billyruffian

They ask if you have a licence with a Yes / No choice. They don't ask for the licence number, which I'd be surprised if anyone in these islands could recall. Rather charmingly, they assume you will be honest in your answer.

I hear this a lot. I've got quite a leaky 400+ year old Welsh farmhouse (long and thin, heat-sucking 4ft deep stone walls) and I'm one of those who installed last year with the grant.

It's bloody brilliant. Way, way more comfortable than the oil-fired system it replaced. The smart meter looked a bit scary during the cold patch in January but even then, it's coming in cheaper than the oil did and without the scary price variability.

I honestly love it. Getting the size of heat pump right for the property is probably the most critical thing.

There is a gate, with a warning. That stops most of the delivery drivers. Tourists, not so much.

I live on an old farm. I'm connected to a neighbour by a track that is narrow, has a steep drop with no barrier and a ford at the bottom. After decent rain, the ford is more like a full-blown river. It is a public footpath but otherwise is only suitable for quads or farm machinery. There's no way of turning around when you're committed. There is not a road or bridleway, there is no public access unless on foot.

At some point, presumably from satellite imagery, Google decided this was a road.

Now google maps regularly directs folk down my private drive and on to the track where they have a terrifying journey or end up having to be towed by a tractor. No amount of 'report a problem' tickets have resolved this and it's been going on for years now.

Well, my attempt at a humorous aside didn't land.

To be strictly serious we are talking about block parameters in ruby which contain the values yielded to it which, in an enumeration, is likely to be a value object from a collection and only occasionally an index (where you've explicitly chained `#with_index` for e.g.). If you are nesting deep enough in ruby to call for `k` then, yes, it would be bad practice.

I can see the appeal, but I offer:

1. thickly cut doorstops of wholegrain crusty bread

2. apply very mature crunchy cheddar

3. cut banana, not mushed, is layered on top

4. a blanket of either ready-salted or salt and vinegar crips

5. and the killer blow, on the opposing slice of bread, thickly, oh so thickly spread marmite.

sigh, I once encountered a PFY junior who named all variables some variation on `nx`, so `n1`, `n2`, `n99` because they 'were all just numbers'.

I work in an environment which has dozens of products, very significant complexity and legislative needs. Cucumber works very well for us because we use it for specifying outcomes. There's way to much Gherkin out there which tries to use it for describing a journey (I click this, then this, and this....)

It works really well for us to get a shared understanding between a non-technical business, devs and QA.

That said, we then hand it the Gherkin over to the SDETs who fettle it according to our house style (which is strict and must pass enforced linting) and it does take gardening as the product matures. It's our SDETs who write the test code: we wouldn't dream of letting a non-technical person actually drive the test logic itself.

I see you are not British nor, according to your bio, do you live in Britain. I'm not sure how 'our' applies to you.

In what way? From mini skirts to punk rock to gay liberation to extinction rebellion to pro- and anti-brexit protests, we seem to be comfortable with challenge. Citation required.

Well, it would be a lot harder to sack president Boris /s.

I defer to the historian Niall Ferguson who said (I paraphrase) that purpose of monarchy is to protect the people from its government. From a UK perspective, it seems to work.

The dominant paradigm is "if it is not permitted it is forbidden".

Oh gosh. It’s the exact opposite. The a principle of Common Law is ‘everything which is not forbidden is allowed’ (the US for example has done reasonably well on that principle).

I live in a smallholding. When the Milford Haven gas transit pipeline was being layed just by the corner of my field they found a henge. Yep, a stone circle, or the remains of it burried right in my back garden, along with countless Beaker People artefacts. The archeologists came, measured and sampled, and the pipeline now runs right through the middle of it. (It did make a curve around a badger sett though).

This is a little but old island. Spit and you'll hit history which is pretty awesome but you've got to build for the folk who are living here now.

I love (and donate to) mailcow, it's an amazing piece of work which makes it simple to get up and running and to maintain a email stack.

The problems you end up with is dealing with the big fish in this space. For instance, Microsoft are currently blocking all/most/a lot-of mail from Linode IPs and have been since 21 Dec regardless of individual server reputation[0].

[0] https://www.linode.com/community/questions/22287/550-57511-a...

I live in a reasonably rural part of the UK in an old farmhouse with historic public rights of way criss-crossing the land around here. One day google decided that a footpath through a wooded area just wide enough for a quad was public highway and started giving driving directions through it. There's no place to turn, the gradient is steep and, once you're committed, the road surface is, errr, mud. Cue umpteen drivers getting stuck, panicing or grounding out on the occassionally fast flowing ford at the bottom.

I'm guessing image rec on some new satellite imagery convinced it it must be a road.

No amount of reporting a mapping problem to google has changed anything. When I reported something similar in Apple maps a couple of years ago, the change was reflected within a couple of weeks.

