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Phone Farewell

Sunrise, Polwarth, 23 November 2022

The first photo I posted from my iPhone 7 was a sunset, so here’s the last one, a sunrise from a week ago. The battery was on the way out and it had developed other quirks, so now I’ve got an iPhone 12 Mini, only two years old, which makes it the newest phone I’ve owned in a decade. The refurbished price of the things is getting a bit crazy, but then so’s everything.

30 November 2022 · Journal

Flip-Flopsing

I was floundering around on Friday night with some verses on floating-point operations per second, as you do. Flops is such a fun word to play with…

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20 November 2022 · Infotech

Toast of the Toun

Colonial America is a myth.

Voter ID in Britain is “far worse than any US state”. How the U.K. became one of the poorest countries in Western Europe.

After the Halloween horror in Korea, here are ten tips for surviving a crowd crush.

How Ukraine won the battle for Kyiv. There’s a harrowing 90-minute documentary on Mariupol: The People’s Story on iPlayer at the moment. It’s devastating to see the human impact, and to have the story of its destruction laid out all at once.

Doctors using AI catch breast cancer more often than either does alone.

The icy village where you must remove your appendix.

I binged on Fern Brady’s stuff on iPlayer last year, before she became the breakout star of the latest series of Taskmaster. Fern Brady Goes Viral has sadly dropped out of view for the time being, but there are excerpts on YouTube. Here’s a podcast featuring Brady on autistic meltdowns, understanding emotions and being the black sheep.

All 125 times a professor said “beef” in one lecture.

Crumbs. “A prankster spun a web of deception about the inventor of the electric toaster … one Scottish primary school organised a day of activities in his memory” [via Mefi]. Our kids have been at Scottish primary schools during the timespan of this hoax. This is all too close to home (appliances).

20 November 2022 · Weblog

Twitteration

In the space of a few weeks, Twitter has been taken over and brought to the brink of collapse. Welcome to hell, Elon. Like Trump, Musk reveals a vapid mind super-charged by wealth and ego. Elon. Trump. Resentment. Elon and Jack aren’t competitors, they’re collaborating. Musk doesn’t have a degree in Physics, or any technical field (archived). A recent OED Word of the Day was twitteration (n., a state of nervous excitement or agitation; anxiety, perturbation), reflecting the widespread sense that the site’s days are numbered.

If you’re looking to flip the bird the bird and embrace the mammoth, here’s a useful tool for finding some of the people you’ve been following on Twitter. It’s a couple of weeks since I set up a new account on a Mastodon server. Second time lucky, I hopeā€”the first one I joined years ago now redirects to a porn site, which isn’t a great sign.

20 November 2022 · Net Culture

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