Posts by AbramKedge@beige.party
(DIR) Post #ApjQau7QCZn0qvhLtY by AbramKedge@beige.party
2025-01-04T07:39:25Z
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@foone I used the resistor colour codes when designing the part number system for Frogwood, although "natural", "olive" and later " burgundy" had to be accommodated using letters. The colour names came from the factory, and some of the mappings were a stretch, but it worked well enough!One of our most popular colours was "Tardis"660N0 - repeating two blue layers, black, natural, black.
(DIR) Post #ArMpUSm9YqJrJI0mqe by AbramKedge@beige.party
2025-02-22T05:44:36Z
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@futurebird @Em back in the 90s there was a lot of interest in generating complex structures and behaviors from the simplest possible rules programmed into simulated ants. Most of my experiments have gone, lost on long-abandoned hard drives, but it was a lot of fun, and very instructive. I gave one group a whole bunch of phobias, and they ended up assembling themselves into four-layer pyramids.This is a different type of experiment in the same vein, where a few different strains of "ants" follow instructions encoded into "DNA". The ants with the highest energy levels breed and create offspring with merged DNA. Usually they all die out, but sometimes after a series of population crashes a stable colony is established with a dominant ant species.https://github.com/geekbrit/ignatiusThe code is a 2012 rewrite in Python of my 1995 original, but might inspire new experiments.
(DIR) Post #AsXSSJupUhlJY74o3k by AbramKedge@beige.party
2025-03-29T04:39:44Z
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When I was a child in the UK, like the majority of my generation I had already had measles so I wasn't given the newly available vaccine. The Rubella vaccine that came out a couple of years later was given only to girls, because of the risk of birth defects. My first wife's eyesight was severely affected because her mother had contracted German Measles (Rubella) while pregnant.This week I found my vaccination record from my medical prior to being granted a green card in the US. Turns out I finally got my MMR jab in 2007 because it was part of a mandatory cocktail of vaccines that all Permanent Residents had to have. I'm cool with that. Your country, your rules, and I finally had the vax I missed out on. Everyone should have the opportunity.I mention this only because the needle has swung so far in the opposite direction that this week a leading government vaccine advisor has been forced to resign."It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the Secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies," Mr Marks wrote in a resignation letter, obtained by multiple US media outlets, referring to the agency's new leader Robert F Kennedy Jr.Mr Marks was among the healthcare professionals who helped develop Covid-19 vaccines in the first Trump administration.HHS responded in a statement to the BBC, saying if Mr Marks "does not want to get behind restoring science to its golden standard and promoting radical transparency, then he has no place at FDA under the strong leadership of Secretary Kennedy."Restoring science to its golden standard.Words fail me. I lived through rampant unrestrained epidemics that are now entirely preventable; saw polio victims in leg braces. It seemed strange to realise that we never saw those any more.The idea of pretending that throwing away proven medical advancements has anything to do with science is frankly insulting. HHS is being turned into a death cult under the rule of a deranged High Priest.
(DIR) Post #At6Oru78iocOCpRtU8 by AbramKedge@beige.party
2025-04-15T02:52:05Z
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@pinhman @mayintoronto There's a cost-effective, 100% guaranteed carbon capture process. Leave it in the ground.
(DIR) Post #AtT7zHPHsCYiQDOkAC by AbramKedge@beige.party
2025-04-25T11:39:28Z
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#WritersCoffeeClub Apr 25 - World Penguin Day! How have ‘the classics’ influenced your work? Only in a negative way. There was the Joseph Conrad assigned reading book that made me almost lethally depressed within two chapters - I refused to read any more of that.More recently, Bram Stoker's Lair of the White Worm, and Haggard's Allan Quatermain fascinated me with the depths of racism and mysogeny that were acceptable at the time they were written. Surprisingly, over all we have evolved somewhat as a society.
(DIR) Post #AuEsNZXKErOWmrn0oS by AbramKedge@beige.party
2025-05-19T03:15:34Z
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@futurebird I saw this great feel-good story of a young local cobbler last week. I hope he inspires more people to take it up. https://www.dunfermlinepress.com/news/25155910.dunfermline-cobbler-mark-gibson-international-attention/
(DIR) Post #Auedz7guV07YJaWWuG by AbramKedge@beige.party
2025-05-31T12:26:31Z
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Stone lifting contest at the 2025 Bruce Festival
(DIR) Post #AumiaZGwrxoPeWAcIS by AbramKedge@beige.party
2025-06-04T11:06:05Z
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@futurebird @TheBreadmonkey I was very surprised when I worked for a few days on site in a French semiconductor company just south of Paris. Every time someone came into the office from another office there was a big round of handshaking. It seemed like a usual thing for them.
