Viewing profile — VSpike

I've always loved The World Tonight. I often listen to it the next day, since it's less driven by drama than the morning news programmes. It has a sober and considered tone combine…

Site seems to be down, but here's the most recent snapshot https://web.archive.org/web/20260210041538/https://blog.tyne...

I was surprised not to see Arthur T Murray in this list, as he was frequently seen in the newsgroups I used to read. https://www.nothingisreal.com/mentifex_faq.html

Hah, yeah I was completely wrong on that! Should have fact checked myself. That's a falsehood I absorbed at some point and didn't question.

I definitely think if you want to use `cat` then just go ahead, it's fine. Sometimes these things are a power play, a way to distinguish between people who know the social codes an…

I had a couple of Sirius (AKA Victor) machines that were cast offs from my father's office given to me to play with. The first one was twin floppy, and the second had a 5MB hard dr…

> All of Google is AI. But you don’t see them bandying it around like a kid with new light up shoes. I was at Google Cloud Next London yesterday and I hate to disappoint you but _e…

A business advertising a potentially harmful product in a way that contravenes the rules.

I was at school in the 80s and 90s in the UK and this brings back very fond memories of a highly eccentric Latin teacher I had, who mastered this technique and used it frequently. …

I've noticed that the offline experience on Spotify is utterly broken and has been for a while. I remember it being quite good when I first started using it, but it just seems to h…

The "why" here ... or at least the reason for me to flash my Chromebook BIOS and install Gallium ... was because my Chromebook went EoL by Google and I wanted to see if I can keep …

Much more detail here https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-60864283 The BBC claims that the 16yo was doxxed by others in his group after falling out with them. They also say that …

I was talking to a friend recently about the hours spent playing these games, and how we'd tape or glue pieces of graph paper together to make large hand-drawn maps of the games. I…

TIL that in the US you use a different octane rating to the UK (and Europe generally). We use RON, while you use an average of RON and MON (called PON or AKI). Our baseline fuel he…

It makes me wonder what other legacy telecom systems are still in use somewhere. Are there any public X25 networks still in use? What about telex? Telex over HF? Inmarsat C? Any X4…

Ever since somebody told me the joke, I can't help thinking of it as "disk destroyer". It's a much more appropriate name.

Missing RiscOS! It would be fun to see some obscure old ones there like Flex and Uniflex too, but then you'd have to add all the DOSs and CP/M as well.

My Greek colleagues say the same about Greece, and having visited our Athens office a few times, I agree with them! Greek olive oil, cheese, and wine easily rival anything from Ita…

I forgot about that. Try https://web.archive.org/web/20171114181219/https://www.jwz.o...

I wonder if this is another validation of the "worse is better" philosophy as described recently in an HN article http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2017-May/009935.html and als…

I have a friend who uses `tac | tac` in pipelines to make the pipeline wait for all the data before continuing, which is an interesting hack.

A fascinating article. There are similar parallels with the smugglers and poachers of my area of the UK - rural Dorset. Characters like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Gulliver…

Even though I think this was video trickery mostly, I often wonder if the later experiments with computer controlled instruments were partly inspired by this Monkey Drummer video h…

A friend of mine swears by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MH_Message_Handling_System