Well that's embarrassing

So for the last month or so, something in the house has been giving an intermittent "peep", your fairly typical "I'm almost out of battery, please feed me" warning. It wasn't the fire alarms, nor the carbon monoxide monitor and I couldn't think what else it might be.

It only tended to occur in the evenings, and it was very intermittent, I'd get nothing for days,. then ten in a row, go looking for it, and no more peeps. The evening thing coinciding with the heating being on made me worried that it might be the CO alarm, despite confirming that was working, to the point of moving it onto my desk for a week. Nada.

I was starting to get paranoid about it never happening when I was looking for it, even if there'd been a dozen peeps immediately beforehand.

On Friday I finally worked out what it is. I changed one of the Windows system sounds a month or so back, because a programme was overusing it and irritating me, and promptly forgot about it, and  now whenever I right click the mouse outside the active window by accident, I get a peep that, despite coming from the speakers either side of the monitor, sounds exactly like it's coming from downstairs.

Well whoops.

You cannot be serious!

The investigative consortium Bellingcat reported Friday that US servicemen responsible for handling nuclear weapons on US airbases in Europe have been practising for tests on their security knowledge by making flashcards of the relevant information. On public apps.

So obviously there's been a bit of a fuss about that.

But what caught my eye was some of the information on the sample flashcards, such as:

"What are the authenticators on the Restricted Area Badge : Volkel* is missing the first L"

What are these people, five?

What is the point of a security test you will automatically pass if you have physically acquired or copied an actual badge?

This would be lackadaisical on many civilian sites, never mind a nuclear weapons storage vault.

*facepalm*

* Major US airbase in the Netherlands