An irregular reminder that if you're near Whitley Bay on 6th or 7th of June then you can get to join in an attempt to make the world's largest aperiodic* tiling on the beach
beachspectres.com
(* it's a maths thing, check out the link or look at the picture and imagine that across a big beach)
Best thread I’ve read on this - read til the end.
Sometimes you find yourself saying things as a parent and think, “How am I this wise? Where did that come from?”
Bandit. You’re just channeling Bandit.
Is it a sign of age that I just got excited by a new antihistamine on the shelves of Sainsbury’s?
Apple Notes app: category “Snacks and Sweets” showing an entry: “Antihistamines.”
“How’s the autocategorisation working out?”
“Close enough.”
Taco Wednesday, huh? I’ll take it.
For me, #CITV died 22 years ago, when a ~£20m production slate was axed - for the previous few years I’d been responsible for about 5% of that spend. But still, this hits hard: www.independent.co.uk/arts-enterta...
1/7
I’m a Green Party councillor for City Ward #Sheffield. It’s a densely populated urban ward.
I’m going to talk about digital advertising screens, which doesn’t sound exciting, but please bear with me.
I want to explain why I spend time objecting to so many of these.
Since 2023, I’ve …
I Work Very Hard, And I Would Like To Try Cake By A Horse Hello. I am a horse. I work very hard at my job of being a horse. When humans say move the heavy thing, I move the heavy thing. When humans sit on top of me and pull on my head, I carry them where they want to go. The main food the humans give me is hay and oats. But I am thinking it would be nice to have a different food. I am thinking I would like to try cake. Yes, yes. Cake. I know all about it. When humans eat cake, it is in glad times. It is the food for a celebration, such as when a woman becomes 47. I have seen cake on the Fourth of July. When humans have a cake, they stand around it and clap hands and smile and say happy birthday at each other. Sometimes there are beautiful markings on a cake, such as balloons or a pink shape. Sometimes the top of a cake is on fire and a boy must blow on the fire with mouth wind. This is the scariest cake. I do not want this kind. But I will eat any other cake. Any cake that is not the fire cake that tries to kill the boy. Please understand: I do not get money for doing work. I do not get to go inside the house. All I am either doing my horse job or standing in my pen or eating food off the floor. I always do these things. But I have never once gotten cake and I would like it very much. I have noticed that human children get to eat cake. But I am bigger than the children. I am more helpful to the farm. Children do not move the heavy things like me or let anyone ride on them. And yet they get cake. Maybe the humans will realize this. Maybe they will say, "You know who deserves cake? That horse. That horse whose back we are always on." Every day I dream about what it will be like if I get to eat cake. Here is what will happen. First, I will walk to the cake and putt my nose at it like hrrfff to make and stomping my hooves to make sure it is not a snake. Then I will trot in a circle to show that I am a horse and I am large. After that, I will nuzzle the cake to …
The horse op-ed is an instant classic. I can't tell you how much joy this piece gives me.
It should be taught in every introductory writing class in no small part because the horse arguments are so compelling. "I have noticed that human children get to eat cake. But I am bigger than the children."
This is why they used Newtons in For All Mankind.
[sigh] _freshish_. The word was intended to be freshish.
Next step: have the folder watcher output Markdown into my Obsidian vault, so I can drop the folder updates onto the project’s canvas. Then I guess I’m building an Obsidian plugin to parse it and style the canvas nodes to highlight the touched projects. Or something.
…then I found myself thinking about how to automate showing which projects I’ve touched in the last week. Which led me to coax Claude into building a menubar folder monitoring app. Which… took only a couple of hours and blimmin’ works.
Which turned into cataloguing my in-flight projects on an obsidian.md canvas, with links to Things projects, Finder folders, VS Code repositories, and so on
Lots of changes at work - colleagues of ten+ years moving on, that sort of thing. Freakish start time. So this week I’ve been refactoring the way I (mis)use @things.app.
Is Trump being pranked? He thinks he’s talking to the Iranians, but it’s actually, I don’t know, The Onion. Or Dude Perfect. Or Claude doing a bad accent. Something like that?
Something something gas chromatography something Claude something something new sideline business something something reverse-engineering perfumes something something scent trademark lawsuit ah bothers, that didn’t turn out well.
Yeah, enjoy the rest of the bottle. That’s your lot.
Ah, but the thing is, you still have to pick an order in which the bullet points make the most sense, or flow from the previous / to the next ideas most smoothly.
So it’s still a story, innit?
😀
Heretic!
(But also: yes, this.)
There are. I don’t know what he had against keyboards, mind. Sheesh. 😀
Ah, Wikipedia also suggests that the “ZX83” was to be a portable with the flat screen. One cited source is the late Rick Dickinson’s Flickr, which includes what looks like the same picture of the ‘Sinclair 9200’ www.flickr.com/photos/95740...
(See also the ‘QL Redefined’ set!)
It was news to me, too - I recall there being talk about the flatscreen being intended for (what became) the QL. That page is about the only source I found, I think? www.retrogamescollector.com/spotted-rare...
Uncle Clive was clearly … er … a little unusual. But I don’t know, if the flat-tube TV had come off, the QL and its microdrives might have made a lot more sense as an A4-ish portable. See for example www.retrogamescollector.com/spotted-rare...
Urgh. Wasn’t in the dialout group. Forgot you had to reboot after adding groups. Ran out of time to test.
Trying to get Arduino IDE2 installed on Ubuntu 25.something. Tried Flatpack, Appimage and tarball. None of them can access USB ports.
What am I missing?
Anyway: get some rest, and I hope your talk is well received and that the demo gods smile upon it.
I think that’s right; it’s certainly my impression. I’ve been wondering if a Pi with a cheap NVME drive is more reliable, but now ‘cheap’ and ‘NVME’ apparently can’t coexist so I guess it’s moot.
Oof. I sort-of expect an unpowered pi to sit on a shelf and not work after a year (hence moving mostly to microcontrollers…), but losing the image is very not good.
Oof. Yes, the bitrot is real. So many tutorials are undated but failed years ago to keep pace with OS updates, and things like picamera2 took out a whole class of applications. I feel your pain.
