vr46

I keep them safe from harm in my stomach

I did push for all my digital images to be DNG, and they are, up to around 2018, and two out of four cameras use it natively - Pentax, Leica - while the other two use their own formats - Canon, Fuji.

The reason I’m less fussy now is because the combination of edits, metadata and image data in a single file didn’t necessarily help me when I switched from Lightroom to Capture One. I would love to be able to update the files to use newer RAW processors and better IQ, but I lose the Lightroom edit information in C1. That makes sense as they do things differently. But I hoped that with DNG there was a universal format for handling edits.

My JPEGs remain the definitive version of the images but I would love to be able to recover all those original edits again in C1, or any other editing program.

Only two weeks ago did I use a script found as a Gist to delete all my Google reviews and attached photos, after a bad but genuine and factual review of mine, accompanied by photos as proof, was removed after the place complained. It’s bullshit all the way down.

I thought they did a pretty good job in getting shit back up and running by 6 that evening, I flew into LHR the next day with zero delay and zero hassle, so hats off to everyone.

USB-C is a car crash of an implementation landscape, just because the interface is a single design, doesn't mean that you can rely on it. It is better than it was, but we've had several instances of issues with the USB-C, including my own personal favourite of my Nintendo Switch charging socket burning out because I used a non-Nintendo charger - an Apple one, completely compliant and as good as they get - to charge the Switch. A £50 repair.

Some USB-C cables aren't data compliant. They just send power. There's all kinds of foibles with USB-C that have taken years to work on and this just isn't clear to tech folks, let alone non-tech consumers.

The Lightning port has never done this to me, the device just charges and that's it. It transfers files and that's it.

Not at the rate she is reputed to work.

“Kemi Badenoch sounds like she's the reverse Tucci. Disgruntled aides are gossiping round the Westminster watering holes that she really doesn't like being asked to do much before lunch.”

No dispute from me, simply pointing that the state itself pursues a different direction than most on this subject by separating the two things.

On your final point, I think we may well be seeing a theocratic majority there quite soon, will be interesting to see how that goes.

This article underlines the point I made. Israel maintains separate data on citizenship and nationality on their population, and "Israeli" is not a "nationality" in that database. Of course Arab nationals of Israel have "Israeli" on their passports, but they are not "Israeli" in that database.

I think therein lies the complexity of the problem when the state itself maintains a population record where citizenship and nationality have been separated, and "Israeli" nationality does not exist, only "Jewish" exists. I believe this was also confirmed by the Supreme Court there in order to ensure a clear link or bond between all Jewish people all over the world. Anyway, what do I know.

I am not trying to explain away Dahl's comments, merely illustrating the complexity underlining all these arguments, and especially ones which allow Israel and its lobbyists to swarm over the arts in the UK and bully them if showing any sympathy for the Palestinians, which is no better than the torrent of antisemitic abuse meted out when there's sympathy for Jewish people.

No, not Dahl, the Royal Court - they had a character/villain in a play, Rare Earth Mettle, with a Jewish name, which I think is hardly the theatre's fault, and previously a play by Caryl Churchill in 2009.

We could do with wider knowledge of a complicated man. My friend's husband wrote a fabulous play about a short period in Dahl's life centred around antisemitism, which was directed by Nicholas Hytner at the Royal Court. I suspect that it was done to improve public relations after various overblown controversies there, but that is not to take away from the writing and performance.

The other context around Israel invading Lebanon in 1982 was given to me (I was too young at the time to have a clue about anything) by another (Jewish) friend, a biographer of Primo Levi, who said, "I believe Israel had the sympathy of the world until they invaded Lebanon," in a conversation about how those who claim to be virtuous by invoking victimhood.

Dahl never invoked that himself, but with wider knowledge of his life and a more critical view of Israeli history, we can see what a complex polarized mess this is with little chance of redemption for either, although it is interesting that one man has generated disproportionate column inches compared to a country.

How is open-source supposed to compete without access to Apple's certificates? If you are constantly forced to override the warnings about unsigned software, assuming your system even allows you in the first place, how much friction before less technical users give up?

Code signing is good, I like it, I approve, but it is a big obstacle for me personally and others who cannot afford Apple Developer Credentials.

When you say "conventions", do you actually mean, "insanity"?

Apple's CPU nomenclature is getting more deliberately confusing than BMW's.

The US prices never include state sales tax IIRC. Maybe we're finally getting some parity.

The proprietary tools were only an issue for people who needed the timeline. Games-wise, Both Actionscript 2 and 3 were perfectly usable without Flash. The MTASC compiler was a massive game-changer, and then Adobe released the AS3 compiler themselves, and certainly when I was at a consultancy working on a massive, expensive game, none of us were authoring anything in Flash. Even the designers and artists simply provided image assets.

