It's hard to shake the gravity of a place that featured in a third of my life, which is also currently the majority of my adult life. I have a certain COVID-like time dilation effect where I think "Oh that was just a few years ago" and suddenly remember that 2004 was a lot longer ago than that!
@cstross @FredKiesche I originally read it as "Tempest Procrastinator", and I wonder if Pratchett might have coined such a device to allow wizards to put off storms they didn't want to deal with right now...
@edchivers @FredKiesche I'm just now visualizing the self-propelled version installed in the rectum of a hippopotamus, using mating Placobdelloides jaegerskioeldi. (If there's a storm coming the hippo gets angry, points into the direction the storm is coming from, and spins its tail as it projectile-shits.)
Well, I know that as a cis guy I probably don't really get a vote here - but as we both know how much it will wind up the soi-disant Stoic Defenders of Something-Or-Other, I say: go for it.
So you're out #sailing in a new area and your electrics fail. No bother, just go back to using a paper chart for navigation (if you ever stopped: I didn't).
The only problem is that the United Kingdom Hydrographic Office is withdrawing its portfolio of Admiralty Standard Nautical Charts and Thematic Charts.
Thank Bob we still have Imray ... for now.
I'm also wondering what small or traditional boat sailors without electronics are meant to do.
That's interesting: it makes sense, I have hardly ever seen a paper chart in use.
That said, when I went deep sea fishing, they had all the paper charts they would ever need (this was NZ) as a backup. It feels... a bit presumptous to believe that e navigation will totally replace paper charts.
@goatsarah @ajlanes @squishymage42 I think for me part of the reason I still value paper charts (other than then not needing electrons) that I sail on other people's boats and I can *always* navigate using charts whereas every chart plotter seems to have a different UI.
@dan_turner ... and a spare of glasses if you need those. I read of a solo sailor who had to be piloted in by the RNLI after losing his specs and not being able to navigate.
A discussion about how they make software and what this means by Jonathan Blow, Thekla, Inc.DevGAMM is the biggest game developers conference in Eastern Euro...
Oh! One factor is that all mobile comms will go Satellite in the next 5 years. But it's not here yet and even then one's device could easily fail (and I'd bet it would be the software that failed first).
I don't understand. The work of updating the charts remains necessary and relevant, so they'll still have to keep the actual data up to date. Doing as Ordnance Survey have done and providing a print-on-demand service for paper charts is surely much easier and more profitable than the work required to safely move everyone to digital-only?
The US is well along the same path, and the answer for us is "online viewer for the chart database can generate custom PDFs for printing, and here's a world-wide vendors certified to print bigger (A2-equivalent) ones for you that meet carry requirements." Including Stanfords in the UK so I'd imagine a similar partnership would be easy to reach.
Credit: Andrew S. Merdith et al, "Extending full-plate tectonic models into deep time: Linking the Neoproterozoic and the Phanerozoic" via u/Useless_or_inept on reddit
LGBT conversion therapy (yes, including trans people) is now illegal in Portugal.
Penalties of people found guilty of trying to change sexual orientation or gender identity: up to 3 years in prison and, if the victim was a minor, a ban on working with minors for between 2 and 20 years.
Fellow trans women site owners: that HOA guy with the blocklist that blocks Nazis and trans women, but mostly trans women, is back on another instance. Just got the shock of my life when he showed up in my feed. It appears that his new personal instance is h-i.social.
You may wish to preemptively defederate for your own protection.
I understand that for the blocking trans women, but it seems odd that someone with that mindset is blocking Nazis. You would expect them to be pretty right wing themselves
ah, so am I so I should have picked that up. It's an odd mindset to want to deny to others rights your community has had to fight hard to achieve. But then I'm a middle-aged cishet white neuro(fairly)typical male
@KeithC It's the British establishment "admit only the right kind of people and close ranks" thing. There were a few journalists who were transphobic, and it became a kind of loyalty test in order to be in the "in group" for them.