(DIR) Post #AunqOgvdZU4eiM0fZ2 by AbramKedge@beige.party
2025-06-04T21:49:03Z
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@mmiasma @Kierkegaanks I had a Czech Russian teacher at school. Fairly early on we both realized that languages were not my forte, so I used to write English using Cyrillic characters - he used to mark my work based on how many times he laughed out loud. Very cool dude.
(DIR) Post #AvQ484mGsJ1ZK0n3JY by AbramKedge@beige.party
2025-06-23T10:07:09Z
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WANTED... A Fediverse alternative search engine. No AI (except perhaps semantic/fuzzy matching for queries), just human-curated recommendations for helpful website pages.Tag any page with a rating and the query that took you there, and it gets added into the mix.Is it even feasible to spread the dataset out across thousands of instances to give resilience without huge storage and traffic costs for server operators?
(DIR) Post #AvmoNdzoA5gF1Kn86K by AbramKedge@beige.party
2025-07-04T09:55:34Z
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@kaia I'm sad that my Pixel 4a 5G is old enough to get a firm "Hell NO!" from Graphene 😞
(DIR) Post #Ay3y0oyk1YaNBpK4Su by AbramKedge@beige.party
2025-09-10T12:24:44Z
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@foone that's ten percent of my first hard disk drive 🤣
(DIR) Post #AyRHn2PtsHCSlPf9MW by AbramKedge@beige.party
2025-09-19T21:04:24Z
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My airship model is progressing, I'm getting to the point where I want to add internal features that will really only be visible when I have found (or made) a proper walk-through viewer. #FreeCAD frequently makes me tear my hair out. And yet, I persist.
(DIR) Post #Aytj4pWRV38KaRw8Ia by AbramKedge@beige.party
2025-10-05T11:42:56Z
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@futurebird I still have my Google Fi account because it gives me seamless (cheap) roaming just about everywhere. I'm using my bought-in-the-US pixel, with an e-SIM for my UK phone service.
(DIR) Post #AzOodXWEwxyiYbyByS by AbramKedge@beige.party
2025-10-20T11:41:15Z
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@futurebird 130kWh for electricity, plus 61kWh equivalent for hot water and heating .The water/heating part is a bit handwavy IMHO, they pump hot water around the district as a byproduct of electricity generated from park and garden clippings. When I run the hot water tap, a meter measures heat transferred through a heat exchanger and estimates the kWh equivalent.
(DIR) Post #B1aLuZ2IWgXrMjno3s by AbramKedge@beige.party
2025-12-24T21:00:09Z
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@futurebird that's the oldest book in the bible. It's interesting how God changes throughout the bible - the switch from Old to New Testaments is particularly jarring. I think of it as documentation of the evolution of the human psyche.
(DIR) Post #B2AqhHgKVYTH6HY2CG by AbramKedge@beige.party
2026-01-11T11:34:44Z
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@futurebird > Maybe I will give them some broken code and we will find the errors together.I think this is an excellent idea!
(DIR) Post #B2SryOlkjImGXYdcm0 by AbramKedge@beige.party
2026-01-20T04:13:50Z
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@historyofpunkrock I bought XTC's 3D EP the previous October, Science Friction on side 1, She's So Square and Dance Band on side 2.Good times.
(DIR) Post #B2i6r81gi99MaQ1msK by AbramKedge@beige.party
2026-01-27T12:41:13Z
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@futurebird of all the code I've written, there's one function that I absolutely hate. I worked so hard to make it readable, but I struggled to follow the logic - when using data tables to encode the fine details.It was the error handler for a very complex chip. Somehow the chip designer (who I was working with remotely) managed to create a five dimensional error space that I had to turn into SCSI errors to send back to the host computer.All I can say is, Marvin, you're a jerk. Look what you made me do.
(DIR) Post #B35HQs1x7zy3ZwuaoK by AbramKedge@beige.party
2026-02-07T16:58:07Z
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@futurebird @Chasteen I'm getting ready to file US taxes, and then file UK taxes sometime after April. Talk about taxation without representation. The reality is they probably wouldn't even let me *visit* the US these days; as a former green card holder I can just imagine the interrogation. No, honestly, I really don't want to live there, don't want to work there. Just want to see my friends.I'll use the HR Block expat service. If you do your own (free) foreign bank account declaration, it's not a bad price. About a sixth of the cost of the accountant I used the first year when I had business taxes to file.