vodou

I remember this blog! It was posting diary entries 70 years after they were written. This was a good time in the history of Internet and the diary/blog ended at the dawn of the golden era of the "blogosphere".

George/Eric paid a lot of attention to how many eggs his hens laid. It almost became somewhat of a joke in the comments. But good content!

https://orwelldiaries.wordpress.com/2008/12/01/11238/

Lots of great quotes (quite a few hen related):

> This morning a disaster. One hen dead, another evidently dying.

I am pretty sure he wrote more about hens and other birds than the ongoing world war.

Alright. Another case when "code of conducts" trumps manners or actually being a grownup. It really is a shame. Happened to a friend of mine on a rather big technical mailing list just for arguing for something that some people disagreed to. It would be nice to get back to a system based on manners and respect. That system worked for years.

I really understand your frustration. Everyone developing in Python for a long time has felt it a bit too often when breaking changes (even between minor version updates) once again ruins the day.

But I also understand that the world is not perfect. We all need to prioritize all the time. As they write in the rationale: "The team has limited resources, reduced maintenance cost frees development time for other improvements". And the cgi module is apparently even unmaintained.

I guess a "batteries included" philosophy sooner or later is caught up by reality.

What do you mean by "character assassination" carried out against Tim Peters? Not anything in the linked article I presume?

A long time ago I was working in a big project where the PLs came up with the most horrible metric I've ever seen. They made a big handwritten list, visible for the whole team, where they marked for each individual developer how many bugs they had fixed and how many bugs they had caused.

I couldn't believe my eyes. I was working in my own project beside this team with the list, so thankfully I was left out of the whole disaster.

A guy I knew wasn't that lucky. I saw how he suffered from this harmful list. Then I told him a story about the Danish film director Lars von Trier I recently had heard. von Trier was going to be chosen to appear in a "canon" list of important Danish artists that the goverment was responsible for. He then made a short film where he took the Danish flag (red with a white cross) and cut out the white lines and stitched it together again, forming a red communist flag. von Trier was immediately made persona non grata and removed from the "canon".

Later that day my friend approached the bugs caused/fixed list, cut out his own line, taped it together and put it on the wall again. I never forget how a PL came in the room later, stood and gazed at the list for a long time before he realized what had happened. "Did you do this?" he asked my friend. "Yes", he answered. "Why?", said the PL. "I don't want to be part of that list", he answered. The next day the list was gone.

A dear memory of successful subversion.

This is true, but only if you try to achieve the exact workflow that Office 365 offers. Maybe it is time to try to be a bit more subversive. Do we really need everything that Office can do? Is Microsoft's abstraction of office work really the holy grail of modern office work or is it causing "empty work"?

How did they react? I would hesitate to show it to my children of the same age. It is a very grim and sad movie.

Maternal mortality rate.

Georges Perec did the same with his novel "La Disparition".

What is almost as impressive is that these novels (at least Perec's) have been translated to other languages.

Botswana is a democracy with a higher democracy index (7.63) than some European countries. Even close to USA (7.85). [1]

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/democracy-index-eiu

A bit off-topic maybe: I really think the earlier film made by the same production team (Crazy Pictures), "The Unthinkable" [1], is a much better film than "Watch the Skies".

But apparently IMDb does not agree: "The Unthinkable", IMDb rating 6.0 "Watch the Skies", IMDb rating 6.4

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5227746

How good/bad would it be to have a poor man's tape archival, using standard cassette tapes (C90, C120, etc)?

For example, using something like ggwave [1]. I guess that would last way more than 5 years (although the data density is rather poor).

[1] https://github.com/ggerganov/ggwave

It's worth noting that "easy swedish" isn't just for immigrants, it as also (mostly?) for people with an intellectual disability.

This is cool! Some of Teenage Engineering's Pocket Operators, at least PO-32 [1], uses a data-over-sound feature.

Does Ggwave use a simple FSK-based modulation just because it "sounds good"? Would it be possible to use a higher order modulation, e.g., QPSK, in order to achieve higher speeds? Or would that result in too many uncorrectable errors?

[1] https://teenage.engineering/products/po-32

Probably not. It only mentions multi-threaded encoding. Not decoding. But for streaming it shouldn't matter a lot since you only decode smaller chunks at a time. Latency should be good. At least that is my experience and 95% of my music listening is listening to FLAC files.

One thing I've never understood with homeschooling: How come parents think they have the competence to be a teacher? Just because you are educated doesn't mean you are a good (pedagogical) educator.

I love Buster Keaton. For me he might be the greatest performer ever.

I actually watched the video linked in the comments with his greatest stunts and also one short movie together with my kids (5 and 8 years old) just the other day. They laughed their heads off!

So if you can hear me, Buster, wherever you are: Your films are holding up a hundred years later. That is quite a feat.

Here is the stunt where he broke his neck: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOo_ZUVU_O8&t=187s

Quite common in space industry. It is the script language used in many (all?) SCOS-2000 based mission control systems. Yes, is is actually used to control satellites and spacecrafts.

I don't miss physical media. Streaming works fine from a technical perspective. What I DO miss is the huge supply of films from all eras, forgotten gems, B-movies, etc.

In my part of the world we had Lovefilm where I got rentals delivered by post. I guess this was the same kind of service Netflix had in the US. The number of titles were just incredible. The number of films I can access today is just a tiny fraction of that. That really is a shame.

A disturbing thought here is that unit tests opened up an attack vector. Without the tests this would have been much harder to hide.

Is it possible to search for a specific pattern in this (or any other) hex editor?

E.g., if you have some sort of container format or aggregated file where you want to search for a specific instance of a pattern (starting from any offset). I haven't found support for this in ImHex (but I might have missed it).

In Sweden, the EncroChat infiltration led to more than 1000 years of prison sentences.

It doesn't affect the wage of the individual postal worker.

What is interesting is how long can the main participant of the unions, in this case IF Metall, hold out. According to them, based on that the strike only affects around hundred workers, the strike fund lasts for approximately 500 years...

I really do wish you luck!

I've been in mission control for a satellite when this is going on. It is the worst stress I have experienced in my professional career. Things sorted out in the end (some bias calibrations were just plain wrong). I hope for the best for this team!

Maybe I'm just old and grumpy, but the subscription business model just puts me off. Nowadays when I read about some development tool (or just any product), I start with the price page. If there are only subscriptions available I stop reading and go on with my life.

PLUTO is already a reference language for test and operations procedures for satellites and spacecrafts.

https://ecss.nl/standard/ecss-e-st-70-32c-test-and-operation...

If I mostly want to keep my own document repository (pdf, word, etc) with search ability over all included documents and, maybe, the ability to do notations, is this the right tool? If not, any suggestions?

I totally agree on "One Hundred Years of Solitude". It is almost a page-turner. Don't let this list scare you away from it.