coroxout

It appears I was mistaken and you do need a licence, though it's free. You should also ask the landowner's permission.

I had thought you only needed the licence to set up traps, which I'd rather not myself as there's a risk of catching/injuring/killing other species, particularly native crayfish or otters. Sorry for the inaccurate post. Sadly it's too late to edit it or I'd put strikethrough all over it...

More details about catching (mostly with traps) and licence details below. http://foragedfoods.co.uk/how-to-catch-signal-crayfish/ https://www.gov.uk/guidance/permission-to-trap-crayfish-eels...

To answer your questions, I'd wait until at least spring; I've only been in summer. Not sure about speed or depth (I've seen them in fast shallow streams and in a slower metre-deep river) but they like lots of hiding places like rocks or overhangs.

In the UK the native crayfish are already severely threatened by invasive signal crayfish. I'm not sure if we have marble crayfish yet but if they breed that quickly it sounds very bad for the native crayfish - and maybe for the accidentally introduced signal crayfish too.

There are various streams near me where you can go out in summer with a piece of bacon, some string and a box (maybe a net too) and catch signal crayfish. You don't need a permit as they're an invasive species - in fact you're not allowed to put them back if you catch any.

(But do put them back if you catch the native species! The signal crayfish are larger and have big red claws with white flashes which give them their name.)

edit: was writing my now largely redundant post as masklinn posted. I hadn't realised the Marmorkrebs were smaller - does that make them less of a threat? It does say they're already a problem for native species in Madagascar.

The best I've found is Slow German: https://slowgerman.com

The presenter speaks slowly (as the name suggests) and clearly, and there are over 100 episodes on a variety of topics, so there's probably something to suit your interests and level.

Deutsche Welle also have podcasts and videos at various levels and you can download a slowly-read news broadcast ("Langsam gesprochene Nachrichten") every day: http://www.dw.com/en/learn-german/s-2469

Or for a normal speed news broadcast for native speakers, you can subscribe to ZDF's "Tagesschau" or "Tagesthemen" podcast, or watch a video of "news in 100 seconds": https://www.tagesschau.de

I'm also interested to hear more recommendations!

Impressive how many of the buildings are still there and recognisable. Nice to see most of the 30+ year old apartment blocks still standing and well looked after.

Must have been so weird to look out from a high-up apartment on one side of the wall all the way over no-man's-land towards the windows of another block on the other side.

I had trouble reading the article because of adblocker-blockers - it was fun when I got there but if anyone else has trouble it's mostly a selection of highlights from this twitter thread and related hashtag #reviewforscience : https://twitter.com/DaniRabaiotti/status/958227887915786241

I paid for some map updates for my older model of TomTom a year or two ago - I considered using a free alternative but I was about to go on a road trip and wanted to be sure I had the right maps for my device plus thought paying might be some guarantee of quality.

The "new" maps were out of date - road alterations which had happened 2 years previously in my home town weren't on there yet. We found various other places on our trip where it seemed the road layout had changed since the maps came out, too.

Maybe I did something wrong somehow but it wasn't a very good advert for paying for maps. I've never used OSM on a drive but it's very good for walking in my local area as it has pretty much every footpath/cycle path (unlike Google Maps, which is very road-based), so I'll try it next time.

As for that older TomTom, I replaced it with a newer model because the battery life had gone right down and the touchscreen was failing, but the new model touchscreen is also very unresponsive, it already needed constant charging even when it was brand new, and the interface and directions aren't as clear as the decade-old model. I won't buy TomTom again.

When I was in Germany, I bought a bottle of Gorbatschow vodka to bring home.

I thought the name was something to do with Mikhail Gorbachev, but it isn't - the brand has been produced in Berlin since 1921 after its founder Leo Gorbatschow left Russia during the October Revolution (thanks, wikipedia).

Fairly decent vodka for the price though; would drink again, but since Stolichnaya and bisongrass vodka are also much cheaper in Germany than the UK they're a better candidate for limited luggage space.

I use pushd and popd every day. If you forget what's in the stack you can see what's in it by using the "dirs" command.

You can also use pushd -n (where n is a number, although I usually end up needing trial and error to get the right one) to rotate the list of dirs without removing any from the stack - useful if the list has more than 2 directories, or 2+ directories you need to switch between repeatedly.

pushd and popd also work out of the box in Windows command prompt, although you don't get "dirs" or any fancier options like in bash, just push and pop on a plain old stack.

I enjoyed the article, thank you.

Shame to see two pictures of Maurice Wilkes working on EDSAC (the big picture at the top and one further down of the mercury delay lines) and no mention of his name, though.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/30/maurice_wilkes_rip/

It might have been sold for a high price, but vellum and coloured inks were expensive at the time, and it is a very long document when a much shorter one would still seem to fit the bill.

Seems a bit of a gamble if that was the plan, and the scribes were presumably either well-to-do or trusted by someone well-to-do if they could get their hands on the raw materials. That makes the prank/con/crazy spirit writing theory seem less likely to me but certainly doesn't rule either out.

