mrspuratic

8 ms·

61.
by mrspuratic 1y ago
My handle arose from a former colleague's attempt, decades ago, to describe a network malfunction he was trying to diagnose as either (or both) of spurious and erratic in a single word...
62.
by mrspuratic 2y ago
In Ireland as well as property tax we also have a dereliction charge for sites/properties, it's been on the books since 1990, but recently being leveraged (clumsily) to punish land hoarding in urban areas. It's currently 7% p
63.
by mrspuratic 2y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20144870#20145422 The link therein has suffered link rot, try: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Lottery_%28Ireland%29...
64.
by mrspuratic 2y ago
By coincidence I found an old Toshiba external USB drive in a drawer last week when I was rummaging for a cable, a black STORE.E one with the (now sticky and nasty) rubberised coating. I just powered it up: happily it still works so I guess
65.
by mrspuratic 2y ago
I used to netboot Windows 95 on a campus Novell network... you can probably work out how long ago that was ;) It started booting a 1.44MB floppy boot image of DOS 7 via (IIRC) BootWare boot ROM (pre-PXE) and switching to Windows using Joe D
66.
by mrspuratic 2y ago
I've used the UV reflective "anti-collision" stickers with reasonable success. You can get discrete (to humans) ones that look like etched bird silhouettes. Just make sure to put them on the outside .
67.
by mrspuratic 2y ago
NUCs are underrated IMHO. I picked up a NUC7 mid-2020, mounts on a VESA plate behind my monitor, used for media, fileshare, general Linux tinkering and VMs. Zero problems (except for a secondary disk failure last year, spinning rust type).
68.
by mrspuratic 2y ago
If you home-compost you get used to finding tea bag skeletons in the compost. For years I used to rip open the used tea bag, compost the tea and discard the bag. In the last few years the largest two brands here (Ireland: Lyons and Barrys)
69.
by mrspuratic 2y ago
I didn't just create my own font, I created a font editor too because nothing else was just right (context: MSDOS 5/VGA era). For clarity, I was not that employee :) Up until quite recently I used to render a fixed-width TrueType
70.
by mrspuratic 2y ago
Empirical evidence trumps conjecture :)
71.
by mrspuratic 2y ago
A perfect ERV will recover the heat (occurs naturally by a temperature difference) and the latent heat (associated with condensation/evaporation). i.e. water vapour in the outbound flow should be transferred the inbound flow. This is
72.
by mrspuratic 2y ago
I have two equivalent regenerative commercial units (HRV, no vapour handling) fitted at opposite sides of a mostly open plan ground floor. They use a heavy ceramic core, and sync for opposite or coordinated flow (optional). They go up to 60
73.
by mrspuratic 2y ago
When I was a student, around 1992-93, I did shift work for a few months in an MS production facility in Dublin. When it was slack I got assigned to degaussing floppies - most of them were "Microsoft OS/2 Version 1.0" install
74.
by mrspuratic 2y ago
Bitumen paint for the inside of concrete water tanks is still a thing. I don't use it for that, but I have used it as a barrier layer on outdoor timber objects, like fence posts, DIY planters and shed floors.
75.
by mrspuratic 2y ago
Harvest in England the second worst on record because of wet weather https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/10/harvest-...
76.
by mrspuratic 2y ago
Definitely not negligible. https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/2022/10/19/very-intense-r...
77.
by mrspuratic 2y ago
Good one, have a potato. You know it's EU state aid rules that severely constrain government spending like that?
78.
by mrspuratic 2y ago
UUCP used /bang paths/ where you had to know (one of possibly several) routes to the recipient's system... http://catb.org/jargon/html/B/bang-path.html
79.
by mrspuratic 2y ago
My mental model is Exchange is a really database, Outlook is a database client, and SMTP is bolted on the side. Things that make sense in the MS ecosystem map poorly onto SMTP/conventional email, but that doesn't stop them foistin
80.
by mrspuratic 2y ago
It was not rational, in hindsight.
81.
by mrspuratic 2y ago
This. I mean, why not start with wave theory and material science if you really want a good understanding :) In my CS course I learned a hell of a lot from creating a 6800 emulator; though it wasn't on the course, building a working 68
82.
by mrspuratic 2y ago
A long time ago this type of thing ("make C look like pascal") used to be the subject of holy wars/trolling #define BEGIN { #define END } There is, to this day afaict, a warning suppression option in VisualStudio f
83.
by mrspuratic 2y ago
"precautionary allergen labeling" [1]. In EU it's still up to individual countries to regulate it, e.g. Ireland [2] > Use of a ‘may contain….’ statement, or similar, to indicate that the product may contain an allergen as
84.
by mrspuratic 2y ago
The Google search page faux-infinite scroll is not just clumsy, it also breaks "back" navigation if you click through, then back, after loading more results. (edit: to clarify, I have the continuous scroll setting off, so it'
85.
by mrspuratic 2y ago
Externalities are hard. https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2020/04/30/plastic-paper-c... By estimated impact: cotton > paper > plastic, but more constructively: > Ultimately, the single use of any bag
86.
by mrspuratic 2y ago
That's not all they're [ultimately] floating around in... https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/20/...
87.
by mrspuratic 2y ago
the strength to weight ratio is fortuitous, but this application is for its biocompatibility.
88.
by mrspuratic 2y ago
recent: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38394635 The story of titanium
89.
by mrspuratic 2y ago
June-Sept in most places in Ireland has a mean daily temp of around 15C, and around 6C winter time. It infrequently gets much above 20C, or much below 0C year round. 5 consecutive days of 25C is the meteorological definition of "heatwa
90.
by mrspuratic 2y ago
If you compile the Linux kernel you will have in the build directory the actual .so file(s) which are ultimately embedded in the kernel. They don't ever get installed as conventional libraries (since they are not), but they are otherwi

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