thehatfox

thehatfox, 1 year ago

I used to use cheapo tools, but I borrowed a Makita circular saw once and it was so nice to use in comparison that I’ve been on team teal ever since.

thehatfox, 1 year ago (edited 10 months ago)

There’s some Bosch stuff in the UK. I’m a Makita person but I recently bought a Bosch glue gun and it’s the most solid feeling glue gun I’ve ever had.

Not a professional line but I also know a few people that love the Parkside tools from Lidl, they are good value home tools so I’m told.

thehatfox, 1 year ago

The UK National Health Service (NHS) still loves fax machines. There was supposed to be a plan to phase them all out by 2020 but it never happened.

They are still somewhat common in some B2B sectors here too, although most businesses have migrated to e-fax systems now.

thehatfox, 1 year ago

Cash isn’t much use for making purchases online, which is also where an ever increasing amount of spending is done.

There’s no coin or note slot on my laptop, and contrary to the internet’s advice throwing money at my screen doesn’t seem to work either.

I used to be a big proponent of cash but with the bulk of my financial activity happening online now I can’t help it feeling a bit redundant.

thehatfox, 1 year ago

There was a BBC documentary a few years ago where they gave GPS tracking collars to a bunch of cats in a neighbourhood and tracked where they went. Each of the cats had their own territory and favourite locations.

thehatfox, 1 year ago

Yes, according to the RSPB habitat destruction from expanding urban areas and farmland is the main threat to bird life in the UK.

When my family had a cat it would mostly catch and bring home earthworms.

thehatfox, 1 year ago

Both HFS Plus and APFS can have case sensitivity enabled, it’s optional.

Enabling it has had a tendency to break third party Mac software though. Adobe used to be a particularly bad offender there.

thehatfox, 1 year ago

macOS offers a lot of stability, it’s reliable, predictable, boring even. It works out of the box and stays that way, it survives upgrades, and rarely crashes.

The release cycle is steady, and changes are generally gradual and incremental. Mac users don’t usually have to worry about a new release breaking their system or their workflow because a developer wants to reinvent the wheel or a UI designer wants to make their mark. The only big shifts have been processor transitions.

The Mac ecosystem also allows users to have a foot in both the proprietary and open source ecosystems on a single platform. Being able to run, say, web development environments and Adobe CS for example, can be a lot easier than farting around with Wine or WSL.

Granted, there’s plenty of downsides to the Mac as well, but the platform definitely has merits.

thehatfox, 1 year ago

I grew up in a very flat part of England, flatness to me is the default and I get genuinely excited by hills.

thehatfox, 1 year ago

Don’t mistake the Netherlands for the Nether Regions either.

thehatfox, 1 year ago

Printing a Roman dodecahedron seems like an interesting torture test for a 3D printer, plenty of overhangs.

thehatfox, 1 year ago

My theory is that they had no practical purpose, they were just a trendy knickknack that eventually fell out of fashion. A Roman equivalent of a fidget spinner or something.

In a few thousand years whatever has become of humanity will be digging up fidget spinners and wondering about them in the same way we do with dodecahedrons. It’s not as if anyone will have been preserving fidget spinner media for millennia to explain them.

thehatfox, 1 year ago

The distributed computing explanation for purpose of the Matrix doesn’t seem to make much more sense than the power plant one.

All of the nodes are continuously occupied by living in the simulation. Unless the machines had a desperate need to understand human society circa 1999, there is nothing useful the machines could do with all the brain power.

thehatfox, 1 year ago

Cypher was right. Ignorance is bliss.

thehatfox, 1 year ago (edited 4 months ago)

That’s one of the big problems with maths teaching in the UK, it’s almost actively hostile to giving any sort of context.

When a subject is reduced to a chore done for its own sake it’s no wonder most students don’t develop a passion or interest in it.

thehatfox, 1 year ago

But what if you are privacy conscious and poor?

thehatfox, 1 year ago

I read that as “unhinge your jaw” at first, although on second thoughts being a snake maybe seems less stressful.

thehatfox, 1 year ago

The AS/400 platform is still alive and actively maintained by IBM so I’m told, although I think it goes under the Power Systems and IBM i brands now. I know several business still using them, with development teams still coding with RPG etc. Apparently there is also reasonable ecosystem of middleware to interface with more modern systems, and some sort of *nix compatibility layer to run more modern software on the platform.

I’ve never touched one myself, but they are keeping a few greybeards I know in steady work.

thehatfox, 1 year ago

It wouldn’t surprise me if there were still a few production Itanium systems in server rooms somewhere, running some obscure or bespoke proprietary software that can’t be migrated to anything else. There are other more arcane systems still being limped along in businesses around the world, for some frighteningly critical applications in some case.

Itanium support being dropped probably has a handful of admins panicking, but in the eyes of the kernel developers it’s a case of “put up or shut up”.

thehatfox, 1 year ago

One of the main issues is the lack of competition. There are now only 3 main browser engines, Blink, Gecko and WebKit. Blink (which poses Chrome and Edge) is by far the largest, and has a the enormous marketing might of Google (and Microsoft to a lesser extent) behind it. WebKit runs Safari, which only runs on Apple platforms and arguably only has the market share it does is because Apple doesn’t allow other browser engines to run on iPhones and iPads. Gecko, the engine of Firefox, continues to slide into irrelevance (which pains me to say as a long time Firefox user).

We are in real danger of the web being trapped in a browser monoculture again, like the dark dark times of Internet Explorer’s dominance. This led to a period of stagnation in web technology Microsoft at the time put little effort into developing IE. Allowing Blink/Chrome to do the same will likely be just as damaging, albeit in different ways - particularly for privacy on the web.

For the good of the web no one company should ever be in the position to dictate web standards, which is why we need a healthy and competitive marketplace of web browsers and browser engines. The problem is that web standards have now become so complex developing an indecent browser engine is now a monumental task. Opera gave up on Presto, once the poster child for browser innovation. Microsoft, a company with far more resources, gave up on Trident. Mozilla was developing a new generation browser engine called Servo, but gave up on the project also.

thehatfox, 1 year ago

Still a giant masterpiece for all the greatest world newspaper nerds.

I’d love to finally find out who really pulled this off. It’s a mystery that’s old enough now to be complaining about its own piles.

thehatfox, 1 year ago

I also have an oil boiler, and a tank in the garden. The tank was fitting with an Apollo Ultrasonic oil level sensor, which sends a signal to base station with a very basic LCD display in the house via 433Mhz radio.

I use an RTL-SDR USB radio dongle, a cheap 433MHz antenna and the rtl_433 software to monitor the signals from the ultrasonic sensor, which transits roughly once an hour. The level measurement transmitted is a fairly accurate centimetre value (I compared it with manual measurements with a dip stick for a few months).

The base station only showed a vague level indication with 10 bars, but now I have more a more precise smart display of the tank level, without any extra modification to the tank system.