Steve44

I can add some information to this from the UK market

The best baking paper is Silicone Vegetable Parchment. This can be baked on usually 5-6 times so is great for a commercial bakery. The one we sold was a two-sided emulsion of Polydimethylsiloxane coated on 42gsm vegetable parchment. It could be used for dry, wet, fatty foods and for baking application up to 220ºc, together with frozen food, food interleave and industrial uses

There is a silicoat baking paper which is cheaper but can only be used a couple of times. The one we sold was 57gsm Silcoat is a bleached, high density paper, manufactured from virgin fibre with high chemical purity, coated on both sides with silicone and was certified to be Home Compostable.

There is also baking parchment which is is widely available for consumers, these tend to be quite thin and only suitable for single use. It's a parchment paper with silicone coatings.

There is also basic greaseproof (which we used as kids as "tracing paper") which can take some temperature but is nothing like as robust.

I quite often print things such as order acknowledgements or appointment information.

It feels like over the past year or so it usually fails. One page on screen goes to 5-10 pages of mainly blank space, certainly not just the details.

I've taken to screen-grabbing and printing that.

It's ridiculous.

I used it for a little while and Turnpike email software from the UKs Demon Internet integrated it pretty well.

The problem was only one other person I knew actually used it, it didn't really have a justifiable use for most people.

I did use the encrypted mountable drives for a while, that worked very well. I since moved to TrueCrypt and now onto Vercrypt and haven't used a PGP product for probably over 15 years.

Shame really but it just didn't get enough traction.

Thank you, great response.

> who need to be solving/fixing/building, and that time (together) is therapeutic

Yes, I think thinks like that not only keep the brain working but allows you to concentrate and switch off from everything else.

Keep it up, you're doing very important work that change lives.

* edit word.

We keep samples of every print run and also use that to cut out and send samples telling the printers to match. They can drift over time so by keeping every run we can monitor.

Some printer are better than others and although often you get what you pay for it's far from guaranteed.

Firstly can I give you a big hug for what you're doing.

Do you find that things such as the man-shed groups play an important part? I feel that life can be more isolating these days and where people move about more and life runs at a faster pace there is less time and fewer opportunities to fully relax and just "talk shit" with someone.

For me TV programmes like Mortimer & Whitehouse Gone Fishing are a reminder of how we should be spending some of our time.

> tainted my view of software development as full of lazy programmers not bothering to optimize code

I have the opposite memory of the C64 demo coders, they were masters at optimizing and pushing hardware well beyond what anyone thought it could do. Generally though they would be very focussed on writing a great demo, but they couldn't/wouldn't spend the time putting together a full game - the flashy demo was their goal.

I was a Spectrum games programmer and yes we were pushing the hardware but what I was seeing from the C64 demo scene was on a different level. There were a lot of demo writers pushing the known boundaries with things like multi layer bas-relief scrolling and playing with colours & music. I can't remember their being much of a demo scene for the Spectrum at the time here in the UK.

Interesting, so yes it does seem to be the American term which is now "leaking" into British English.