gravitystorm

Thanks for posting this! I'm happy to answer any questions.

I began my research by looking for some kind of hard plastic case.

I used to ship micro-sd cards in plastic cases through the mail, here in the UK. At first I used standard DL (letter) envelopes, since they are cheap and the case inside the envelope didn't push it over any depth size limits.

However, when I got two angry support emails for having sent them "empty envelopes", I had to ask them for photos, which both showed a small sd-card-case sized hole along one short edge, with some tell-tale marks. What was happening was the leading edge of the envelope was going through some kind of thinly-spaced rollers, pushing the case to the rear end of the envelope, and then the rollers had such a grip on the envelope that they squeezed the sd card out through the corner of the envelope like a squeezing a pip out of a lemon.

So I had to move to padded envelopes, which were then a more consistent depth over the whole length of the envelope, and so they worked fine in the mail machines. But that upgrade ate into my margins since I was only working on a small scale.

It's little details like these cause vague statements like "It is normally recommended to use bubble wrap to protect SD cards in transit" - lessons learned the hard way!

Hostmonster (a Bluehost brand) have been the worst, since they were so blatant about it. I'd only had legitimate correspondence to that address, until the week I cancelled my account, and since then the spam has been relentless. So as part of my account cancellation, they clearly sold my email address on.

The most amusing was the UK Parliament petitions site, since you would have thought they were a bit more careful with the email addresses given to them.

But the strangest is the persistent use of specific email addresses that I've never used anywhere - about half a dozen common forenames, and one forename-plus-three-numbers. I've no idea where they originally came from - perhaps someone padding out their email lists for sale with semi-randomly generated ones? - but that set of addresses has been used and reused for over a decade. At least it makes it easy for me to train spam filters, since even novel emails are easy for the filters to spot when multiple copies arrive together.

Good luck with everything Vladimir! I have fond memories of working together and visiting you and the rest of our team in Kyiv back in 2008 and 2009.

Carbon capture is necessary in the long term, for particular emissions that are hard to avoid (like specific industrial processes and parts of agriculture). But while we're still pumping out emissions that can be easily and cheaply displaced today, like coal and gas fired grid electricity, then the money being spent on carbon capture is being spent terribly ineffectively. And globally, we don't have the time or money to waste.

For example, most electricity grids are still partially carbon-intensive, despite renewable sources being cheap and available and in use. Simply buying some more solar panels and hooking them to a carbon-intensive grid will displace coal or gas emissions by the following lunchtime, far more cost-effectively than any form of carbon capture.

I understand the principle on working on research projects that have a long lead time. But Stripe should treat carbon capture as such, and could have a more cost-efficient climate strategy: put most of this money today into the most cost-efficient solutions available today, rather than putting its entire budget into the least cost-efficient solution.

I use HSLuv for designing our maps at Thunderforest. The map stylesheet language we use is CartoCSS, and it has built-in support for HSLuv since 2016.

https://cartocss.readthedocs.io/en/latest/language_elements....

I can really recommend using HSLuv for this kind of thing. I used to use regular RGB values (like #f2cdaa), but it's hard to make features on the map "a bit less blue" without accidentally changing other properties. For example, changing #f2cdaa to #f2cd88 makes it less blue, but also darker.

So a few years ago I switched to using HSL in our stylesheets (and using the HSL tab in the Inkscape colour picker) which makes it easier to reason about the colour changes. But there's still some problems with HSL, as the article describes. For example when choosing road colours, I often want to keep the saturation and lightness the same, but when I make minor roads yellow the change in hue really changes the perceived brightness in HSL.

So HSLuv is great for what I do, since I know that if I get the brightness and saturation of the roads the way I want, I can mess around with the hue without any side effects. Or if I like the colour of the forests but want them slightly less saturated, again no side effects when I make changes.

The big drawback is that there aren't many colour pickers available in HSLuv, mainly just the one on https://www.hsluv.org/ . I haven't found e.g. HSLuv colour picker plugins for Inkscape or the GIMP yet.

"Atlantic City of Rock" is one of my favourites, but there are more!

It's worth specifying that if they've lumped them in with the UK, since the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man aren't actually part of the UK. Heck, they aren't even part of the EU either.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminology_of_the_British_Isle...

Wikipedia has a nice Euler diagram and the full nitty gritty details.

I just resized my browser to be about an inch wide, and then they all fall in a straight line past the cursor.

I guess you could call that a workaround :-)

I've been doing this for a few years, along with a reasonable minimum font size. I find it really tough to go back to a smorgasbord of fonts and sizes, with some of them often unreadable. Controlling the fonts via Firefox is awesome.

The biggest downside to this is where sites (e.g. github) try using private-range unicode codepoints for graphical icons, not realizing that users often have other fonts set. I really discourage site authors for hacks and stick to using graphics for icons.

The problem with your first command is the "cut" - works great for a while. Then you deal with other_vhosts_combined.log, and there's a leading hostname and port, so you want -f2 instead. After that, you start working with the user-agent field, and after remembering that the date and request fields have internal spaces, settle for something like -f13, which works until someone puts a space in their faked-up referer, and you can't use cut any more.

I love plain-text logs, but that apache logformat is a bad example of "neatly delimited records", given the unstable mixture of spaces between and within fields (some of which are quoted, some not, and one even quoted with square brackets!).

No - but it seems like that figure is wrong on two counts - greater than the actual number of ships of that size lost in that timeframe (142), and those ships weren't sunk by rogue waves.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_wave#Loss_estimates

As soon as anyone says "Ceefax" or "Teletext" I think of Bamboozle. I'm glad to see I'm not alone and there's even a wikipedia page about it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamboozle

Not mentioned there, but there was one geek aspect of Bamboozle that I remember. Given that a wrong answer would (at the time I played) send you back to the beginning, it was tempting to try and note down the three-digit page number of the question, to cheat and skip back to the latest question. But the use of the 4 coloured buttons meant that the questions could use page numbers with hex letters in them - e.g. 34F - rendering them impossible to type in with a remote control. Sneaky, but it was a source of pride when I had figured out not only that they used letters, but why they used only A-F.

Also, Bamboozle inspired me to waste many hours making drawings on my (even by then) old BBC Model B's Mode 7 graphics.

Alternative gist, but with line wraps:

https://gist.github.com/b69c536f31bc584e557d

I can heartily recommend a starter kit like the ones that oomlout sell - http://www.oomlout.co.uk/arduino-experimentation-kit-ardx-p-... for example. I bought one in summer 2010. They come with a good selection of examples that you can assemble with the various parts that it comes with, so takes a lot of the uncertainty out of what you need if, like me, you're more of a software than a hardware guy and not sure what resistors should be paired with which LEDs etc.