Ken Milmore

Ageing software engineer 👴💻
#Debian enthusiast 🐧
Dabbler in mathematics ∞
Lefty vegetarian tree-hugger 🌹🥕🌳
Gateshead, UK 🐐🇬🇧🇪🇺
𝓖↔¬𝖯𝗋𝗈𝗏(⌜𝓖⌝)

#noai #noindex #nobots

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Last Notes

2026-10-31 00:49:33 UTC

For "binance", I keep reading "binface".
That is literally a rubbish name for a company.
Maybe the connection with refuse isn't quite as glaring in US English idk.

2026-10-15 16:25:31 UTC

COVID Pandemic archaeology.
#covid #consett #Durham
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/117/445/827/831/992/636/original/2494584b18f80a43.jpg

2026-09-30 13:33:50 UTC

Anyone know what's up with APOD? The site is giving us an an SSL cert for "go-vip.co"...?
#apod

2026-09-05 22:21:59 UTC

Came upon this gem of a series on iPlayer. It is a history of economics, presented in the late 1970s by none other than JK Galbraith.
There are a lot of interesting sidelights on our present conundrums. Social Darwinism, booms, busts and bubbles.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/m002l6sc/the-age-of-uncertainty

2026-08-20 13:50:22 UTC

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@nprofile…r9vg Never seen inside one of those, thanks for posting. Adapting ROM boards to take static RAM chips was a common trick, I had a similar board for my BBC B

2026-08-19 09:47:58 UTC

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@nprofile…v2v2 @nprofile…al9h The explosion of home working has given a lot of people this problem - they've designed asymmetric consumer broadband on the assumption that all we want to do is watch Netflix.

2026-08-18 23:58:59 UTC

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@nprofile…l7em @nprofile…qxaa Safeclene! I remember buying a can of it from Maplins. You could famously immerse a working CRT TV set in it. I doubt anyone would want to do that with isopropyl alcohol.

2026-08-18 23:34:19 UTC

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@nprofile…l7em @nprofile…qxaa The same guy who developed Tetraethyl Lead also worked on CFCs and they were a similar disaster. But they were both sufficiently tangential to the economy that with sufficient pressure, industry gave them up. Sadly AI is already shaping up to be in the same category as the fossil fuel industry: So entrenched that it may have to be prised out of the cold, dead hands of capitalism, to use a grim analogy. ☹️

2026-08-18 23:13:59 UTC

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@nprofile…qxaa I'm in denial and I'm staying there. This has always been a problem with having relentless growth, you reach a point where productivity is so high that you can't find enough consumption to justify the production. We arguably passed that point in the developed world some way back and have been propping the whole thing up with massive waste and overconsumption. JK Galbraith was writing about this 60 years ago. Stroll on! 😂

2026-08-16 16:36:17 UTC

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@nprofile…l7em @nprofile…jnnp Do you have any statistics? I'd like to see breakdowns of the prison population by age, UK region, class of offence and any other demographic that turns out to be significant. I don't know if that exists in digestible form somewhere?

2026-08-15 15:07:44 UTC

"In a typical week, Stuart Manley, from Barter Books, in Northumberland, would sell two or three thousand books. But one recent single bulk order from a Canadian company equalled what he would expect to move in seven days."
...
"But the suspicion is that they are not being bought for avid overseas readers but instead something else with a voracious appetite for new information: AI."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp3rprx2wl4o

2026-08-14 09:52:59 UTC

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@nprofile…f4gm Sadly there's still quite a bit of denialism around in the red wall voters that Burnham is supposed to win back. As soon as he takes a position, the right instantly have a stick to beat him with. Being right doesn't necessarily get you re-elected. Just ask Nigel!

2026-08-14 09:46:24 UTC

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@nprofile…v2v2 I seem to remember the P4 design was also intended for use with RAMBUS memory which got rejected by the rest of the industry. Intel were reluctant to go DDR I think?

2026-08-14 01:46:39 UTC

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@nprofile…gfcd Reminded me somewhat of Terry Gilliam's Brazil.

