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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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 13th, 2024

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  • You’ve probably had your chilli by now, but no-one else seems to have mentioned that canned goods are often fine long past their printed expiry date.

    Exceptions might include: rusty cans, because rust outside could also be inside; dented cans, because that might have created a weak point that could compromise the contents; and those cans with the ring-pull easy-open lids - ring-pull seals aren’t as good as the full seal of a can that needs a can-opener.

    And finally there’s always the look and smell test. Tip them into a separate bowl before putting them in the chilli. If they look and smell fine, then dump em in the chilli, with or without any liquid they might have been stored in.


  • Other way around. “Moses” apparently came first. It’s basically the last two syllables of “Ramesses” but missing the initial particle saying who (or what) was the cause of the person’s birth. For Ramesses, it’s Ra, obviously. The Semitic peoples took it and applied it to their mostly mythologised forefather.

    Since their culture took the meaning of a name seriously - something we’ve started to lose at least in Anglophone countries - you’d expect there’d be a record of that missing particle for Moses, and yet, there doesn’t seem to be one.

    This could indicate there there were a lot of -messes all amalgamated into one.

    Imagine, if you will, a compilation of stories about the heroic exploits of Celtic men all named Mac-something and eventually a mythos develops around a unified “Mack”, eventually with allegorical and fantastical stories being built up around him. This hasn’t actually happened in Celtic culture as far as I know, but it puts a context on the whole thing.





  • I’m about 50/50 on grammar errors. They bother me either way, but sometimes I feel the need to correct them and try to explain why.

    Today I seem to have worded it in a way that’s rubbed people the wrong way. It has gone better. You win some, you lose some.

    And yes I know I sound like an LLM. I used to not be able to communicate my ideas at all (flashback to not being able to string a 500 word essay together at school) but then I got a job working technical support and I had to figure out a way of getting my ideas and explanations across. And this is now how I communicate, for better or worse.

    Unfortunately, LLMs learned how to communicate in a not dissimilar way. And so we sound alike.


  • *whose

    “who’s” is “who is”[1] or “who has”[2], and it can be wrestled into a possessive if you make “who” all or part of a name[3], but it’s the wrong sort of possessive for this context. If you really want the possessive form, it ought to be phrased “which person’s”, which is mostly what “whose” means.

    (An actual linguist would speak more about the genitive and how it works in English, but I’m not as capable.)

    [1]: e.g. “Who’s there?” [2]: e.g. “Who’s let the cat out again?” [3]: e.g. “This is you-know-who’s box of tricks.”






  • Most external password managers have features that the one built into Firefox (or any browser) lack, not least of which is having a separate (encrypted) backup of passwords (a tiny amount of data) independent of a browser profile (often huge).

    The next main one is the ability to generate random secure passwords for accounts rather than simply remember the ones you’ve made up yourself.

    Edit: It’s been brought to my attention that Firefox can generate a strong random password (feature added 7 years ago, I’ve been under a rock, I guess), but its features seem to be somewhat limited in scope. I couldn’t get it to re-roll a password I didn’t like, nor could I figure out how to tweak the parameters (length, characters allowed, etc.). Mozilla’s own help says “edit it yourself so that it fits the site’s requirements” which seems like a bit of a cop-out.

    Though you didn’t ask, PasswordSafe is my preferred choice. (Runs just about anywhere, or so I’m led to believe. I’ve only ever run it on the one computer.)

    I don’t even know most of my passwords now. When I’ve accidentally pasted one into the wrong field somewhere, they’ve been practically illegible.