Adam Trickett

@VeroniqueB99@mastodon.social In most countries other than the US you can add: 1980: fully functioning public health service 2026: Partially privatised public health service where you wait for ever or pay though the nose to jump the queue.

D10: Burren and Ted https://www.blipfoto.com/entry/3549159821397723049 #blip of the Poulnabrone Dolmen in the Burren National Park in #Ireland. #blipfoto #gimp #rawtherapee #photography #history

@infobeautiful@vis.social but I can't park my monster SUV anymore, how is that progress? If only other French towns and cities were as progressive...

@gnate@ohai.social @girlonthenet@mastodon.social the Germans developed the passive house standard, where you have a highly insulated house which uses heat exchangers to keep the internal temperature constant without any active heating at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_house The technique has been around for quite a few years but is constantly ignored by politicians.

@fabio@manganiello.eu it's a more general problem. Most people are mostly honest, but a lot of politicians are less so. Politicians assume that if they are on the take, then everyone else is, so frame laws on presumption of guilt... For example Johnson was such a lazy arsehole he even said he was, when he said why he was against home working, as he didn't do anything when left to himself and therefore no one else can...

@fesshole We've all done this. I used to type Wombles for fault descriptions when testing a service modules. On one system all the test users were cartoon characters - and on another service engineers were famous scientists. As I have dyslexia even when I remember to change messages to real ones, odd things slip through...

@ianturton@mapstodon.space @juergen_hubert@mementomori.social Came here to say that.

@issyl0@ruby.social I watch this guy: https://www.youtube.com/@allenfleckney5969/featured He's funny and doesn't always fix things, but it's amazing how simple so many repairs are for TVs. He's not well at the moment, but there are plenty of videos you can watch.

@bonkers @mjd @meowki yes when I lived in the US I found dollars very primitive and easy to mix up compared with Sterling which was colour coded and each note was a different size. I believe the US dollar is often the most forged currency in the world, because it's widely used outside its own borders, there are a lot of them about and compared with Euro or Sterling the anti forgery features have lagged - though the more recent ones may be a lot better.

@dreamos82@mastodon.world what don't you like about Wayland? I've been running it on all but one system and it's as good or bad as xorg in my experience. One system wont run KDE over Wayland - which bugs me. I've had issues with both, but can't say one is drastically better than the other at the moment. #Debian #kde #XOrg #Wayland

@TimWardCam@c.im Exactly. Many people died for the right to vote and plenty of people (me included) are still not allowed to vote where they live. Low turn out leads to strange results, and you've no right to complain if you didn't vote - no matter how stupid the UK voting system is.

@andypiper I volunteer at an IT group, most normal people struggle to use and understand smartphones or Windows, slightly older people are utterly lost. Many assume they are stupid/ignorant, not that the other end site/app is just rubbish.

@HollieK72@mastodonapp.uk @wolfnowl@universeodon.com @freakboy3742@cloudisland.nz to be fair, the first session after lunch when everyone is full isn't good for retention either...

@wolfnowl@universeodon.com @freakboy3742@cloudisland.nz If you read your slides out loud word for word, then people don't tend to register what you've said or written.

@meowki @mjd They are different but how good are their anti-counterfeiting measures? Historically British banknotes have had two people on them, the reigning monarch on one side and someone dead but famous on the other side. Back in 1990 when a few series was introduced they increased the size of the face and reduced the body, as they claimed that people were very good at spotting forged banknotes because people were good with faces.

@gnate@ohai.social @girlonthenet@mastodon.social I'd love to have a passive house, but our first house was about 70 years old and our current house is over 200 years old. We've done what we can but it's never going to be enough, given what we started with.

@girlonthenet@mastodon.social Strictly speaking a properly insulated building, such as a passive house should need neither heating or cooling, so no A/C required. It still needs to move air about and be properly constructed, but it shouldn't need A/C to stay cool.

@sunpig if the cat walks away from you with its tail up you can see the spot with very little insulation on its rear... Children usually find this very funny.

