vr46

Class is ongoing and it's for complete and utter beginners, I'm in week 5 right now. Gave up on Duolingo maybe 18 months ago or more.

I've only recently started the classroom learning, week 5 just began, and I'm in there five days a week, four hours a day, so that's really great and the outcome required is, I think, B1 level. Duolingo over 18 months contained so little vocabulary and grammar, plus I stopped it maybe 18 months ago too, so its impact was restricted to about one day's worth of class.

I did five years of French at school and three years of Spanish and definitely enjoyed the Spanish more.

I’m bilingual from birth and have never found languages difficult, but finding the time to put into them does get more challenging over the years.

Maybe that’s why I went with Duolingo initially. I’m not finding the language learning particularly hard even though I have twenty years on you, but I also have the benefit of having to be in a classroom four hours a day, five days a week. That is making the difference, apart from a very good teacher.

I know that in theory languages get tougher as you get older, but the teaching of languages has come leaps and bounds since I did French and Spanish at school, and my motivation has shifted too, so I’m finding things easier now than ever before.

Duolingo should be on borrowed time, as a method to learn a language it’s inefficient to the point of being ineffective - it seems to serve as an acceptable reason for fiddling with one’s phone, like a Guilt-Eze pill.

I spent 18 months on it and the learning was soundly thrashed by three weeks in a classroom, and for all the pupils, not just me, primed for success by 18 months with Duolingo.

Unless anyone has had a different experience, Duolingo is an exercise in self-deception. No doubt there will be people in difficult situations that have managed just fine with Duolingo, or in spite of it, but it doesn’t feel like a growing market.

It’s in the queue but luckily I’ve run out of money

My Steam Deck arrived in the summmer of 2022 after years of not having a PC but occasionally dual-booting an Intel Mac for games, and doing the whole Steam Sale thing of filling my boots with games that would barely get played.

Well. That pile of games is getting eaten through and more are being added as I and the family are loving the Steam Deck, despite having a Switch with dozens of games.

I’m currently 90 hours into my new favourite game, Witcher 3, having racked up similar on Forza Horizon, with Elden Ring, Cyberpunk, Skyrim, and a load more, await.

Valve have done an amazing job. The store UI still sucks balls, but who cares when I can replay HL2 in my hands.

Speaking of people with no shame, what are his parents up to?

There’s a lot of comments here and in the article - and in previous (honestly better) articles by others - about the lack of sunlight, and it’s definitely a thing, but we ensured junior was outdoors for the majority of his waking life and he still needed glasses at age 9. Later than me (age 6) but we put him into MiyoSmart lenses as soon as we could and they have definitely arrested the progress of his myopia.

In fact, there’s been no change in his prescription in a year.

In fact, one side went down 0.25 as my brilliant UK Opthalmologist deduced that he was not in need of it, and many kids opt for a slightly higher power than they need during the tests. Not to be fooled, this doc. The previous tests, the first, were conducted in Germany on similar equipment, but without a master sleuth operating them.

In short - MiyoSmart lenses are fricking brilliant and kids should be put into them immediately if they need glasses. They are twice the price in Germany than in the UK, like most things, but at least we had the choice.

When I was a lad, they only had a chart of ever-shrinking letters and can-you-tell-the-difference-between-Mickey-Mouse-and-Goofy-in-this-comic before they bolted a stronger pair of goggles on, fast forward 44 years and I’m a -10, and could well have been worse had I not found my optician 31 years ago. Now we monitor my eyes for diseases and potential retinal detachment.

But yes, be outdoors AND have passionate experts looking out for your vision.

Not really. Flatbeds give excellent consistency in their results and their workflow. Setups with digital cameras vary, require quite a bit of equipment for the serious, and are subject to a lot of variations in the process plus require more post-processing IMHO - from cropping to correction. They can also not deal with dust and scratches like an ICE scanner can.

Not everything is about resolution.

Digital camera scanning folks are enthusiastic and I’m all for it, but there’s a huge amount of value in a simpler process and automation. Look up camera scanning equipment and you’ll see an enormous amount of kit available to optimize these setups. There’s a reason it needs optimizing! :)

I have two slide projectors but haven’t used them since the 1990s because of all the faff and the fact that projection degrades slides. Plus the space required.

I think Pry is EOL, last time I checked, and wasn’t getting much help either.

Some great examples there, and look at how many frameworks are “$LANG on Rails”!

Rubyists introduced me to automated provisioning and deployment - Puppet, Chef, Capistrano - as well as concepts like test-driven-development and the genius of metaprogramming, but it’s common to hear javascripters waxing lyrical about TDD while slagging off Ruby.

Ruby is like 12-Bar Blues: people who love rock music don’t always like hearing blues. My favourite story is about seeing Earl Slick and Bernard Fowler performing Bowie, and they struck up a long bluesy intro which caused one of the two older fellas standing next to me at the bar to turn to me and say, “I really don’t like all this blues crap!” only for the “blues crap” to become The Jean Genie two seconds later.

Careful what threads you try and unravel as they may weave your own narrative…

I’m a version away from current events and playing catch up, hoping that these new improvements can replace pry!

As both a Ruby programmer and an DevOps/Infrastructure in the past, I have found Ruby to be a superlative programming environment but just as easy to program in badly as any other. I have never found it harder to run, monitor or debug than any other platform, certainly not harder than building and tuning a Java server platform. Really I think Ruby has been the biggest influence for more brilliant tools and practices in modern development than anything else, even if it doesn’t come close to the performance of a static language.