I do agree that the repeated glyphs and almost-repeated "words" are a big red flag against "can this actually mean anything?", and I'm not sure the idea of abbreviations really explains that.

However, many medieval documents even in known real languages do contain almost undifferentiated glyphs one after the other:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minim_(palaeography)

Not quite the same, but something similar might conceivably apply to e.g. the Voynich's c-like characters.

Huh. I didn't know about that. Thanks for the info.

I don't know anything about the current maintainer or any of these disputes but I hope WOS keeps going; it's been going for over 20 years and amassed a lot of good stuff in that time.

Good stuff, thanks!

If you're looking for somewhere else to archive them, World of Spectrum might be interested. They have ZX80 and ZX81 books and software as well as Spectrum - and I don't see these listed.

http://www.worldofspectrum.org/archive.html http://www.worldofspectrum.org/books.html

Thank you for scanning these!

I love lynx.

I may be alone (or in a group of 7), however, judging by how often I get a 403 Forbidden error because a site is set up to reject anything with a user agent of lynx. Seems to be a default of many Wordpress setups. e.g. lynx slatestarcodex.com.

Maybe I should just tweak the user agent, but hey, lynx pride.

(edit: looks like it's the "libwww" part of the default lynx user agent which gets me blocked, not the "lynx" part. OK, I will edit that out. Ha!)

But with no verbs how would you do the gag from Monkey Island where the verbs change for the parrot?!

http://monkeyisland.wikia.com/wiki/Murderous_Winged_Devil?fi...

(I kid; the verbs are mostly superfluous, as "look" and "use" basically cover all the options, but I really do fondly remember the verb-changing gag above...)

I find a lot to agree with here.

It's all very conceptually neat and (if you're lucky) easy to read from the top down, where you enter one function and read off a list of other functions which are called in order.

But then if you look into any of those other functions they also call more functions and so on, several levels deep. And when you have to debug someone else's code because the data after function 15 of 17 isn't quite right, and you have to unpick all the places it's been passed through in slightly different versions and slightly different lists of parameters, it can be a nightmare.

Same with my linter telling me to close a file within a few lines of opening it. Personally I'd rather keep all the file-munging code in one place rather than scatter it down a rabbithole of nested functions as an exciting Alice In Wonderland story for future developers.

I try to come to a compromise on these things when working in a team, though...

So it is - you need to search the Macintosh section rather than the HyperCard section. Thanks!

Two other Rand and Robyn Miller titles are there too: https://archive.org/details/TheManholeMacintosh https://archive.org/details/CosmicOsmoMacintosh https://archive.org/details/SpelunxMacintosh

I never had a Mac in that era but I'm looking forward to trying these after reading the Digital Antiquarian article about the Manhole: http://www.filfre.net/2016/10/the-manhole/

The HyperCard stack I was really interested in seeing after all these years, though, was the Mackerel Stack - alas, not there (yet)... http://www.craphound.com/nonfic/mackerel.html

That's pretty cool! Well done.

Now I'm wondering whether the game clock could be suspended unless ticks were sent via API, to turn it into a turn-based game to be played only via API calls...

Interesting, thanks.

We have a small fridge in our small kitchen which will need replacing soon as the door has gone rusty underneath and the seal is beginning to go.

It used to be a standard size of fridge but they're all wider and deeper now (maybe to allow thicker walls for better efficiency - the internal dimensions are often no bigger) and we can't find a name brand model to fit in the space, only cheap budget brands. So it's good to know that a cheap fridge can be just as good.

Meanwhile, our other name brand white goods have needed replacing after 2-3 years each. It's impossible to find anything with a decent warranty. Strange to remember that my parents' fridge, cooker, washer, drier when I was a teenager were all older than me.

Yes, http://www.shikadi.net/keenwiki/Keen_1_Levels says the "teddy bear maze" is the secret level and that the yellow door never existed.

Not sure if a mistake or red herring; probably the former but in a more tortuous level layout it would be kind of funny/cruel to make people work to get the green key to get the yellow key to get nowhere extra at all...

Thanks to khedoros1 for linking to the wiki, which has lots of good stuff on (and also lets you look at the level maps while the originally linked site is down): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14656926

That wiki is brilliant, thanks!

I'm going to disagree from the opposite end of the spectrum as the two replies already disagreeing.

I wanted to program computers from when I was a kid and my dad showed me how to draw coloured circles on the screen. And now, I have a job in tech, part support, part coding.

But the thing is, I'm not very good at the coding part. I'm also quite lazy and hate practising things I'm not very good at, so I don't put in the work to get better.

Meanwhile I've seen coworkers come and go and maybe been a bit scornful of them because they seem to be only in it for the money, or they don't know things "everyone should know", maybe they don't even seem to want to ("pfft, what kind of boring loser would even care about that stuff"). But, they've been much better coders than me: they've picked stuff up faster, they've put in more work, they've gone on to new, better-paid, more interesting jobs. And well done them.

(It's a good, encouraging story for beginners who are drawn to it though, I agree with that part.)

I spent so many hours playing the first game as a kid, decoding the alphabet (which I would later discover it tells you how to read in episode 2 or 3 anyway), trying to get every last item, etc.