@MarkHoltom British chocolate such as Cadbury's have long substituted cheaper fats such as shea butter instead of cocoa butter for years - this is nothing new. It's also true that Dairy Milk and even their so called dark Bournville has pitiful little actual cocoa solids in them. Many European industrial milk chocolate has more cocoa solids in it than Bournville... Unless it's Fair Trade and ideally organic, I don't even consider it. Cadbury's is inedible goo.

@Sylocule@cyberplace.social @nixCraft@mastodon.social I'm running Win11 on my corporate lappy and I'm constantly amazed at how bad the consumer version is in comparison. I too assume we have a debloated image. Don't run any Windows at all on my own kit, but my occasional exposure consumer grade Win11 is enough to make me never want to go that direction...

@ruben I put my step-father on Debian over a decade ago. My sister-in-law over 5 years ago and my mother-in-law last year. In all cases they took to it from day one without a problem. I tweaked the desktop, fonts, colours etc, and always used KDE. I've got remote access, but I almost never need it. It takes a while to configure something up, but it's worth it as the out of box experience isn't perfect. Windows 11 is pretty dire, I can't comment about MacOS.

@phaedr0s@masto.hackers.town @pluralistic@mamot.fr Couldn't agree more, good code is like good HiFi kit, it's the fewest possible number of lines to get the job done is usually best. I spent days deleting thousands of lines of spaghetti from an output program last year. The original was years old and was evolving into a new form of life... Errors are proportional to the number of lines, more lines usually equals more bugs...

@N33R@fops.cloud while French TGVs are the best in the trains in the world, the rest of the French system is a joke, and France has similar car ownership and usage to the US. Many European governments are pro car and anti-public transport and anti-cycling. Things aren't quite as bad here as in the US, but big oil has a strong influence over policy in too many places. While Paris has fought a long and ongoing battle against the oil and motor industry, most other French towns haven't even started...

@wakingrufus@bigshoulders.city @ShadowJonathan@tech.lgbt more than a decade ago that was always my experience at corporate training courses where the browsers were plain IE or Chrome if you were lucky. I dread to think what it's like today for most people who don't install an ad blocker by default. I'm old enough to remember using Netscape before you needed an adblocker...

@iode it's absurd when you think about it. Can't let children use social media in case they self harm, or use it to hurt others. But it's okay to let adults do the same... Social media needs regulation for everyone. At the moment companies are happy to promote dangerous messages because they make lots of money and take no responsibility. I don't claim to know how to do it, but the big firms need controlling somehow.

@TimWardCam@c.im given how little exercise most adults get and how awful the British diet has been allowed to slip to, combined with lackluster wage growth and inflation I'm amazed it's only as modest as they say... Mind you, falling life span should make pensions cheaper and annuity rates better...

@TimWardCam@c.im not for me, I'm not allowed to vote where I live and my party doesn't stand in France. Previously I did distribute leaflets, even with the dubious "Winning Here" bar graphs. I gave too make do with cycling and walking my mother-in-law's dog.

@sldrant@mastodon.social @jasoncoon@leds.social been using Firefox for years on the desktop as my primary browser and use an adblock browser on my phone. Will have to check Firefox for Android again...

@Daojoan@mastodon.social or someone who doesn't have to think for a living... I used to work in an open plan office and hated it. Too much noise, too many distractions. Horrible and unproductive. I would have much preferred a cube... Though they never seemed to be popular in the UK. Now I work from home and I'm far more productive.

@EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu If people want a lead on climate change, why is the EU back pedalling on the minimal controls that have been put in place? We need a big tax on carbon on everything made and imported into the EU - which will rebalance supply chains and make an actual difference. We also need the superrich and their client media brining under control so that they stop distorting the debate. How many have to die? Before we change?

@nixCraft@mastodon.social Can't imagine inverting it is good for air flow and cooling...

@Pepijn@mastodon.online at first I thought you were asking if you've ever seen a cow in person and not on TV/film. I did know people at university who had never seen a cow. But then I realised you weren't asking that... Definitely seen cows, and patted them, not sat on one though... I don't think either of us would enjoy the experience.

@pjhenry1216 @Sheril I can't speak for the US as I don't live there. I was taught about her in secondary school before I did my genetics degree. Recently there was a campaign to have her on a new £50 banknote. Though that went to Alan Turing - who was hounded to death because he was gay. I'm not saying there wasn't/isn't sexism/ageism/racism etc. I'm just saying things aren't as clear cut as some people say.

