pony_sheared

I think the oddness is the LLM content generator conflating information about the 2 types of batteries.

I have one of the originals too, I only use it in an emergency (e.g. maintaining a Raspberry Pi) because the trackpad is so awful - I can't type on it because the cursor jumps all over the place.

That basically shattered my dream of leaving my work laptop at home on short business trips. Well, that and it weighs as much as a laptop anyway so there wasn't actually a benefit.

You reminded me of one of the first Mac games I got as a kid: Shufflepuck Cafe, I don't think it had spin but the sideways speed of your mouse was imparted on the puck

My in-laws had a Dualit toaster. I am convinced this brand only survives in the market because people think they want one to signify that they've "made it", like getting an Aga.

The incredibly loud mechanical timer drove us all nuts. We always forgot to change the heating element (#slices) selector, so invariably ended up with one uncooked piece of bread. The pop up function is beefy but difficult to get escape velocity on small items. They eventually ditched it and went back to a £20 long slice Cookworks from Argos. They still have the Aga (also bloody annoying).

Duck duck go is worth trying, it's like Google from the old days

I started with Droidcam during the pandemic and switched to Iriun. Currently using it with an old iPhone SE over USB, but also used with Huawei P20 Pro. Not many features, but just works.

https://iriun.com/

I don't know if there are many cricket fans here, but I wondered if this is why - when watching the Ashes highlights of the cricket on BBC iPlayer or YouTube - the ball seems transparent as it runs over the grass.

You can refer to this list before naming that -copter

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IUPAC_numerical_multiplier

If enough of us are saying Tetracopter, it will stick.

Interesting article, I was initially very confused as I assumed Nautilus was the seabed mining company, which I bid some work to about 15 years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nautilus_Minerals?wprov=sfla1

It's the toilet cubicles. Americans have renormalised having a communal poo like the Romans.

Sounds great, but I feel we'll be wading through ads and product placement

Beat me to it...

Thanks ChatGPT, your land border fact is wrong. Here are some longer borders.

Canada - United States 8,893km Kazakhstan - Russia 7,644km Argentina - Chile 6,691km

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1103985/border-length-be...

We use todoist for our home shopping (grocery) list. Connecting this to Alexa has been one of the better quality of life improvements for us. After a bit of trial and error we figured out that you don't have to say "Alexa, add milk to my todoist shopping list", just "Alexa, add milk". So, for this specific purpose I don't think there is a better interface than voice.

It does occur to me that taking my shopping list on the phone to Tesco and putting things in a basket manually is probably not the future that Bezos had in mind for Alexa. But ultimately I don't trust Alexa / Amazon to actually do the buying.

In London, in an apartment block, I tried BT broadband (60Mbps max), then Virgin cable (100Mbps for £55 / month, prices go up for more speed), then EE 4G (£30 / month for 200Mbps +/-50Mbps, unlimited d/l upload is also over 60Mbps, about 6x on Virgin).

I don't game, so don't care about ping.

So, where I am, using 4G for my home internet is faster and cheaper, and I can gift data to my phone. I have not had any issues with reliability.

Thanks for this this comment, at least on Huawei's version of Android UI it's not at all obvious that the year is a button.

Give AFE a whirl, you can format and comment formulas

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/garage/profiles/advanced-for...

I loved Calca, paid and used it for years, but it seems to have stopped development and I switched OS... So I ended up falling back to Excel

Developers, rhymes with interlopers

We're currently crossing seas, not just the channel. Nice little map with stats here:

https://www.nationalgrid.com/our-businesses/national-grid-ve...

A few years ago I saw a talk by an industrial chemist, long distance power transmission over carbon nanotube cables. Looks like they're still not ready for primetime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_nanotubes_in_interconne...

I work in the sector (offshore renewables and O&G), here are a couple of interesting ones:

1. Short installation window: they can only install this machine when the tides are changing (i.e. not much flow), so they only have a couple of hours to collect the moorings and it hook it up to the grid

2. Fatigue: loads of areas, not just the turbine blades... variable loading on the mooring lines, vortex induced vibration of the power offtake cable, wave induced motion on the offtake cable

On the two you mentioned:

Marine growth (barnacles etc.) is generally manageable with anti fouling paints, or PTFE (teflon) coatings, wipers and bearings around the things that you don't want to seize up. The animals will have a hard time getting a footing in this high flow environment anyway, it'll be pretty well self cleaning.

Saltwater / corrosion is also manageable with coating systems, cathodic protection and large corrosion allowances.

While these two do cause issues, they're kinda "solved", you can generally apply the same straightforward techniques and they don't take up as much engineering effort as solving the installation, system design and fatigue.

The new Let() function gives you multi row formulas, with local variables.

https://insider.office.com/en-us/blog/let-names-in-formulas-...

And it's a hack, but you can put text comments inside an N() function and add them into your formulas.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/n-function-a624ca...

A Kent Braeburn in season is pure joy. Your description of the remaining months, primarily imported, is spot on.

I'm a su-dougher, because "pseudo" reminds me I can be someone else.

Sorry to horrify anyone but we actually do this at work (mechanical engineering company) - JavaScript calculated component dimensions as form fields based on user input (e.g. pressure or load rating) overlaid on technical drawings.

Reason it's done in pdf is a lot of our technical is spat out in PDF format (generated from CAD - SolidWorks).

There are other options like Traceparts or setting up a variable input SolidWorks model to generate loads of static outputs, if you have the time and money.