Excuse me, why is my cat in your house? Please return her immediately.

If you haven’t read it, Torvalds’ book is pretty interesting. He’s a fairly blunt writer of prose - alas, no Hemingway - but has a good voice and his slightly-cynical Finnish humour comes through clearly. Doesn’t have the massive ego that you might have expected, either - he knows he’s one of the planet’s biggest nerds.

Essentially, his somewhat geeky summer project was to implement the POSIX parts of Minix as a learning exercise, and basically locked himself in his room till he’d done it. Photocopied the spec sheet, and was ‘ticking off’ all the calls he’d got working. He was dual-booting with Minix for a while, which is why the filesystem layout is the same, but at one point managed to break his Minix boot, and Linux had to become self-hosting.

Fair play to him - took him a few months to produce the OS kernel that the whole GNU team couldn’t manage in a decade. Perfect is the enemy of good. Open-sourcing ‘something that works’ was all that was needed for everyone else to add in all the bits they needed as well, and the rest is history.

https://goodreads.com/book/show/160171.Just_for_Fun

It isn’t a problem; mote has misunderstood the law.

https://www.gov.uk/buying-carrying-knives

“Illegal without good reason.” You are most definitely allowed to buy kitchen knives to take home with you; trying to take them into a football game will be frowned upon, though.

Police are usually fairly sensible about it. I’ve got friends that do medieval reenactment that have been stopped with cars full of longswords and crossbows. Show them your event tickets and some of your other gear, you’ll be waved on your way.

A three-inch blade is allowed provided it doesn’t lock in place; as long as it just folds away (like a swiss army knife) then it’s fine. Three-inch butterfly knife will get you in a lot of bother, though.

My three all flop out in front of you and demand belly rubs - they will pull your hand back in if you try and stop. The tortie is quite vocal about it, too. Fine if it’s one of them, but if two of them get you then that’s what you’re doing for the rest of the day, and good luck trying to drink anything.

Are you the person at my work that keeps raising pull requests with all the code stuffed into AbstractWidgetReaderWriterManagerImplHelperV2 classes consisting purely of static methods with fourteen parameters each? :shakes fist angrily:

“So what first attracted you to the multi-billionaire Bill Gates?”

He dereferenced a pointer to the 1970s and retrieved the shirt that way.

I had Kodi installed for a few weeks as my television media front-end, but it has:

• the worst UX that you could possibly imagine, with menu after menu arranged seemingly at random, and buttons doing different things at every level
• functionality delivered via plugins, at least half of which do not work
• directory scans failing seemingly at random, with the errors hidden away in log files that you have to shell in to retrieve
• terrible documentation, inevitably consisting of forum pages about how it used to work a decade ago

It may well have a huge amount of functionality, but configuring and using it is the exact opposite of slick. Have uninstalled in favour of KDE with VLC installed, and manipulated via the KDE Connect mobile app, which is somehow a much better big-screen experience.

Hate AI ‘art’. Love me some Icon For Hire. But they mostly sing about mental illness with pop-metal hooks, and rarely anything spiritual.

Yep, that’s ugly. I wonder if it’s because electric cars don’t need as many functional components, like eg. air intakes? Don’t need so much detail work to harmonise the stuff on the outside, therefore, it ends up looking like a child’s toy?

Proportions are still kind of graceless and unweildy, and that colour is nasty. I’d probably have gone the same yellow as the brake shoe, or just classic Ferrari red…

As an “EFL” speaker, yours is clearer, more grammatical. If I’d written this, I’d probably have changed the “opting instead” to “when they opted”, but yours uses two shorter sentences, which is better style in English.

Having seen native French speakers producing “one sentence covers an entire page” text when studying ESL, I’ve tried to keep my bad habits under control myself. Can be a bit too easy to produce a runaway sentence sometimes, when you’ve a lot of thoughts to get on the page.

Well, that’s three different genres of game.

XCOM balances strategy and turn-based tactics in a way that’s a bit unusual. Games like Civ or Crusader Kings let you do the strategy, but you’ve not much influence in battles. Something like Hard West or Invisible Inc. let you do the turn-based tactics, but are fairly light on the strategic choices.

The STALKER games are survivalist FPS; although you combine looting and shooting, they aren’t looter-shooters. As Strelok, your role-playing choices are quite limited - you can ‘get out of here, stalker’ if you wish - and you’ve no stats. I wouldn’t have described the world as particularly reactive - the ‘bad ending’ in the first one depends on what you’ve been doing.

Morrowind and the Souls games are both Western RPGs; you fight enemies with weapons and magic, it’s not obvious what’s going on, certainly at first; and the world changes as a result of your decisions. DS doesn’t generally let you know when you’re making a decision, which makes it quite tough to progress some storylines. But as to how the fighting plays out, they’re about as different as can be.

So I wouldn’t worry about it. Wish there were more XCOM-like games, tho, since I love the mix.

They’re quite versatile computers for general purposes, but their i/o performance is dreadful. Mine all max out at about ten megabytes per second. That will not do, for server purposes.

Fortunately, there’s businesses all over that are chucking out all their old mini PCs since they won’t run Win11. I got an extremely decent one for £20 and it’s my new home server. Absolutely storms it, while just sipping at electricity.

… which is ironic, since SystemD is what happens when someone comes up with a problem to fix your solution.

The squinting cat has quite a pointy face. Testosterone makes cats have ‘rounder’ faces; can be hard to tell on cats that were speyed quite young, but males capable of having children tend to have quite chubby cheeks. Plus, the black cat looks to be going for a nipple underneath; and of course, it’s actually present in the picture, whereas dad cats are all ‘wham bam thank you ma’am’ and will usually be miles away once children appear.

Far be it from me to assume pronouns, but that doesn’t really look like a dad cat to me…

Dang. If only they had some kind of security scanning tool that could catch that kind of thing.

Not arguing that PNG is the right choice, but you want something lossless for science purposes, and this is a science image.

You can tell roughly what order the impact craters were formed by seeing what overlaps what; looks like the small impacts mostly followed the big impacts. Maybe the earth’s orbit cleared out the bigger stuff first? If you had a really good image, you might be able to work out the average impact angle, and therefore the average speed of impact, since we know the speed of the moon, and how they would intersect. Nothing’s filled with lava like it has on the near side of the moon, which makes me think these have mostly happened later in the moon’s life, when it’s cooled down a bit.

I just love space, I’ve no education in it. I bet someone with a fancy moon science degree would be able to tell you a lot more, and they’d be poring over every pixel. Don’t want any JPEGs getting in the way of that.

Azure’s documentation is the worst fucking bullshit that I’ve ever read in all my days, and just about every single page or tool (including the CLI) has an integrated slopbot that routinely recommends commands and REST endpoints that don’t exist; it’s slow as fuck, and to do even the simplest things is agonising. But to give them their dues, their recent uptime has been pretty good.

Truth be told, I’ve even come round to thinking that I prefer using Azure to Google Cloud Platform. Using any of Azure’s features is a pleasure akin to cutting yourself with a rusty nail and then falling in a sewer, but at least it has some features. GCP is like they implemented a quarter of the very basic functionality and then got fed up, decided to call it a day.

The fluorescent green hi-vis is usually reserved for first-aiders, but there are exceptions. I was working on a site in the middle of some rapeseed fields once, and we all got issued green - anyone wearing yellow or orange was swarmed with insects in moments.