Sometimes Mastodon feels like a connection, some days it just makes you feel more isolated. I guess it evens out over all 🤷♂️
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Abram Kedge🏴🇨🇦
@AbramKedge@beige.party
mastodon 4.6.6Originally from England, 23 years in 🇨🇦 & 🇺🇸, Scotland feels like home, it's where I voted for the first time this century.
Former embedded & webby SW, just doing it for fun now & to help friends with their business. Writes weird psychological SF, occasionally. Copies of my books in Dunfermline, Kirkcaldy, and ROC NY libraries.
Green/Leftie/Yes to Independence. Let your first instinct be to choose to be kind. Black Lives Matter, Trans Lives Matter, LGBTQIA friend and ally.
353 Followers
352 Following
50 Posts
Joined November 25, 2024
Author web page:
Goal achieved:
3 years without a car
Annoyingly addictive game:
Pronouns:
He, him.
Replying to
@drahardja@sfba.social I met someone who told me he has become really bad at following through with jobs at home, because he just doesn't remember them.
At work he has got into the habit of not making a mental note of his tasks, because he'll receive an automated email summarizing his To Do list.
Expect to see the Alexa Honey-do feature with continuous in-home recording any time now.
#ScribesAndMakers 29 Do you know what you wanted to be at 11?
I wanted to be an inventor. There were a whole lot fewer cogs and pistons involved than I expected, but in many ways, that's what I was.
Shared a table at lunch with a very interesting French gentleman who is in Edinburgh for the week looking for Fringe acts who would like to perform at a big festival in Avignon.
I flipping love this place.
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In other news from lunchtime, my bottle of "lemon iced tea" had a peculiar flavour. Further investigation revealed a tiny English label that says Sour Plum Soup, made with sour plums, dried tangerine peel, licorice, and salt. Best before May 6th 2026.
Well that's alright then, I thought there was something wrong with it!
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@PaulaToThePeople@climatejustice.social
I love the idea of a single long pinned post, I'll be going back there for a browse later 👍
@TheBreadmonkey@beige.party
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@NormanDunbar@mastodon.scot When I picked up a set of wheels with winter tyres for my little electric clown car, I realised that it would take a complete wardrobe makeover and about four litres of fake tan to even become visible to an assistant at a New York State BMW dealership.
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@hedders@mas.to @NormanDunbar@mastodon.scot I have a little sympathy for the Tesla owners who sunk their savings into a vehicle while Musk was mostly hiding the crazy.
But then I think of my dad's neighbour, who ripped up the fence and moved it a fair distance into my dad's garden to give themselves a wider driveway. They waited until he was spending a few weeks with us after my mum died. Yeah. What a complete and utter Tesla driver.
He had to move it back again and pay all legal fees after I found archival Street View photos showing the original position. Still a cit of a bunt. Pretends he can't see you if you pass in the street.
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@JackTheCat@mastodon.scot @RabBrucesSpider1@mastodon.scot There's at least Canada and Greenland ahead of us in line for annexation, maybe even Cuba. No need to worry. Yet!
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@fribbledom@mastodon.social remember, exTENDed memory TENDs to be useful, while exPanded memory is Practically useless.
Back in those days I regularly had to talk sewerage workers through editing CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT to get the data from their gas safety monitors to upload. There was only one editor guaranteed to be installed on their computers, edlin -- which could be a challenge.
Funny enough, unlike a few of our directors, not one of them had any problems following the instructions over the phone.
July 2005 I slept* through Hurricane Dennis in New Orleans, just weeks before Katrina. How different it would have been, if we had taken our vacation just a little later. I still have shivers, thinking how quickly things got brutally violent.
*I have a habit of doing this - I walked the dog around the park the day after the 1987 UK hurricane, amazed at all the toppled and split trees.
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@NormanDunbar@mastodon.scot @celeduc@mastodon.social my 91 year old dad would knock up a widget for that in about twenty minutes 😄 (started his working life as an instrument maker).
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@NormanDunbar@mastodon.scot I'm happy my last ever car was a five year old electric. I kept it for a further three years before selling it when I moved back to the UK.
It was a grand little car - but never loved by BMW. The key engineers left to join other manufacturers.
I never considered myself a BMW driver 😄
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@corbet@social.kernel.org it's worth noting that the article mentions that constitutional rights are suspended at International borders and international airports when questioned by immigration authorities.
What it doesn't mention is that recently the No Rights Zone has been extended to 100 miles from any border.