The Async gem and Ruby 3+ is an incredible piece of work. If you need to coordinate 3rd party services, it's the way to go in ruby and it just reads beautifully.

I went to an agreed petrol station, they'd authorised spend there. From memory, I think I just told them my name and that was all I needed to do: fill up, thank the staff, drive off.

I had my wallet nicked in Padstow on the last day of a trip there and was just about take the 3.5 hour drive home. Problem was I didn't have enough fuel to make it. My CC providers took ages to even answer the phone and cancel the cards. Amex dealt with it a just a few mins, arranged to courier a replacement card to me by the next day and authorised a fuelling stop for me on my way home. I'll never be without one, ever.

BlockBear is free

Research I grant you, but for treatment, quality is very unevenly distributed. The Welsh NHS is appalling enough that I've considered relocating to England for this reason alone.

If I remember right, didn't the Queen refuse to give her assent to table this bill to the Parliament?

The Queen, acting upon the advice of her government, refused to grant her consent for the Bill to be debated.

You see how this works? The Queen didn't just decide for herself.

Parliament is sovereign, it can vote to do away with any of these customs and traditions at any time it likes. But we like custom and tradition, it's part of our culture.

it is only in the last 3 - 4 decades that they are being interpreted more "democratically" in modern parliamentary traditions

That is a ridiculously narrow view. There have been plenty of times we've had constitutional crises. We have an election to resolve them, such as the 1909 finance bill that resolved the issue of which chamber was supreme.

Thank you for taking the time to do that and I know we are drifting massively off-topic. The blogs posts fail the PROMPT test for me but the Zahraa, 2001 paper is much more interesting and makes a decent case that this isn't a settled issue and it probably should be sooner rather than later.

I don't believe anything without evidence. It seems like a reasonable piece of tidying up that settles the legal juristiction of vessels in those waters but I look forward to seeing the evidence that it was a spiteful landgrab (watergrab?) so I can adjust my beliefs.

On balance, the maritime border appears to me to have been restruck to be fair.

Now scotland has independent tax raising powers, the border with england for sea resources was carefully restruck to favour england

The maritime border used to be a straight east-west line despite the east coast of England being curved. In 1999 it was changed so that it followed established international maritime border conventions regarding distances from the mainland[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_Adjacent_Waters_Bound...

It really rescued Britain from the financial mire it found itself in the mid 70s when the country was bust and had to go the IMF. It paid for the economic restructuring which was desperately needed. Dominic Sandbrook's books (Seasons in the Sun: Battle for Britain, 1974-1979 and Who Dares Wins: Britain, 1979-1982) cover this in some detail.

Some of that is correct, the Queen has soverign immunity (a bit wider in scope than, say, the immunity afforded US presidents), and her household has excemption from some laws.

Some of the power you are referring to is the Royal Perogative in which the monarch is important constitutionally but not practically because the use of the Perogative is reserved for the Prime Minister.

Some of the things you mention, such as 'owning' swans and dolphins are not the possession of the Queen as a person (she can't sell them) but the Crown which is almost a deliberately confusing term that means the state. We'd talk about Crown buildings rather than government buildings for example.

Britan has a deliberately confusing unwritten constitution which works well much of the time and while we like to use language which makes it seem that the monarch has lots of power they really don't. The Queen absolutely does not have a nuclear button nor can she nuke anyone. The power to go to war used to be a Royal Perogative (the PM could declare war) but even this is now lost after adventures in Iraq and requires assent by parliament. Here you are confusing a symbolic role for a commanding role.

I built a small wildlife pond in the corner of a field. A couple of months pass and it magically pops up on the OS maps, right shape and dimensions too.

Meanwhile google maps is merrily directing vehicluar traffic down a precipitous footpath to get stuck in the ford at the bottom despite endless attempts at getting them to correct it.

The work at Bletchly wasn't declassified until the 70s. The house and the site was a near ruin when I visited in the 90s. Hardly a government promoting anyone or anything. There is some, quite rightly, national disgust at the way Turing was treated which probably plays into his myth.

I'm in the middle of writing some of this right now.

For 'reasons', I need to add callback hooks into a particular HTTP Client library my org uses across several dozen of projects. The library we commonly use doesn't have hooks.

I've got a couple of options: switch wholesale to a different library, build a child class, build a nasty bit of monkey patching boiler plate, or build a little library which prepends some logic into the ancestors chain.

The first and second would cause eye-rolls ("I'm just calling an internal api in the way I've always done, why are you making me change it everywhere!"). The monkey patching boilerplate, well, gross. But a little bit of prepend logic packaged into a gem and I've got the behaviour I need.

One of the tremendous joys I get from ruby is never having the feeling that the language or runtime can't do something I need. Whether that thing should be done or which way it should be done is another matter.

Just clicked to try -- found the display currency I wanted, British Pound Sterling between Egyptian Birr and Georgian Lari. Was expecting it to be amongst the other 'B's.