We focus when we think of the solstice on the length of the day, but I wonder how much that’s it and how much it’s the quality of the light, the angle of the sun, that makes this time of year miserable. Today it looks like the sun will not get more than 15° above the horizon
Hypothetically if the sun reached the heights it does in Summer during the 7h42 of daylight we get today, would it be more pleasant? (Assume for the purposes of this exercise that I’ve arranged the physics to work to permit this somehow. Either the sun operates like a lightbulb or speeds up or something.)
@goatsarah I completely understand ... I wouldn't expect any trans people to put themselves in that situation without knowing what might happen ... Hugz
I am unsure how abandoning the narrative to the transphobes works out. Perhaps granting exclusives to the Guardian will make up some some of the slack.
Dear #lazyweb I'm looking for a very particular product from like 10 years ago (or it's modern equivalent).
It was a linksys usb/ethernet dongle. Tiny, like a tube of lipstick, with 2 wifi interfaces built in, and a microcontroller web server/router. You'd connect it to USB, login to the web server via wifi (if you'd set it up already) or usb/ethernet if not. Then configure one wifi interface to connect to upstream wifi, and other wifi could act as a personal hotspot.
I know I could build this with a pi zero w and a second wifi dongle, but it'd be bully and honestly less reliable. That little linksys guy just WORKED. It had one job, and it did it.
@wez @jordan Yeah, this is looking like my best bet. Nothing near so tiny as the Asus (Josh found the product I was thinking of), but it's not so much the size the matters, as what you can do with it.
Puli (GL-XE300) looks like the one for my purposes. I don't *need* the cellular connectivity, but it can't hurt...
Thank you, lazyweb. I ended up getting the GLiNet XE-300 "Puli". The cellular support stops at 4G, but that's not a feature I'm looking to use anyway, I have phone tethering for that. The rest of the feature set is bangin'.
There’s always so much to do at this time of year - but what can really help is to write a well-defined To Do List of what you might realistically achieve in your day.
I've got one more piece to finish (a horn that needs sewing up) and then it will be time for the goat-ening. Be prepared for many pictures of a crochet goat.
(In case you're not aware, I'm making one of these youtube.com/watch?v=CC_NDwdzww… but in crochet form. I'm not intended for it to be burned, or destroyed by jackdaws, as seems to be the case for this year's model.)
This is the live feed of the Gävle Goat located in Gävle, Sweden. The Gävle Goat live stream will be active until New Years' unless, of course, the straw goa...
Of course, me being me, I didn't check every piece before I started sewing, so I only realised that I'd used the head for the tail after I'd undone several rounds and attached it firmly to the body. I'm now making a new head.
The goat now has a head, neck, tail and four legs all in the right places. I need to figure out how to fix the horns on so they don't flop all over the place.
If you're book shopping for the festive season, one of the best things I read this year was The Red Scholar’s Wake by Aliette de Bodard. The space pirate love story you didn't know you needed.
As I am in the Caribbean, I have discovered that there is quite a difference in what things cost. Take apple pies, for example: in Antigua an apple pie costs 9 eastern Caribbean dollars. In St Lucia, it’s 12. In Grenada, 10.
The Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill has been published with much fanfare, following the conclusion a treaty between the UK and Rwanda that provides for some asylum-seekers to be remo…
> "I am unable to make a statement that, in my view, the provisions of the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill are compatible with the Convention rights, but the Government nevertheless wishes the House to proceed with the Bill."
This is a HUGE 100% battery powered tug right here in New Zealand. We went head-to-head with a dirty diesel tug in #Auckland harbour. The planning, filming & editing took WEEKS and the finished result was epic, but sadly Twitter and Facebook's algorithms both decided it sucks and should not be seen by anyone unless I pay hundreds of dollars. 😭 Is this what the internet has become? What do I do?
If neurosis about the English class system were a place, why would it be Essex?
Everyone either wants to be Eastenders or Midsommer Murders, but the reality is that they’re almost all petit bourgeoise, and utterly horrified at the idea.
@rodhilton "Long after retiring from government, he continued to offer his views and ideas" 😂 I changed my number, moved out of state, got a court order, but he always managed to find me.
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