@GrahamDowns@mastodon.africa @clarity@xoxo.zone in some countries a significant proportion of shares are held by pension funds, made up of the pensions of millions of normal working people. In effect people own the companies that employ them. The problem is that pension funds never vote against the board so a tiny number of robber barons can milk the system without even owning most of it. In civilised countries no one goes bankrupt because of illness, because of socialised health care.

@Edent@mastodon.social that sadly won't work for two reasons:

1. He's a useless tub of lard.

2. While he is my "MP", I no longer live in the country in which he sits in the legislature, and my local-to-me MP will ignore me as a foreigner even though I pay plenty of tax for him to play with.

@cstross @marjolica @martinvermeer @Inidox @ij @randahl The ICAO sets the rules for passports. You can make them any colour you want, as long as it's photostable for ten years, i.e. a dark colour. So dark blue, green or red are the obvious choices or black. Most but not all EU countries use the dark red/burgundy colour but there isn't any rule saying you have to. The so-called blue passport for the UK is virtually black as was the one before the modern soft one was adopted.

@infobeautiful@vis.social for decades there were only a few bank issued PINs in use for the whole UK, as long as people didn't share no one noticed. Sadly some people did and made a lot of money before the practice was phased out.

@Edent@mastodon.social I can't stand as an MP, see point 2. I don't live in a country where I'm allowed a vote, and in the country where I live I'm denied the vote.

@alternativeto when ads were small static text blocks I didn't mind. As soon as they started to move, pop-up or pop-under I started to block them. I've used an adblock of some sort for so long now I'd forgotten what some sites look like with ads. Any site that says turn off your block gets ignored, and there are no exceptions. If ads weren't annoying, were relevant to the site, legal, static, small, then I may consider unblocking them, it's their own fault they get blocked.

@Chris1776 @iode France already sends out nastygrams if they think you have been using a VPN to circumvent geo-restrictions. I've never encountered one personally, but I know people who have. I don't know if they really check what you're doing or just send them in case you may have.

@cstross@wandering.shop I'm highly conflicted. Tobacco killed several relatives in horrible ways. Outright bans without a general attitude change is a gift to criminals. I prefer the gradual squeeze approach, making it socially unacceptable, punishing vendors who break the rules, raising duty and treating the addicts. An age lock may work if the other methods have already had a big impact, otherwise it's pointless.

@seatsixtyone@mas.to Better than nothing, but overall lots of gaps. France and Spain seem rather empty and disconnected.

@Edent@mastodon.social more than that, but I've lost count. I always decline anyway... They need to change the law so that by law, the default is all non essential are off and you have to turn them on one at a time by hand if you want them on...

@theodora@rivals.space @infobeautiful@vis.social poor people can't afford cars at all, stop propping up big oil.

@foxbasealpha @meowki @mjd indeed, 1963 when the queen was on one side and Britannia on the other. Though notes only had two sides and colour after 1957 with the Series B.

@christof @EUCommission someone better tell Macron as the French government is obsessed with nuclear plants. They are pressing ahead with SMRs after their ERP plans ran billions over budget and are over a decade late... And EDF the state owned electricity company hates solar and wind, in fact anything that detracts from their nuclear fleet...

@gnate@ohai.social @girlonthenet@mastodon.social most of us don't because most politicians believe it's more important to build cheap houses, than it is to build houses people can afford to heat or cool... Trying to give insulation away is almost impossible, but the second energy prices go up in a cold snap or we get a heatwave, people complain... We did what we could with our houses and it makes a difference, though it's more effective in a new build.

@graves501@fosstodon.org @Edent@mastodon.social Paris used to be paper ticket based and worked very well. Then they went electronic only, the apps are a pain and I never got the NFC on my phone to work with a gate or you buy a card and then fart about topping it up, and again that wasn't super reliable. Trains are a mess too, as there are different sites and apps for same fricking company... You can only do certain things on the TER platform for example even though it looks like you can on the SNCF site/app but you can't!