Very true, the railway fell from prominence but in the last twenty years, London has been seriously revamping its stations to possibly recapture some of that old, well, prestige and glamour are probably overstating the drive, but certainly to make them more useful, robust, commercial and extract more from every square foot.

My dad was one of 13, my mother one of 5, I had a huge family growing up, but most of my uncles and aunts didn’t have children, so I had fewer cousins. But still 11-12. Still big. Fast forward to 2023 and nearly all the older generation are no longer with us, families are stretched across Canada, America, UK, Germany, India, and barely anyone knows anyone else any more.

One cousin who I hadn’t seen for, shit, 31 years, surprised me by arriving in London from Canada one day with her daughter and texting me from a UK number to triply-confuse me. We had an absolutely awesome week, two only children reconnecting after so long, and junior got to meet - even if do say so myself - a very cool uncle who knew all the best places to go.

So my mission for the last five or six years has been to try and connect all my cousins’ kids to my own, so they can hopefully maintain a casual connection and come up with their own relationship. Maybe before I die I can organize a big family get-together of just the kids hanging out.

I found a loophole - check my older comments - to let me get out of their system, but they may have closed it. I bought Affinity for a laugh but switched to Capture One for better skin tones, Photo Mechanic Plus for better management. Both those have gone to the terrible subscription model but I’m just going to freeze my Mac‘s OS where it is and have a reliable machine for this.

It’s total madness, isn’t it. Long time user, from 1-5, then everything fell apart with CC, subscriptions and the clusterfuck of shite installed on my Mac.

It’s a replica, for sure, but it is still a commemorative monument, and it was specifically commissioned by the railway company and restored about fifteen years ago, with some bollards added to protect it from cars, but it’s forlorn and feels neglected sat shielded by the railing and then across a car park. I was leaning against it a few months ago waiting for a friend, lamenting that so much of London’s heritage and history gets so much attention and this poor thing is almost designed to be ignored.

The Charing Cross, erm, cross is marvellous and yet so badly situated, the mind boggles. My ex-girlfriend was a tour guide and filled me in on it about twenty-five years ago and NOTHING has improved.

Look at where it is on the satellite image:

https://maps.app.goo.gl/A7ZF3acr35XnN1AX7?g_st=ic

Personal recommendations are:

* Elmo’s Song

* Feist’s Sesame Street version of 1-2-3-4

A total shambles getting to and from the stage, but a devilish charisma once on it, great performer, RIP Shane, fecking hell

Oh hallelujah, I've got a lifetime sub due to buying their app back in the day and was grandfathered in, so I can escape some of the marketing, but their crazy, pants-on-head UI makes guitar harder a lot of the time.

I have no idea what has gone wrong with American appliances, apart from the general crappiness of using a top-loader washing machine in the first place, but I’ve had multiple different washing machines/dryers and dishwashers in the last decade and the efficiency programmes have been getting steadily better and better. Yes, they are European makes, Miele and Bosch, (evenly spread out across eight appliances) but they are fantastic at cleaning and drying. The new Eco 40-60 setting means that you can fill a machine with a whole range of laundry and go away, super helpful.

Tooting or Elephant & Castle? Even the new design of E&C is terrible last time I looked, as ambiguous and confusing with little time to get into the right place

Very cool technology, for those who don’t want, need or can’t make creative use of the visual artefacts that come with other cameras.

I’m sure a lot of people would love to bomb the BBC out of existence but that might be hard.

Agreed, a fascinating story about a company making fantastic cameras. I have an ETRSi on my shelf right now. In the 1980/90s many a serious advertising photographer used them in the UK and I can't believe how reliable and resilient they truly are. And the origin story is fab.

I could never afford this new, but about ten years ago I could, as the value of film cameras fell off a cliff. Get one now, folks, before everyone reads this story!

Maybe. I reprocessed a couple of 5D2 raw files a year ago with new tech (Capture One 22) and the images were fabulous, no complaints. I shouldn’t have been too surprised, I was making A1 prints from the 5D2 in 2009 so the camera is more than good.

But the 5D4 is superior, from the lovely focus-pulling via touchscreen to 1D-grade focusing. Let alone GPS, dual cards and the buffers.

There were definitely areas where these SLRs could improve from generation to generation, which seems to be much reduced regarding the iPhones, since the form is fixed, and upgrades or changes are often extremely unobvious.

Without the expensive gear, the iPhone looks considerably downgraded compared to better source equipment. I had a Canon 5DII the day it was released and within a week some friends and I had a music video entered into a festival, and within a year, two short films, all done without any extra lighting or equipment - including gimbals. The source camera and lenses were good enough - and the look was amazing compared to camcorders - to achieve this.

Forgetting "shoots" and professional lighting, the iPhone isn't going to have the massive range of other equipment, and when you're spending literally thousands of pounds on studio time, lighting hire, operator costs, etc etc, are you really going to pick up and shoot on an iPhone when you've got a Black Magic or Sony or Canon at hand? Unless you're being paid by Apple?

I get that it's viable but there really is a lot of road between viable and superlative.

Isn’t the HP35 around for about €50?

EDIT: OMFG no and look at the prices