25 February 2017
Today marks the ninth anniversary of the sale of our first home together, my wife, my first daughter, and me. A precarious few months preceded the joy of signing that piece of paper and terminating the first of our two mortgages together.
Two concurrent mortgages, though in no way unique, stretched us nonetheless. The simple fact is that we picked a budget for our new home and exceeded that by a generous two-digit percentage.
And we’re still paying for that decision.
Still, it is good that I’ve not been shot at, for at least nine years and three months.
23 February 2017
Can modern incarnation of C5 succeed? (BBC)
I’m easily old enough to remember the original 3-wheeled washing-machine-motor-powered death-trap, the only safety aid a flag flapping above on a flexible whip shaft, but didn’t see one for real until years later, in a museum.
I view the name Sinclair with fondness. I owned a ZX81 (with 16K wobbly RAM Pack, a Spectrum 48K and thermal printer, and an almost-totally-impractical in-ear radio. I still want a red-LED RPN calculator, bug-ridden as I know it to be.
Though modern cars are far safer than during the 1980s, the roads are fuller and the drivers less-attentive than ever. So I confidently predict that Betteridge’s Law of Headlines applies here.
The answer to the question the headline poses: No, no more-so than ever.
23 February 2017
No, not an insult. Why, when it’s absolutely necessary to have a bag for collecting poo, there isn’t one? Why, when it doesn’t matter, is one’s pocket full of the things, often bags sliding languidly to the floor when rummaging for keys, cards, cash…?
No social faux-pas here though whatever the circumstances, it’s never particularly awkward; there are many dog owners out there with a similar sense of responsibility.
To avoid the embarrassment, the angst of returning to the scene of an ‘incident’ there has to be a better way of remembering allied to a better, more discreet method of poo bag concealed carry.
22 February 2017
Well, 3 weeks after paying for a Pinboard.in bookmark tagging and page archiving account, I’m no closer to having the site owner fix the issues I’ve mentioned.
It’s the first time tagging made sense to me, thus disappointing that the failures are increasing in scope, tested across a range of operating systems, browsers and apps.
Archiving hasn’t started yet despite multiple promises, full-text search is thus impossible, new tags require multiple refreshes to show up and so bundling is problematic, simple searches fail to find bookmarks visible on the same page! I could go on, but the bottom line is when the site owner repeatedly fails to respond and fails to fix the issues I highlight, I complain about, why should I invest more time in the service?
Pinboard.in thus easily fails to gain Baz’s seal of approval.
I might have to make my own, though it won’t reach the promise of Pinboard’s feature set. Here’s something I put together some time ago; it’s generated from a CSV file, no databases to introduce complexity.
http://bazbt3.github.io/readinglist/
19 February 2017
Today, a day of nerdy firsts: I had my first-ever Telnet session, and very tentatively started to play in my first-ever MUD. Bear in mind I’ve been on the Internet since March 1997; that’s twenty years! It’s interesting to note that both Telnet and the MUD precede my arrival in the slow lane of the Information Superhighway.
But first, these snippets from Wikipedia:
“Telnet is a protocol used on the Internet or local area networks to provide a bidirectional interactive text-oriented communication facility using a virtual terminal connection.”
…and:
“A MUD (originally Multi-User Dungeon, with later variants Multi-User Dimension and Multi-User Domain), is a multiplayer real-time virtual world, usually text-based. MUDs combine elements of role-playing games, hack and slash, player versus player, interactive fiction, and online chat.”
Telnet, first mentioned in RFC#15 in 1969, is almost as old as I, predating the World Wide Web by an easy twenty years! The Colossal Cave Adventure first appeared in 1975, is itself no spring chicken!
Me: I played a few text-only adventure games starting in the early 1980s, but all were stand-alone single-user relying purely on the imagination of the programmer(s) and the user (me!) My all-time favourites: The Hobbit, The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, and Zork (a game I never finished.)
You may have seen the game I ran with @mlv in an App.net thread, a flavour of which is available through the transcript here. A very enjoyable, diverting few months.
So there it is. Thanks very much indeed to @papierzeit on the pnut.io network for posting your server details and allowing me to have a go! I’ll be back.
Sharing imaginations, it’s amazing!