A few years later, I did use Flash to teach students interactivity (in 2016, I was wondering why myself, but hey, university courses are hardly up-to-date) but there was little other reason to use it.

Today, I still rate AS3 and if there was an LLVM project to output, I don't know, WASM, or similar, I'd try it. Oh, there are?

- https://github.com/bvibber/wasm2swf

- https://ruffle.rs/

Of course, MTASC wunderkind Nicolas Cannasse went off to create https://haxe.org/, which was used quite well on Smart TVs and the like for a while, still used in games. Maybe we already have the answer, but the web is too boring for this stuff.

You need a non-UK card to use on your Apple Account to change its region.

I found XMPP an absolute delight to work with and built all kinds of command-and-control messaging utils with it that allowed me the flexibility to use it as a chat service and RPC broker all at the same time, with bots as APIs. It was nuts but brilliant. Bring it back, I say.

I agree, I've tried every possible setup I could to get things running reliably for a client and ultimately just held up my hands and went, "exactly why are you not using a combination of Signal/Keybase/GPG" for your use case?

Even PGP was easier to adopt en-masse than this.

Indeed. My 1999 Crumpler is sticky, as are similar things from that era, but the clear windows on my ski jacket’s helmet cracked into pieces. My old 1980’s Walkman case did both on the same case with both materials as you suggested.

You’ve not foolishly neglected a Billingham bag’s straps over 33 years, like I did. They need replacing now because they became so dry and brittle.

Ok, I get it.

Kinda makes sense for people who remember the originals and have money to burn, but clearly a different market to the cheaper UK paperbacks. The first 15 books are US$60, versus five via Kickstarter, and more expensive later on. Bittersweet, I’d like to see these books made more accessible to younger readers. Maybe it’ll come soon.

I have experienced too much degradation of both leather and plastic material over the last twenty to thirty years to know what's what, leather needs feeding and oiling to retain its properties, and plastic deteriorates in numerous ways from stickiness to brittleness. Leather that outlasts the car seems stupid, my friend and I have a complete set of Saab 9000 Aero seats that we salvaged from my car about 15 years ago, still waiting for either of us to turn them into useful seating for the home.

This I absolutely do not understand when the publishers in the UK are printing the books for sale already. The vagaries of international licencing, no doubt. There are plenty of complaints about the standard of illustrations in the books, and the covers are certainly lacking, but they are actual books on actual paper:

https://amzn.eu/d/0FzZNoX

https://amzn.eu/d/4DDoYaY

Great memories of these, and the Sorcery Series, although I foolishly disposed or donated all of mine, including the Sorcery Spell Book.

Ian Livingstone is a lovely man, too - he used to frequent the Square Enix office in London, and occasionally we would exchange tales of searching for a teaspoon while trying to make a cup of tea in the kitchen area, but I refrained from making gags about Testing Your Luck in order to find one.

Yeah, agreed, long time user, just let my sub lapse. I don't like VSCode like I did IDEA but all the features are there, and more, much more. The AI integration and choices (Cursor, Trae, RooCode, Aide, Windsurf, PearAI, etc etc etc) are way better and honestly take the place of a lot of stuff Jetbrains had an advantage on. Also Jetbrains stuff is often not working or unreliable - developing within Docker containers, for one, and it keeps popping up with their shit AI assistant that you can't disable. Honestly, what is this, Clippy and MS Office?

I literally did not renew last month after twelve years of paying, and longer overall, and the UI was the last straw. I installed the "classic" UI plugin, but it's like you say, I know they're going to drop it. I figured that if I have to use a UI like their new one then I can use VSCode as well, there's no real reason to stay. The real cutting edge stuff is happening over at VSCode anyway. Plus Jetbrains never made a decent VCS interface and I can always use an older version with a permanent fallback licence.

I agree that there's a barrier, but it's not huge. Mastodon really could use some people versed in marketing and onboarding. People use email without realizing that it's decentralized, I tried to draw parallels between that and Mastodon to my friend, but I failed.

Last weekend, I took an old cross-platform app written by somebody else between 1994-2006 in C++ and faffed around with it until it compiled and ran on my modern Mac running 14.x. I upped the CMAKE_CXX_STANDARD to 20, used Clang, and all was good. Actually, the biggest challenge was the shoddy code in the first place, which had nothing to do with its age. After I had it running, Sonar gave me 7,763 issues to fix.

The moral of the story? Backwards compatibility means never leaving your baggage behind.

Yet another shitshow-in-waiting. I know Mastodon isn’t as polished but leaving one frying pan to get into another is a lost opportunity. I failed to convince somebody to move to Mastodon recently.