implements

Cheetahs (genus “Acinonyx”) are the largest ‘small cat’, apparently [1] - separate from the genus “Panthera“ containing the ones that will attack humans (lions, tigers, leopards).

[1] There’s a well known viral video of a wildlife park keeper who sleeps with three cheetahs who behave pretty much like large house cats.

Tip: The iPhone Passwords App has basic TOTP functionality (manually create a password entry and click “Set Up Code”). I have a few dummy passwords which are effectively just labels for some login codes - it’s one less App to install.

Excuse the whataboutism, but how many Americans are arrested for “disorderly conduct” each day? (Which from my YouTube police footage watching appears to be “being an annoying arsehole in public” [1] ie a broadly similar moral misbehaviour)

[1] An overt act or conduct in public (or affecting the public) that disturbs the peace, safety, morals, or order (e.g., fighting, making unreasonable noise, using obscene/abusive language or gestures, obstructing traffic, creating hazardous/physically offensive conditions, refusing to disperse).

Our online laws which Americans often seem to view entirely through the lens of free speech are more about public (dis)order. It’s not ideas that are being censored, it’s personal conduct online which may be harassing, threatening, abusive or may create a breach of the peace.

Part of the transaction is the performance of a service role - they’re thanking you for allowing them to help you. But also it might be a habit if they’re used to serving a queue of customers (“Thank you for waiting”) or just a polite verbal cue that the transaction has started or again the habit of saying thank you on being passed something hand to hand (often shortened to “ta”).

A lot of people say that going through a trial, even as a victim, is a punishment …

“You can beat the rap but you can’t beat the ride” (rap being the charge and ride being the whole process from arrest to acquittal: time, money and emotional trauma)

I wondered whether K’s original crime was being “the sort of person who would express excessive pride before the law” - a Minority Report style “Contempt of Court”.

Or was it originally just mistaken identity?

I was taught “Edible (fit to be eaten as food) vs Eatable (capable of being chewed up and swallowed)” but modern usage seems to treat them as synonyms (the former just being more pleasant to eat than the latter).

Remember that they’re not flying towards the Moon but to a point in space where they and the Moon will be closest together in a day or two, hence the Moon is now ‘off to their side’ and they can see a segment of it that is hidden to Earth observers … I think.

Also, the dark side of the Moon is often illuminated but we call it dark because it’s also hidden from earth due to the Earth and Moon being tidally locked (the same side of each always faces the other body).

Ahh! Yeah, my teachers were equally unimpressed - but none of them gave the argument you mentioned, which could at least be understood (like elbows on tables).

I’m right handed, but eat with the fork in my right hand and knife in the left.

Is the issue that people have difficulty cutting with their left hand? Because if you can the process of eating is pretty efficient: hold with fork, cut with knife, move food on fork to mouth …

Yeah, I’ve got a UK Foundation licence but have never actually made a call - it was more of a “have transceiver might as well be legal to use it” thing.

(Also, HF antennas - just didn’t anticipate how difficult they were to set up properly)

Speaking of Linux, OpenBSD’s hypervisor (vmm) supports it so I managed to get docker and containers running on my server via Alpine Linux. Opens the door on all the latest ‘modern server stuff’ running happily on an OBSD box.

Yep. There’s a safe engineer on YouTube who was explaining the history of dial combination locks commonly used for government filing cabinets, etc. He pointed out that you can drill them in minutes but you’d need several hours to make good the damage such that the break in wouldn’t be easily detected. The combined time is therefore the ‘strength’ of the security. (Also, why it might be a good idea to have open sensors on safes, cabinets, etc)

Cloudflare aren’t a bad registrar (imo) - they sell and renew domains at wholesale cost, forward emails, can do website landing pages with a Worker (etc). Understand the product in depth and would seem like a reasonably safe bet. (Not shilling for them, just personal experience).

You can roll your own email if you can get your head around setting up an OpenBSD box and configuring OpenSMTPD and the correct domain DNS records - but the issue will be email deliverability. Gmail etc are going to treat as spam most emails that turn up from a residential or VPS linked IP address.

