Viewing profile — tragomaskhalos

It's a shame that the tyranny of volumetrics referenced in the article means that in the UK some of my favourite crisp flavours have been brief one-off novelty runs - coronation ch…

When it comes to Christmas songs, I'm afraid you will have to prise Slade from my cold dead fingers

Built-in graphics commands are a massive win, and a big gap in today's standard language offerings for kids. Any old timer will tell you that the ability to trivially get sprites u…

see also: microwaves A microwave needs two dials - one for power level, and one for time. Not a calculator keypad, not buttons with +1 and +10 on them or any of that nonsense - dia…

many years ago an older relative went on a holiday to Spain and was outraged that their apartment did _not_ have carpet. I deemed it futile to point out that carpeting is desirable…

I had no idea that each 'Spoons has its own custom carpet design. They are a much-derided chain but this is a nice detail, and by keeping drinking affordable they ensure the next g…

In the UK a misplaced apostrophe (in a plural or in possessive its) is called a "greengrocers' apostrophe", presumably due to folks in that trade being particularly susceptible to …

I would have crashed the Greek paper because we were not taught accents, but the instructions make it very clear the answers require them!

It's worth reiterating that Go was created by Google to solve Google's problems. If it also solves your problems, or a worthwhile subset thereof, then that is a happy serendipity, …

Slightly younger than the punch card era, but one bit of "old" tech I don't miss is the line printer. We had one in an office with a nylon carpet, and you'd approach that thing wit…

Dismayed to learn that it's now virtually impossible to obtain an RPN calculator of any sort. Swiss Micros make HP clones but for the more casual user their prices are pretty prohi…

Based on the attitude of its advocates, a flat earth would lack science and mathematics entirely, so pi would be undefined?

Prediction: one beaming grandma vs one bemused, crestfallen kid on Christmas morning.

My mum briefly worked as kitchen staff for Winston Churchill, and she tells the story that they had to wrap his stilton in a piece of greaseproof paper, hold it up and listen for w…

Ha, indeed! To test this theory, next time I re-read the book I'm going to imagine Louis Wu speaking in a West Country accent throughout :)

In Larry Niven's 'Ringworld' the explorers are always eating 'hand meals': for the longest time I resisted the obvious interpretation and imagined some unfathomable futuristic repa…

Also - material science and computation being less advanced, they just built bigger margins of error into everything that required resistance to force etc. Compare to today where e…

OK I'm now imagining a 19th century job interview when the candidate is given three weeks to 'devise and construct a steam-powered apparatus capable of emulating the popular parlou…

The vocabulary section is also very iffy, assuming some common Japanese words haven't changed their vowels in the last two centuries! The whole section is a reminder of how much we…

Thought that as well, but try to imagine someone bellowing the word over the incessant clacking of teletypes and it _almost_ works ...

The London Underground used to have a freely accessible API for real-time data as well, it was useful to curl it to plan when to leave the house :) Sadly no longer.

I would say that if you want to do 'clean' Rust you could certainly end up in a maze of reference lifetime problems. However here your escape hatch is that you can just clone stuff…

One thing not mentioned is that US usage has 'couple' as an adjective whereas in British usage it is a noun - hence "a couple hours" is incorrect in Britain, we must say "a couple …

If I need to grok a complex nested data structure then YAML is a 'mare, but JSON is not much better - even with nice IDE support. TBH end up just running a script to flatten the wh…