Most of the US population have lost most of their rights. You'd think someone would be challenging that policy.
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@celeduc@mastodon.social @NormanDunbar@mastodon.scot I'll second that. BMW are all about gouging their customers.
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@Mara@hachyderm.io @chandlerc@hachyderm.io I have to be honest, I'm amazed at how reasonable that price is! I bought a GCC Spirit LS 40w with rotary attachment for $17K in 2013. I made the money back several times over, but dang, I struggled with flame suppression all the time.
The rotary attachment was definitely worthwhile, I sold thousands of glasses and other cylindrical etched items). I had to squirt Windex onto paper and drape it around whisky glasses to get a fine etch, but it looks like yours comes out well without that?
How much smoke (if any) does it generate?
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@jake4480@c.im @hedders@mas.to @NormanDunbar@mastodon.scot in my defense, I once drove a 7.5 tonne Ford Cargo through a flood and unexpectedly met a BMW coming the other way. It wasn't my fault the driver had his window down.
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@sue@glasgow.social that's pretty funny... I suspect most of the LLM revenue comes from people who are eyeing big bonuses from slashing their "staffing budget line".
Waiting for the realization to sink in that the client companies have fired their biggest competitive advantage without an available viable alternative.
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@stephaniepixie@fandom.garden
A vet explained it to me as a survival mechanism. In the wild, if an animal looks vulnerable then it becomes prey. Doesn't work so well now, we need to know when they need help!
@cohentheblue@ohai.social @rzeta0@mastodon.ie @catsalad@infosec.exchange
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@TheBreadmonkey @amiserabilist @hedders @alexpsmith @Alice isn't Bromley a cooking apple? I don't think it's a real place, that sounds made up to me.
Oh wait. That's Bramley. Pie, anyone?
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@jess@blop.social perfect name 😄 I had to search for it - I see Scoop Wholefoods, 18 locations *worldwide*
Not that I'm going to be starting any new ventures, been there, done that!
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@i0null they're just making radiation units up now, aren't they? "500 kilogreys is approximately 97 megaNikes, or half a microwobble."
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@NormanDunbar@mastodon.scot that's awesome, is a great attitude to have. After dropping out of uni, I spent five years working in international moving. I met all sorts - from East end gangsters, through to the ambassador for the Ivory Coast, and Lord and Lady McDonald (twice) ((she was lovely, and was absolutely paranoid that someone might throw away her fragrant hickory twigs)).
And then there were the people I worked with, some very rough and ready, some who'd surprise you, intelligent problem solvers who just decided that they liked a job where they were left to do things the way they thought best.
The big lesson I learned was to listen - no matter what my first impressions, everyone has something that was worth hearing.
Replying to
@LovingFalloutLondon1954@mastodon.social @noxypaws@packmates.org @celeduc@mastodon.social @NormanDunbar@mastodon.scot the battery may be useful if you have solar panels or if you can take advantage of off-peak electricity tariffs?
My 2015's battery was *almost* down to the level for a warranty replacement. OTOH, the efficiency was at least double what you'd get from a Tesla - I don't blame you looking for another.
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@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange If the servers are faster, it offsets the inefficiency of vibe-coded software...
I decided to leave the window open tonight, for that cool gentle breeze. 1:30am (an hour ago) I finally got up and closed the window, the storm was scraping the blinds against the wall. Still sounds very windy out there.
Anyway, what are you doing?
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@stephaniepixie@fandom.garden @cohentheblue@ohai.social @rzeta0@mastodon.ie @catsalad@infosec.exchange I'd only add that they will hide an illness or injury. When I came home from uni for a weekend, I was shocked how drab and lethargic our cat was. My parents hadn't noticed. He had advanced peritonitis.
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@adaddinsane@mastodonapp.uk that is very cool. I miss the days when computer magazines were about how to do things, rather than what to buy.
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@adaddinsane@mastodonapp.uk Acorn User? I read the article on ARM before my day of interviews - gave me just enough info to not look like a complete eejit 😄
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@NormanDunbar@mastodon.scot I have reasonably high expectations that today, for the first time in my life I voted for the candidate who will win. Also, thanks to the Scottish voting system, I got to vote for the party I agree with the most - win-win!
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@ricci@discuss.systems something I always said to the software developers who reported to me: "Nobody has a monopoly on good ideas. Together we can make something better than any one of us could achieve."
Also - take pride in your work, but don't get emotionally attached to it.
