Viewing profile — softgrow

The economics of bookstores in Japan favours the shop owner much more than other places. Books are sold on consignment, you order books and pay the wholesaler once sold. Book doesn…

At school studying typing there was a class of 66 all manual typewriters except for the two electrics. If you were good and had some spare time, you were given printed instructions…

There is a similar trap in walking the Thames path through London. Some is privately owned and you are made to not feel welcome, odd rules, buttons to press etc. Guardian has a 201…

Maybe we are solving the wrong problem? Should it be, where at the economies of scale in "building places for people to live in". I'd be interested to hear from others about relati…

I had a taste of OReilly books through ACM/IEEE. A few years pass and I'm working on some obscure legacy code and a book saved me. Needed it in a hurry so signed up for OReilly boo…

Reading the translation of the talk, public transport vehicles have a persistent MAC but for private cars the MAC address changes every 15 minutes.

To understand speeding you need to understand the concept of "speed choice". Everyone chooses how fast to drive, only those who choose above the speed limit are speeding. If your e…

If you ring for the ambulance, (Australian context), you will be told what to do! The telephony scripts have first aid baked in. The paramedic will come (not necessarily with an am…

I'd really like a rejection physical letter back saying thankyou for application but no thanks signed by a human. I put some effort in to applying, they could at least exert some e…

I hope the students can choose to use their own wifi at home if they have it, much better service for them. Depending on how it's setup, the cellular contract may be not be that cr…

As documented at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_Easter_eggs google search for "times new roman font" and the results are returned in that font. ( https://www.google.c…

I don't think my taxes/insurance costs/donations to charity are high enough. London (donation funded) has a helicopter service that attends 6 serious trauma cases a day. Denmark, G…

Sounds like Hatzolah Melbourne, https://hatzolah.org.au since 1994 Since 1998, in Melbourne for anything that might need a defibrillator a fire engine is sent at the same time as t…

Worse still, I loathe screenshots of text on a website. Please make text is text so it works with a screen reader, can cut and paste etc. Less of it about now but used for multilin…

I watched the film and was surprised when it moved on from gambling and scams. Initially thought it was aimed at avoiding being scammed of your hard earned cash by shysters. I wond…

At least it has a steering wheel. Wait until that disappears to be replaced by a joystick or worse still a USB port, bring your own mouse.

Fire and rescue appliances are a bit of a problematic thing to buy as they never go very far and are retired with low mileages. In my Australian State, South Australia, this a huge…

It's in Table 1, of the paper. The "safe" night-time level for the bottom 50% of the population is surprising low, 0-1.21 lux. I've been sleeping for years with 10-20 lux (inner ci…

I'm glad that Shanghai has moved to the next level in public transportation in meeting customer demand. Most cities don't have the funds to buy smallish buses and labour available …

https://kakaku.com (A shopping comparison and review site) has menus not as long as McMaster-Car (down the left side), then more menus in the body and tabs thrown in to boot when y…

It is better, has underground, overground and is womble free. Also has planes and current weather effect (raining).

I built a very bright light source using a lamp stand from Ikea and the brightest, narrowest beam LED reflector I could find from my big box hardware store. The project works and g…

Surprisingly or not, isn't a very new idea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perovskite_light-emitting_diod... Note that extending the lifetime is key to taking advantage of their lowe…

Correction QLD publishes, NSW has bits and pieces due to FOI requests.

Ditto NSW in Australia (but not all states).