Status-Q
Well, I didn't get to see the eclipse this evening because dinner was on the table and there was a big tree in the way, but I gather it was much like previous eclipses, of which I've seen a few. I did do a quick search on my blog in case I'd written about them before, and found a somewhat-related post from 2009 , which I had forgotten. I'll re-post it here in tribute to a certain Ms Gaynor…
We've probably all seen the recent news about one AI company accidentally hacking into another AI company, but this is a lovely new, rather more down-to-earth, story from ABC News: "Andrew asked his personal assistant to book him a spot in one of his gym's coveted morning classes. It was a task he thought was well suited to this particular assistant because the booking form was online and because…
This is a lovely site from the National Library of Scotland. It lets you view two maps side by side, and you get synchronised scrolling, zooming; even your cursor is tracked on both images. You can pick from a range of maps, on either side. I've spent a lot of (enjoyable) time simultaneously exploring places I know well in a couple of different centuries. Now, has anybody got a time machine, so we…
"Democracy", Winston Churchill famously said, "is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." He didn't claim to have originated it, though, and actually, to give more context, he was speaking in the House of Commons on 11th November 1947 when he said: Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and…
Here's an unsolicited recommendation of a Mac utility... but first, a quick explanation of why I need it. One of my bookshelves contains a large number of bare hard drives in protective cases. These store data that I am keen to keep, just in case I need it again, but which would consume too much space if stored on my normal machines or servers. Much of this comes from past video projects: the raw…
Hannah Fry is one of those annoyingly accomplished people that make you realise how little you've achieved in life; for more details, see her Wikipedia page . She's now a Cambridge academic, and I don't think we've ever met, though another thing that her page told me is that she grew up in my childhood home town of Ware, and attended the same school as many of my friends... but nearly 20 years…
"He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me." ― Thomas Jefferson, Selected Writings
If you're not a technically-inclined user of the Apple Photos app, you may want to skip this one! The master copies of my photos live in two different worlds. There are the quick snaps taken on my iPhone: handy to browse, to share, to sync across devices and, increasingly important for me, to search by using a map. I generally access these, like everyone else, using the Apple Photos app, and…
I have friends who run marathons. Seems a bit daft to me, though I do quite like the idea of walking one. But I learned from friends who had recently done the London one that there's also a recent tradition of the Reverse London Marathon, which starts at midnight and follows the course in reverse, arriving at the start a little while before all the other competitors set off. Some sites refer to…
When I'm ruler of the world — something which is, by the way, on my list of retirement projects, but keeps getting usurped by urgent tasks like booking an MOT for my mum's car, so I haven't got around to it yet — one of my first actions will be to ban the phrase 'up to' from all marketing materials. Last year, I complained here about our bathroom cleaner , which announced that it removes 'up to…
" Credit ", I remember reading many decades ago, "is a nice new word for the nasty old situation we used to call Debt ". I've always liked that, and I can't remember its origin. I probably read it about the time that credit cards were first becoming popular, and it's stayed with me ever since! In the world of IT, there's a thing called 'Technical Debt'. If you spend all of your software…
Well, at 1am on Saturday morning, we arrived home from our 'Tour de France' in the campervan. We had planned to travel for a bit longer, but having stayed in 15 different places for our first 17 nights, we were in danger of overload and so decided to turn for home and save some of the other places for a future trip! One of the joys of campervan travel, and especially in France, and even more so in…
Well, yesterday's post got a lot of responses! Thank you, everybody! Some of them are visible in the comments and some were by email. But most of them were from drivers rather older than me who said that my formula would have them driving at 40 on motorways (or something like that). Now, notice that I did talk about the maximum speed you like driving rather than the maximum speed you would…
When we started towing a boat behind our car, and were consequently limited to 60mph rather than 70mph on major roads in the UK, I found I rather liked travelling that way. Yes, it took a bit longer, but it was more relaxing. And I've noticed that, whether due to a growth in wisdom or to a decline in testosterone -- I prefer to think it's the former -- I now tend to drive rather more slowly than I…
This morning, we visited Kermorvan Lighthouse, just across the river from the delightful Le Conquet. This is the most westerly point of mainland France, on a delightful headland, and definitely worth a visit, especially if you're lucky enough to get the kind of weather we had today. By the way, from here to the Scilly Isles is a little over 100 miles. How do I know this without looking it up?…