed is that OpenOffice will natively export to .pdf. It was a simple case of getting caught up in your own geekness, which we are all prone to.
Same deal. Most of my service or user manuals are softcopy. Some both. Hardcopies are kept in separate notebooks.
I apply a method I call "Organized Chaos" in which everything I'm currently working on gets dumped on my desktop. When that space reaches critical mass, (usually due to being overrun with dumb web toons, manuals and datasheets, etc) I spend a few minutes sorting it all into folders. My PC is always equipped with two hot-swap bays; every month I make a new image onto a hard drive that's stored elsewhere. (This gets messy as I often switch between Win7 and Win10 Boot disks depending on how annoyed I am at one version or the other, and to keep both current... but ah, well...) I keep 2 or 3 most recent images for all my computers on this drive, which gets cloned and replaced every couple years as storage density increases and needs increase to match.
Network storage houses most of my family photos and videos and incremental backups using Windoze Backup & restore.
I rarely print any of my manuals; only individual pages as needed to clip up over the workbench for a current project.
I'm not touching you Brits food safety habits with a ten foot pole other than to say that over here if it's moldy or out of date it gets trashed.
We're doing our best not to touch US food safety habits! E.g. chicken contaminated with faeces and bacteria that is "made safe" by allegedly washing it in chlorine.
Have you never eaten a blue cheese of any kind?
I've trashed many things that were "in date" because they had become dangerous.
Of course I have. I love cheese of all types. Especially blue cheese. Along with items such a yogurt. Beneficial molds and bacteria. But to age meat until it shows signs of mold? Not quite.
Dunno about your assertion that chicken is washed in chlorine. I would assume if it were you'd smell it. I have yet to open a package of chicken gotten a whiff of chlorine. It wouldn't take much and I doubt they could get it all washed off.
I wouldn't have thought that hanging meat up like they do Spain would be very hygienic, gathering dust, flies on it not to mention smoke fumes etc, but they do and enjoy eating it apperently. I doubt that I would be brave enough to try it though although I do regularly eat food beyond its best by date.
All meats over here are treated with chlorine and in some cases ammonia as well (Google "pink slime" for some truly disgusting info-dump about our modern food production; which, joy of joys, is now legal to include in processed meats without warning labels again thanks to Resident Chump); the factory-farming methods we employ are not only barbaric in the way we treat the animals, but also simply filthy due to the demand for greater and greater production speed. The USDA is a joke; most slaughterhouses (ESPECIALLY poultry) have "inspectors" that are employed by the slaughterhouse, and the output of such places is so great that there is statistically no way in hell even 1 piece of meat in 10 actually gets inspected. The poultry industry is the worst offender, with lines running so fast that the birds are still alive when they're scalded for plucking. This is known, it is fact, and it is why you can't trust anything, neither product nor propaganda, that comes from any of them.
Pork production has overtaken beef because pigs can be grown in a factory environment; they spend their entire lives in a pen (now concrete cells where they are also killed so the runoff can be easily hosed away with pressure washers) barely big enough for them to turn around in. This is why pork now produced is so dry and stringy; an animal needs exercise to distribute fat in the muscle tissue to develop the "marbling" that makes a good juicy, flavorful cut of meat.
COOK EVERYTHING. USE A THERMOMETER. Meat produced in America is GARBAGE; there's a reason Japan REFUSES to import American beef, and beef is the cleanest meat we produce by dint of how it has to be produced. Our veggies are similarly dirty; Japan won't buy our rice because it has too high a content of insect parts. The fact our grain combines have lobbied for and and been granted a regulation ALLOWING measurable amounts of insect parts is disgusting to the Japanese, and I can't blame them. American Agri-Business, like every other Corporate Entity, only wants rules so they can break 'em.
We've been battling against GMOs for decades, not just because of the inherently dangerous way in which we approach genetic engineering, but because of the reasons those who employ it do so.
Monsanto uses their industry monopoly power to destroy entire economies; buying off politicians to allow them into traditionally family-operated markets where grains are produced the old-fashioned way, by reserving a portion of the crop for next year's seed. Once Monsato gets in, they force growers to use their seed, which, being gene-altered, is conveniently also STERILE. This means that none of the crop grain will grow if planted. This forces growers into an endless loop of taking out loans to buy seed grain from the very people who set the price of their crops. As you might imagine, it doesn't take long for growers to become so indebted to Monsanto that they essentially become share-croppers on land that has been in their family for hundreds of generations. They've done this in Spain, China, India and are trying to do it in Brazil even now.
But get this... that isn't even the worst of it. The REASON those grains are being gene-altered is this: so they can survive being sprayed with neonincotinids and glyphosate pesticides. Neonics are nothing less than super-concentrated synthetic nicotine, but because it isn't TECHNICALLY nicotine being synthetic, they can keep bribing politicians to keep it legal, unlike nicotine which was outlawed as a pesticide decades ago because cancer. Glyphosates are a relative of Agent Orange; a concentrated form of DDT. Again, same toxic soup of politics, bribery and poisoning the world for fun & profit. Gee-whiz... I wonder why Monsanto has such a hard-on to merge with Bayer, the world's largest producer of these poisons?
And remember... all this poison... once it washes off the grain (and of course, not ALL of it ever does wash off; but you don't know how much, because politicians, payoffs, refusal to allow such actual scientific studies) winds up in the groundwater, and all that grain with Ifni knows how much carcinogenic residue is what goes into all those chickens, pigs and cattle we were just talking about.
So yeah... you REALLY need to be more careful about what you eat. If you aren't disgusted and terrified, you aren't paying attention.
The only way you can be even moderately sure of getting food that is safe and clean to eat is to buy only Kosher. At least THAT has been inspected by someone; now as to whether that someone was bought off...
But that said... aged meat?
BLEARRRGH. (Yes, I know the difference between aged and cured
)
Now... to keep this all TEA-related; Here's a bodge wire on a Power Supply tester:
Cheers,
mnem