Viewing profile — mrspuratic

Portugal has about 10% forested land, of which an estimated 25% is non-native eucalyptus (an active pyrophyte), and over 50% in some areas. I've seen the aftermath of eucalyptus fo…

My uni had an original 1800s style beam engine (from a whiskey distillery) as a feature in the Engineering faculty building foyer. It did move, but driven by electricity, and only …

My technophile uncle gave me one in the late 80s when he upgraded, even came with a monster of a daisy wheel printer. Can't remember what the WP was, but I remember being amused wi…

This feature has been part of bash since 5.1 (ca 2020), though it may not be enabled in all distros. cd src/bash-5.3/examples/loadables make accept enable -f ./accept accept (accep…

Plus /actual/ flywheels to compensate for non-synchronous generation: https://www.esbinternational.ie/case-studies/details/moneypo...

Land grab strategy 101.

Not as long as there's money to be made schilling and selling "qualifications" in prompt engineering.

This is how it works. Ireland was a net beneficiary until 2018, and now it is a net contributor (one of only 10 net contributors). These are decades long investments, Poland joined…

\usepackage{comicsans}

"updoc" is still my favourite joke name. A long time ago (predating E lang's updoc afaict) I wrote a toy markup for semi-technical docs, named so with the specific intention of dro…

showdead=no in user settings hides flagged & moderator killed posts

Smoke yes, but you're also turning a carbon sink into a carbon source. At ~16% of the island's surface area, peatland stores an estimated 53% of soil based carbon. (source: Irish P…

[dupe^2], previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46897340

Robert Frank Tinney, artist for over 100 Byte magazine covers 1975-1990, passed away peacefully on February 1st, 2026, at the age of 78. Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=…

I grind my teeth every time I hear "I need an urgent DNS change" :/

Hydro can help a lot with that. Grid stability is a big issue with non-synchronous power sources (SNSP).

> I couldn't quickly find a way to decompress them pdftk in.pdf output out.pdf decompress

Although it's not mentioned in those, it's going away at the end of the month: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46701733 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46678710

I got a Foxydry (Italy) wall-mounted rack a few years back, best €100 I spent that year. Bottom rack folds up flush to the wall, top rack raises nearly to the ceiling. Towels dry f…

No fridge? That's a heat pump.

This. I have that type (regenerative MHVR) installed in the attic for upstairs, and a synced pair of in-wall ceramic (recuperative) types on opposite sides of main living area down…

In old school FORTRAN (I only recall WATFOR/F77, my uni's computers were quite ancient) subroutine (aka "subprogram") parameters are call-by-reference. If you passed a literal cons…

Ireland is lucky enough to have several suitable sites, but just one operational: Turlough Hill, which has been running for over 50 years and is in use daily. It's at least as usef…

xmkmf. I feel your pain.

Total US Fed. Gov. contracts for 2024 was (according to gao.gov) $755B. That's a lot of drinking, never mind any anticipated AI spending boost next year.