My favourite bit was the dark, fiery secret tunnel underneath one of the larger levels (http://www.commander-keen.com/levelmaps/1/013.gif), which teleports you to the city on the right-hand side of the world map at the bottom of the level maps page, not really visible from the map screen when going between the main cities... but I no longer remember which of these maps is that city, alas

(or maybe not alas: I hope I've put some more currently useful information in that part of my brain instead. Thanks for the nostalgia!)

I also have a filled-in square which it says is incorrect with no indication of where/why it's incorrect, which is quite frustrating. Would it really be too easy if you could guess and then be told why it was inconsistent?

I don't know if this is only new for books or new in the US or if I somehow hit a trial of this feature, but I've had this buying a music CD from Amazon UK. I hit the usual default "Buy" button in the buy box and the CD was shipped from a third-party seller in another country.

Kind of annoying as it was a Father's Day gift (so the order must have been about a year ago) and the unexpected international shipping meant it didn't arrive until after the day itself. I'm pretty sure there'd been no indication of this on the sale page.

L for rest (lower-case for a single turn stood still, with shift to rest until health recovered), or the 5 in the middle of the numeric keypad if you have the right keyboard layout, I guess. Sadly 5/the numeric keypad diagonals don't work on my UK keyboard layout.

There are some alternative keys but I keep mixing them up with (the more traditionally roguelike) vim keys, which they are near but not quite similar enough to.

Looks really beautiful though! Enjoying bashing my way round; I don't know Dart but I'm looking forward to taking a peek at the source later.

(My favourite actively updated roguelike is Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup. There's a new version due next week...)

I agree that the nominative case endings and usual SVO order of English should prevent (nearly all) false positives.

(The only one I can think of is that comparatives are meant to take the nominative case, e.g. pedantically it's supposed to be "he" rather than "him" in "A man smarter than he would decline". However, this rather convoluted sentence structure is rare, even more unlikely in a plot summary rather than the full novel text, and almost always followed by the subjunctive rather than an indicative verb.)

My bigger concern was what doesn't get caught because it appears after a noun rather than a pronoun, or has an adverb in the way. I thought major dramatic plot points might be more likely to use the character's name rather than a pronoun, and so we might see fewer words like "murders", "defeats", etc. From the results it seems like those words are still present in large quantities, so perhaps I'm wrong.

I'd like to see it done with "they" too, partly as a control case and partly to see if any verbs are more common for individuals rather than groups (although the rise of impersonal "they" may hinder that aspect of the analysis).

I have a 4-year-old Samsung S3 Mini. I keep wi-fi, bluetooth, data, GPS turned off by default, make few calls, don't send or receive many texts, and if I don't use wi-fi or play games the battery will last several days - probably 5-6 days when the battery was new and now a bit less.

However, I do usually turn wi-fi on for 10-20 minutes a day (e.g. look at HN and follow links to a few different news articles - news sites can be quite processor-intensive) and that knocks at least a day off the battery life. If I play a game, even fairly simple puzzle games, I need to charge it that day.

I'm also on my third battery for it as the previous two eventually got to the point where they couldn't hold a charge at all, so I'm very reluctant to upgrade it to a model without replaceable battery, but alas, that leaves few options. I'd also like a new phone to fit in my pocket like the S3 mini does, and as far as I've seen those two criteria knock out every recent-gen phone.

I can only hope that sooner or later a company decides people like me are a big enough market segment to reach out for again, but I suppose people who are happy to keep a phone for 4 years are not good enough customers and need to be forced to buy a new phone every year by the battery dying.

I can relate to (what you wrote and also) "I'd rather cut my toenails with a rusty butter knife than write the paper", but even more "I'd rather cut my toenails with a rusty butter knife than be the kind of person that still isn't writing the paper even though it's 11pm on the day before the deadline but, oh, look, I'm still not writing the paper and now I'm actively running round the kitchen looking for butter knives as if they'd actually get me out of writing the paper, and now I'm cleaning the kitchen worktop for the first time in several months instead, and now I'm 10 pages deep on a Google search for what kind of spider I saw in the kitchen, and oh crap now it's midnight and I'm still the worthless jerk that hasn't started their paper"

I don't know if I have ADHD, though. Admittedly I wrote the above in a fairly exaggerated-ADHD way, and it's all the kind of thing I do actually do, but... no diagnosis, maybe just anxious about failure or lazy instead.

It's true that adult ADHD (and non-hyperactive ADHD, and ADHD in women) is under-recognised in the UK.

However, NICE (the National Institute for Clinical Excellence) has published guidelines about diagnosis and the short version iirc is that you're well within your rights to point out that your GP is not a specialist in this area and ask to be referred.

The bad news is there may not be anywhere locally to refer you to, so you may need to travel out of area, pay to see someone private (and then fight to have your prescription accepted and paid for by the NHS). There are more kids' specialists but they may not recognise the nuances of the adult condition.

No, I haven't done it - I've been meaning to for over a year and keep putting it off, ha ha.

Links: https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/CG72 - NICE guidelines; https://aadduk.org/forum/ - AADD UK forum