Personal email servers will communicate with each other happily but you need a middleman one for important recipients if you want to be sure it gets into an inbox.

Don’t want to edit Norm, but a (perhaps British sensibility) alternative is:

“The more I hear about this Hitler fellow, the less I like him”

My pet idea is to make some use of longwave! […] At 60 kHz the wavelength is 5 kilometres long …

Dim memory from my Ham Radio days that you’d need an antenna length of 1/4 the wavelength, which wouldn’t be very convenient for portable devices, unfortunately.

The UK had an aircraft called Harrier - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrier_jump_jet …

Also, the French: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEPECAT_Jaguar which was designed to be useable from improvised runways, hence the extremely robust landing gear.

Any device with a Government service (eg NHS) or a Banking app knows who and old the primary user is, so seems the obvious technological solution is some kind of securely anonymous attestation that websites can request from the OS.

Very interesting. Relates to conversations I've had recently regarding trans people in sports. Turns out that conversation isn't simple, because gender is way more complex than the binary M/F options society has tried to act like it is.

Using the word “gender” to refer to the concepts of both “reproductive sex” (chromosomes, gametes, genitals) and also “gender” (socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities, and expectations associated with femininity and masculinity) certainly makes it very complex to reason about and discuss, particularly if it feels socially distasteful to separate the two.

Without getting the soapbox out, it seems to me that there’s an infinite number of possible “genders” as each unique individual can construct whatever permutation of supposedly feminine and masculine coded things that suits them. But broadly speaking, there are two sexes - the one that went down the developmental pathway to produce and ejaculate semen, and the one that went down the pathway to be able to ovulate, incubate fertilised eggs, give birth and nurse with milk.

So in considering sport, given the physiological consequences of reproductive role causes female performance to be on average significantly lower than for males, does it make sense for sporting categories to be gendered (how people look or act) or sexed (how people are constructed)?

There’s a inclusivity argument for “yes” from the point of view of the interests of one group (transgender people), but it seems to come at the cost of preventing female athletes from doing anything other than merely participating in many competitions, rather than being able to win them.

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The Orwellian part may be “men” and “women” changing from sex categories to gender ones, more specifically the ‘Newspeak‘ conflation of sex and gender into a single concept such that for some people it has become difficult to discuss them separately: “Not only can Trans men become pregnant, they can do so while being biologically male, too”.

(Not attempting to debate Trans, only pointing out the 1984 type changes to how people must now think about sex and gender to avoid ‘finding themselves accused of crime-think and a trip to Room 101’ /s)

Argon is an interesting one. A comparison between chemically synthesised nitrogen and ‘pure’ nitrogen extracted from the air (with the oxygen, carbon dioxide and water removed) revealed a discrepancy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argon#History

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loqudG71uBM (Chemistorian, noble gases)

Generally, it’s news because it helps to confirm that gender or sex-based discrimination hasn’t interfered with the career success of a female individual.

Specifically, it’s another milestone for the British intelligence and security community - one that Stella Rimington made in 1996 at MI5 and Anne Keast-Butler made in 2023 at GCHQ.

Also, this sort of thing goes “Notable for its absence, notable for the first, no longer really notable at all”. It’s hard to have the last one without the middle.

“By definition, there is no real number between 0.9r and 1 therefore they are the same” … was how I heard it explained.

How about measuring the linear tape motion in a similar way that laser mice measure surface movement?

There was an adventure game that showed “The Mists of Time” for 30 seconds during initial map generation - it was a very creative way to describe the analogue tv noise caused by missing video signal.

There’s an interesting blog post about how a far simpler machine generates its video signal, if people are curious about the signals involved:

http://blog.tynemouthsoftware.co.uk/2023/10/how-the-zx80-gen...

“The CPU then only produces a TV picture when BASIC is waiting for input (or paused). At other times it does not bother to produce a video picture, so the CPU can run the program at full speed.”

Empty product and also 0! (Which is extra unintuitive because 0 isn’t empty ie the products of 0 are 0)