VSpike's comments

Site seems to be down, but here's the most recent snapshot https://web.archive.org/web/20260210041538/https://blog.tyne...

I was surprised not to see Arthur T Murray in this list, as he was frequently seen in the newsgroups I used to read.

https://www.nothingisreal.com/mentifex_faq.html

Hah, yeah I was completely wrong on that! Should have fact checked myself. That's a falsehood I absorbed at some point and didn't question.

I definitely think if you want to use `cat` then just go ahead, it's fine. Sometimes these things are a power play, a way to distinguish between people who know the social codes and those who don't. In this case, it probably had a reasonable origin even if it's now more of a way to beat on newcomers. On old systems, memory was limited, disk was slow and forking was expensive. Saving a process in a script or one liner was a noticeable improvement performance-wise.

I learned some bash from an old-timer who would write an infinite-loop like this:

  while :; do 
    # loop body here
  done

This works because the `:` is a way to set a label, and it implicitly returns 0. It's just a weird wrinkle of the language. So, why not do `while true`? On old systems, `true` was not a builtin and would call `/usr/bin/true`. Writing the loop this way saves a process fork on each iteration.

On a modern system, you'd be hard pushed to measure the difference, so it really doesn't matter which style you prefer.

I had a couple of Sirius (AKA Victor) machines that were cast offs from my father's office given to me to play with. The first one was twin floppy, and the second had a 5MB hard drive. When I got the second one I think the first one got binned. When the second one broke, I bust it up to use the PSU and HDD on another computer. Of course, I really wish now that I'd kept at least one of them, but you never know at the time what would have value in the future and what is just junk.

> All of Google is AI. But you don’t see them bandying it around like a kid with new light up shoes.

I was at Google Cloud Next London yesterday and I hate to disappoint you but _everything_ seemed to be about AI. The keynote was about AI. The decor was all AI generated. Each breakout had to mention AI, to the point where a couple of speakers joked that they _weren't_ going to talk about AI. It was a bit depressing.

A business advertising a potentially harmful product in a way that contravenes the rules.

I was at school in the 80s and 90s in the UK and this brings back very fond memories of a highly eccentric Latin teacher I had, who mastered this technique and used it frequently. The other memorable thing about him was how he'd tell us he was going to do some photocopying and head off with no paperwork, only to return 5 minutes later still with no paperwork but smelling of pipe smoke.

Some more modern classrooms had the greenish boards that were a continuous loop that you could roll, but the older ones had black ones that were extremely heavy (maybe slate?). Some of them had a counterbalanced pair on ropes and pulleys in wooden runners, so that when you slid one up the other would come down. I remember in one lesson the ropes snapped and the front-most board came whistling down like a guillotine past the face of the maths teacher and landed with a bang like a gunshot. He was unhurt luckily but was extremely pale and shaken - understandably!

I've noticed that the offline experience on Spotify is utterly broken and has been for a while. I remember it being quite good when I first started using it, but it just seems to have got worse to the point of being unusable. I figured it was maybe just Android but my kids who are iPhone users said the same. We live in a rural area and use Spotify on the move a lot (on buses, car journeys, bike rides) and are often without signal so offline is essential. Maybe Spotify devs assume everyone has good 5G/Wifi and never actually test it out? Whatever the reason, having the option to make my own offline library to work around deficiencies in the service I'm paying £16.99 a month for seems like fair use to me (yeah, I know UK law has no such concept but I can sell the idea to myself at least). I might even dig out my old MP3 player as mentioned in other comments.

The "why" here ... or at least the reason for me to flash my Chromebook BIOS and install Gallium ... was because my Chromebook went EoL by Google and I wanted to see if I can keep it going for a while.

Gallium is an amazing piece of work, and the documentation is superb, but it's starting to show that it's on a very out of date base and there's no sign of a new version for some time. The efforts seem to have slowed down, which is a shame.

It leaves me wondering if the main patches and drivers in the kernel fork could ever be merged upstream. Maybe there's some technical or legal reason why not, or maybe it's just the work required and nobody has the time.

Either way, I hope it remains possible to run old Chromebooks for a while yet! They are often decent, cheap hardware if a little slow.

Much more detail here https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-60864283 The BBC claims that the 16yo was doxxed by others in his group after falling out with them. They also say that security researchers have been tracking him for at least a year.

I was talking to a friend recently about the hours spent playing these games, and how we'd tape or glue pieces of graph paper together to make large hand-drawn maps of the games. I wish I still had those! I have so much love for those games, and so many good memories of them. Also, I loaded them up in an emulator recently and I'd forgotten how hard they are! No save games, very limited lives, so many ways to die, so much skill needed to get jumps and moves just right, and often no time to think. And when you die, you lose everything.

TIL that in the US you use a different octane rating to the UK (and Europe generally). We use RON, while you use an average of RON and MON (called PON or AKI).

Our baseline fuel here is called "Premium Unleaded", despite it being the standard fuel and is 95 RON, which should equate to about 90-91 AKI meaning it lines up with your Premium gas.

We also have "Super Unleaded" at the pumps, which is 98 RON and should equate to 93 AKI in the US.

I guess that means we have no equivalent of your regular gas.

FWIW I've never managed to detect any benefit of using the 98 octane fuel, either in performance or fuel consumption. I've never owned a really high performance car, beyond a tweaked Saab 9000 Turbo running a higher boost, and that seemed to be happier on the Premium. I always assume that the 98 octane stuff is just a way of extracting extra money from gullible people, but I have no more proof of that than the anecdata from all the people who buy it and swear by it (probably because of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choice-supportive_bias )

It makes me wonder what other legacy telecom systems are still in use somewhere.

Are there any public X25 networks still in use? What about telex? Telex over HF? Inmarsat C? Any X400 gateways still running? Can you still send a UUCP mail?

This kind of digital archaeology has a strange fascination to it.

Ever since somebody told me the joke, I can't help thinking of it as "disk destroyer". It's a much more appropriate name.

Missing RiscOS! It would be fun to see some obscure old ones there like Flex and Uniflex too, but then you'd have to add all the DOSs and CP/M as well.

My Greek colleagues say the same about Greece, and having visited our Athens office a few times, I agree with them! Greek olive oil, cheese, and wine easily rival anything from Italy, but people (in the UK at least) tend to know the big Italian brands. According to my colleague, the finest chocolates are made with Greek almonds too, but they are not known as a product in themselves.

I forgot about that. Try https://web.archive.org/web/20171114181219/https://www.jwz.o...

I wonder if this is another validation of the "worse is better" philosophy as described recently in an HN article http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2017-May/009935.html and also discussed at https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html

I have a friend who uses `tac | tac` in pipelines to make the pipeline wait for all the data before continuing, which is an interesting hack.