icosian

> Yeah, and definitely is not the right story for hotels.

The first time I encountered Destination Dispatch was in a London hotel, maybe 15 years ago. Anyone unfamiliar with the system would naturally sprint towards an open elevator and end up in an elevator with no buttons, totally bewildered. It's not the right system for a transient population.

I'm sad to hear the service has gone off the air. I was a constant listener to BBC Radio 4 on 198 kHz growing up in Dublin. It was a valuable window onto the world.

Listening to the last transmission there, I note that the continuity announcer, (the Irish) Al Ryan, signed off with 'oíche mhaith', i.e. 'goodnight' in Irish. A nice nod, I think, to all the former LW listeners in Ireland.

For a long time after my daughter was born, I wasn't sure if she could hear or not. I tried to get her to react / turn her head / wake up to voice, music, claps... Nothing.

One day I was taping up a box behind her and I pulled out a length of packing tape. It made that awful screeching noise and she was startled. It was a repeatable result. Her hearing was fine, she was just super chilled about noise in general. I found her limit with a roll of tape.

I don't know if they are still in print but Bletchley Park Trust published a great series of monographs on particular aspects of the codebreaking story there. Highly technical, written by specialists, sometimes by people who had worked there. I picked up a load of them when I was there and can recommend.

Only about a dozen years ago Bletchley was inviting former codebreakers back for an annual reunion. I used to go along to hear the talks, meet some of them and get books signed, including by Betty Webb. I'm glad they eventually got the recognition they deserved.

We have almost lost the chance now to hear personal testimony of WWII. I've met several Battle of Britain pilots too, but the last died in Dublin recently:

https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2025/0318/1502596-hemingway/

Updated by the owner now.

I can attest. We had a milkman (daily), and a vegetable man, an egg man and a bread man who came around every week. Only the milkman had an electric vehicle.

Perhaps it could have been offered as a "naive" interim solution to be replaced by machine learning, with the benefit that the ML team would have a benchmark to show how good their model was by comparison.

A Martello tower in Howth, Dublin, has also become a technology museum, known as the Hurdy Gurdy Museum of Vintage Radio. It was the passion project of one individual, Pat Herbert, who sadly passed away in 2020.

https://sites.google.com/site/hurdygurdymuseum/home

The photo of the Wrens has been published before. I was once sheltering from the rain in the doorway at Bletchley Park, along with an elderly lady. She turned out to be Dorothy du Boisson, the woman on the left in the photo. I happened to have a book with that photo on me, and she pointed herself out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Du_Boisson

I donated my BBC Model B+ to a computer museum recently, along with a stack of Acorn User magazines (available on the Internet Archive, BTW) and software on cassette. Felt strong pangs of regret driving away. I can still feel the excitement of figuring it all out, a world opening up to me.

Those BBC TV shows had the unusual feature of broadcasting software over the end credits. Just had to tape the screeching and play it back into the computer.

I have wished for something like this, so I tried it out, using _Beauty Beats_, by Beats Antique. I got one of your own playlists - what are the odds?!

Works great, thank you!