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@raymierussell @NormanDunbar the QL is a perfect example of how Sir Clive could take a good idea, and make it a miserable experience in the pursuit of squeezing every farthing out of the bill of material costs.
It's going to have a 68K processor! Yay!!!
With an 8 bit data bus! Err..?
I really wanted to like mine, but the very clever, very unreliable microdrives were abysmal.
Regarding Pascal and Delphi - it bugged the heck out of C programmers that Pascal programs compiled faster and ran faster, before C compiler writers got their act together on optimisation 😆
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@essjayjay @NormanDunbar @raymierussell is that where colours are set at the character level, rather than the pixel level? That's a flaw I'm fully embracing in the 6502 computer simulation I'm working on right now!
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@dwillanski I think I've seen the exact same effect, it makes me doubt myself - even when I'm sure I checked.
My current main gripe is when I carefully swipe the same word four times and it still comes up as something completely different using adjacent letters.
That, and when it goes into grammar correct mode after guessing the wrong word rather than just trying the obvious word that would correct the "grammatical error".
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@deborahh@cosocial.ca @Jirikiha@raphus.social @ErikUden@mastodon.de Just coming up to fifty years since I read that series. Time for a revisit, I think.
I watched a video the other day that covers the good, and the bad, of body donations in the US: https://youtu.be/k8Hx5nvO2sM
Donating Your Body To Science: The Dark Truth
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@statsguy@mas.to have to admit I lost a lot of respect for George Orwell when I heard he effectively erased his first wife Eileen from his writing, despite her having saved his life in the Spanish Civil War.
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@adaddinsane@mastodonapp.uk 🙂 I worked at ARM for five years (I was their first software guy in the Consulting business unit). I didn't meet Sophie, but I saw her at a couple of the summer barbecues - usually playing volleyball. She is one of my all-time heroes.
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@NormanDunbar @raymierussell I really liked the CAD program that came with mine, but after a couple of months it wouldn't load any more 🤷♂️
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@NormanDunbar @raymierussell I think so, yes - and it looked GLORIOUS in the red, green, white on black palette
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@raymierussell True - it introduced huge numbers of people to programming who would never have had the opportunity otherwise, so that's officially a Good Thing.
I knew someone who worked at a company that cut keyboards of AIM65 computers with a hacksaw, so I took one and grafted it onto my young brother in law's Spectrum when its keyboard failed with multiple dead keys. Took me a while, I had to patch the board to match the required matrix.
Yeah, he wasn't happy, he wanted a new computer 😄
#ScribesAndMakers 7 May: When did you think of the idea for your current project? Do you remember how it came about?
My current project is to create a simulation of an imaginary 8-bit home computer from the early 1980s.
I think the seeds of the idea came to me 25 years ago - I always wanted to try out some processor architecture ideas. I'm starting off with a simulated 6502, but once I have the rest of the development system and simulated hardware ready, I'm going to do some processor hackery!
I have a franchise idea... a shop that sells only bulk items by weight into your own reusable containers. Shampoo, slices of soap off of a bar, basically anything shelf-stable that usually comes in single-use plastic.
Three good things today:
1: Somehow managed to walk 1.5 miles, almost entirely within a 5m x 5m square of dad's garden.
2: Within spitting distance of finishing the grand fruit bush netting frame.
3: Worked out that dad's rivet gun is user-serviceable, and fixed it, all by myself. Went from 20 squeezes to 2 squeezes per rivet!
#3GoodThings #ThreeGoodThings
Replying to
@broadwaybabyto@zeroes.ca my daughter and son in law complain bitterly about Canadian healthcare. They seem to have forgotten that their youngest was resuscitated when he was a few days old after an emergency airlift and had emergency heart surgery.
I know they've had big administrative headaches since then, but damn, saving your son's life *for free* in that fashion has to count for something, right?
Replying to
@mojo I lived for about 15 years in Rochester NY, almost everyone I met over about 50 had worked at some time for Kodak. I noticed a suspiciously high cancer rate among them - anything similar in Melbourne?
The George Eastman house is worth a visit - he was a very eccentric character - he didn't like the proportions of his large atrium room, so he had it cut in half, jacked up one entire side of the house and moved it a few yards until he had the space he wanted in the room.
An engineer at Eastman Kodak invented the digital camera. He brought it to the board of directors. They rejected it, because it was not related to their core business - which was turning silver into photographic film. Cameras for Kodak were only ever a way to further that trade.