julian_t

5 ms·

1.
by julian_t 2mo ago
I prefer the version attributed to Aristotle: "Those who can, do; those who understand, teach" A good teacher needs a deep understanding of their topic, often deeper that that required to be a do-er only.
2.
by julian_t 2mo ago
My first encounter with this was on a foggy November morning, and I had no idea what was going on. There's another very similar but smaller one at Heathrow, next to the Hatton Cross tube station. That one has the added attraction of Lo
3.
by julian_t 2mo ago
And copper pans. They need re-tinning every now and again, but they'll last forever.
4.
by julian_t 2mo ago
The British Boot Company (britboot.co.uk)
5.
by julian_t 4mo ago
"Email addresses always have a 'normal' TLD" I registered a ".consulting" domain for my little company when they became available, and it has proved highly problematic ever since. Strangely (or perhaps not) it
6.
by julian_t 4mo ago
Maybe something like this? https://www.visualcapitalist.com/roman-empires-roads-map/
7.
by julian_t 7mo ago
I've often played this after Ralph McTell's "Maginot Waltz", which really contrasts the optimism and patriotism with the reality.
8.
by julian_t 8mo ago
Some people lived through amazing change. My grandmother was born in the late 1890s in rural Wales, and died at 95. She remembered electricity coming to her village and the visit of the first motor car, the arrival of radio and telephones.
9.
by julian_t 8mo ago
I have a lot of undeletable old photos on my iPhone. The photos are there, but no photo app shows the trash can icon. They aren't on iCloud or any other current device, so I'm thinking that at some time I must have done something
10.
by julian_t 10mo ago
> Do people replace their phones because the battery isn't good anymore Yes. I'm not bothered about the latest thing, and every phone I've replaced has been because of two things: the battery has degraded until it's u
11.
by julian_t 1y ago
Same with bagels here in the UK. Round bread with a hole in it, for the most part.
12.
by julian_t 1y ago
I used to rely on this on the old DEC systems, when editing and saving foo.dat;3 gave you foo.dat;4. It didn't save everything forever - and you could PURGE older versions - but it saved enough to get me out of trouble many times.
13.
by julian_t 1y ago
Dam' right (he says, still developing at 70). Getting older may be compulsory, but I regularly have to help the youngsters out with tech-related matters.
14.
by julian_t 1y ago
I got given a small Synology box by a brother-in-law, and have not been impressed by their OS or apps, so I just use rsync. It's OK, but as my needs are simple I'm thinking of using an RPi solution instead. (What was amusing was t
15.
by julian_t 1y ago
The comparison with mechanical keyboards is spot on! Despite having nothing to do with radio or morse in any way, I was given a Vibroplex and it is quite a piece of kit - solid as a rock and obviously a tool well suited to its one task. It
16.
by julian_t 1y ago
I currently have three editors open: nvim (because I've been using it since it was vi), VS Code (because that's what work mandates) and Emacs (for org mode only). Horses for courses, and all that.
17.
by julian_t 1y ago
Years ago we found a large heron with a broken wing on the road outside our house in Wales. It had probably hit a power cable, and was hopping around dragging its wing. It was basically a homicidal needle beak, obviously not in the best of
18.
by julian_t 1y ago
My wife does silverpoint. A couple of bucks worth of fine silver wire in an old mechanical pencil, and you're set for years of drawing. Pretty much the cheapest way to do art (and it looks good, too)
19.
by julian_t 2y ago
I used to get these two or three times a year, but then I had heart surgery last summer and had five in the first day after I came round from the anesthetic, and two or three every day for weeks after that. They've now settled down to
20.
by julian_t 2y ago
I have several Indian coworkers who have a single name. Our company systems insist on first and last names, so they either end up with '.' as a last name, or the same name twice.
21.
by julian_t 2y ago
The Daresbury Laboratory in the UK had a giant Van de Graaff generator housed in a high concrete tower. I remember staying on site and waking up in the middle of the night with a really creepy feeling that turned out to be caused by that th
22.
by julian_t 2y ago
For me it's a bit of both. A programming book that I wrote over 10 years ago - the content is long out of date but the weight reminds me of the effort I put into producing it. Then there's my father's library, all 2000 books
23.
by julian_t 2y ago
Had this at an ATM recently, and it took a couple of tries at my PIN before I looked at the keypad and realized what was going on. One more wrong PIN and I could have lost my card.
24.
by julian_t 2y ago
And some have a manually-operated lever, which is completely silent.
25.
by julian_t 2y ago
I'm currently in Tokyo and it is the norm to wait for the green man, even if it is a two-lane road there isn't a car in sight. I can understand waiting at one of the mega intersections, where you can barely make out the pedestrian
26.
by julian_t 2y ago
It's a very different (and foreign) environment. Job control language, how data is stored... if you come from a typical modern server environment you'd be pretty lost in the mainframe world.
27.
by julian_t 2y ago
> The people who stay late (but also come in late) are promoted, whereas the early risers like myself are chastised for leaving early. I had one boss who got fed up with the early risers like me apparently bunking off early, so he instit
28.
by julian_t 2y ago
So much this! Several of the stations on my local line (SWR out of Waterloo) have sliding gates that are prominently labelled "Warning! Sliding Gate!!". But they are manually operated, so they're never going to move of their
29.
by julian_t 2y ago
A few years ago I visited a company in New Jersey, in a business park just off the 1 - a bunch of office buildings and a business hotel in a little enclave. I could see the office across the road from the hotel, but there was no easy way to
30.
by julian_t 2y ago
When the noise from the white box stops, then I know. And if I'm not at home to hear it, I'm not quite sure why I'd need to know.

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