Some middle-aged guy on the Internet. Seen a lot of it, occasionally regurgitating it, trying to be amusing and informative.

Lurked Digg until v4. Commented on Reddit (same username) until it went full Musk.

Was on kbin.social (dying/dead) and kbin.run (mysteriously vanished). Now here on fedia.io.

Really hoping he hasn’t brought the jinx with him.

Other Adjectives: Neurodivergent; Nerd; Broken; British; Ally; Leftish

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  • 82 Comments
Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: August 13th, 2024

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  • If the “kit” says it’s “one size fits all” or similar wording, check the instructions that come with it on how to adjust it for things that are likely to vary.

    Otherwise, you’ll probably need to take measurements or, if you’re lucky, there’ll be make and model numbers on the existing parts that you can use to get replacements or new internal parts.

    If you’re really unlucky, you have a bizarre but genius-designed toilet made by a now out-of-business manufacturer who found novel and unique ways around patents and lawsuits and you’d be better off replacing the whole thing.








  • Christianity of all denominations is losing followers at a church-worrying rate. Yes, you’ll always get those who are zealous or make it part of their identity and will never quit, and of course, the quiet - if you’ll pardon the pun - masses who are ever faithful, but the churches don’t fill up quite how they used to.

    By getting the kids hooked on an ideology through a relatable, maybe even exciting, child-like character, they’re hoping to (eventually) get people back into churches and get business booming again.



  • William would become king, but then things get weird. I strongly suspect there’d be a rushed act of parliament on behalf of the dead Charles, to whom the parliament was loyal, in order to - ahem - reign in this inexplicably power-mad William and perhaps even try to seek to apply some kind of punishment.

    I could see a cross-party vote to not recognise William as king because of the grievous act and instead choose to recognise the next in line who was not in favour of that grievous act. This might mean that parliament chooses to recognise George as king and seek to appoint a regent in his stead until he was of age, for example.

    Whatever was to happen I don’t think there’d be a civil war over it, but there’d probably be a referendum on becoming a republic fairly soon afterwards so the whole thing could be sidestepped.

    If it turned out William wasn’t acting alone then I still think there’d be an investigation as to who was in favour and maybe expunge William’s line from succession altogether… but then I don’t think the powers that be would want Harry as king either. Or Andrew.

    Edward would be unwilling, but I think he’d make a good, if quiet, king.

    Anne would be f**king hilarious.

    But all of this is moot. The chance of Wills becoming a homicidal maniac is about as likely as his gran coming back from the grave and doing the job herself.


  • Find yourself a language that allows negative indices to count back from the end of an array.

    In those languages, index 0 is usually the first element, but if you’re particularly perverse and negate your indexing, you can start at 1, or rather -1, at the other end and work backwards.

    0-indexing originally comes from needing to add to the array’s base memory address to locate elements. If you have an array at memory address 1234, you might expect to find the first element at that address, which would be 1234+0, and the next at 1234+1, etc.

    1-indexing started as either a deliberate abstraction from that idea, and/or else there’s something else stored at 1234 that the array data type needs and the real elements start at 1234+1.

    All that said, there’s at least one language that insists the indices of an array be of a subtype of some Integer type that must have a limited range. Then you can start and end wherever you like, and the whole 1 vs 0 business is meaningless (except to whoever writes the compilers for that language anyway).






  • One possibility is that you have a fairly common username part and a similarly common domain like, say, gmail.

    There’s nothing stopping a spammer from taking existing addresses and word lists, then taking them apart and putting them together in different ways to make up completely new addresses to send spam to. It doesn’t matter if 99% of the addresses they make up don’t exist because they’re only interested in the 1% of the 1% of successes who will fall for their scam. They don’t even get the rejections because the From address is usually bogus too.

    e.g. I bet whoever owns john dot smith at gmail gets a huge amount of spam whether he’s in any databases or not.




  • Pro tip: Flexing leg and feet muscles can cause the body to steal back that blood flow and cause things to settle down.

    That said, there’s an art to doing that without looking like you’re doing something weird. Only you know what’s too weird for you, and then aim not to go past half way to that, just in case. Subtlety is key, and when you think you’re being subtle, you probably still need to dial it back a notch.

    Mental arithmetic or something else unrelated to the situation that moves blood flow to the main brain can also work. Silent brain games on your phone. Sudoku maybe.

    Good luck.