2026-08-13 13:44:32 UTC

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@nprofile…v2v2 @nprofile…40v7 I always found vinyl LPs very pleasing to listen to on the outer couple of tracks, but as the stylus moved inwards where the recording circumference is lower, the quality became audibly worse. Cassette tapes don't have this problem, despite the hiss: The quality is consistent up to the end.

2026-08-13 11:55:36 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj In the UK, we have a lot of government waste on commercially developed software projects which are often over budget and barely fit for purpose. Local authorities, health trusts etc procuring software independently leads to balkanisation and poor interoperability. Software is a gravy train for the private sector at the expense of taxpayers so I tend to put it very strongly in your first category. Nationalise software!!! (Or some of it at least).

2026-08-07 10:38:58 UTC

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@nprofile…nutk Having said that, the grim outlook for young people in the workplace has triggered a lot of anxiety in parents who want their children to be ahead in the job market. The middle classes are well ahead on this, ie at grooming kids for tertiary education and well-paying jobs. So the govt. helping out disadvantaged kids is widely seen as a useful form of "levelling up". The working class are screwed either way really.

2026-08-07 07:53:13 UTC

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@nprofile…v2v2 We've moved on from doing scare stories about hacking to genetic design now. If your AI can synthesise a communicable disease then we might be interested.

2026-07-31 13:22:21 UTC

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@nprofile…33pr @nprofile…t7ty If you're used to running a lot of remote X applications then Wayland is a pain.

2026-07-30 19:03:43 UTC

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@nprofile…l7em @nprofile…7lce Yeah that's the place, they haven't moved then.
They actually built a new studio off the side of the City Road place to record the tube in, it wasn't in the old buildings. Unless I'm mistaken it predated nicam stereo or anything like that... I seem to remember our TV sound was pretty dire anyway in those days.

2026-07-30 18:32:37 UTC

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@nprofile…l7em @nprofile…7lce Last I heard, the remnants of Tyne Tees were in a small business unit next to the MetroCentre. After they moved out of their old place on City Road (which according to my Dad had originally been a brewery maltings) the whole area got redeveloped into banal corporate office blocks and student accommodation. The Egypt Cottage pub, one of the oldest and coolest in Newcastle, got demolished. Origin of Viz characters and frequented by popular beat combos off the Tube... ☹️

2026-07-30 17:56:43 UTC

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@nprofile…7lce Newcastle appears (annoyingly) to be standard shorthand for Tyneside. I'm from Gateshead and until not so long ago it was normal for people down south to not know where that was, so you'd just say Newcastle. I guess that changed as much because of the Angel of the North as anything else.

2026-07-28 12:57:13 UTC

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@nprofile…2q04 Because of the expected attempts at avoidance, it might be worth considering how to limit and/or tax overseas ownership of UK land and businesses. One can imagine the UK being operated remotely by a bunch of wealthy expats in the US or the Cayman Islands. Some might say that this already happens...

2026-07-28 12:19:46 UTC

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@nprofile…2q04 I guess if we decide we are going to do a wealth tax, there will immediately be a bun fight over what constitutes wealth. The whole tax system is set up to tax movements of money, but if you want to tax wealth you have to start accounting for it. That means valuing things like land assets, volatile stocks and trusts. That could actually be very expensive for the state to set up, which may be why the politicians don't want to go there. It is much easier to tax high incomes than wealth.

2026-07-23 17:51:54 UTC

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@nprofile…gfcd Is this not down to Webster or something? A deliberate attempt to break away from (correct) limey spelling?

2026-07-19 09:07:32 UTC

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@nprofile…eew3 Their insistence that it isn't alive is interesting. Contrast with the tech companies who'd like us to regard their LLMs as intelligent. I wonder if this is all about American socio-religious sensibilities?

2026-06-21 11:09:59 UTC

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@nprofile…gfcd Actually the subsidised buses are a big deal. But mostly yeah you're right.
There is the glimmer of possibility that Burnham will actually shift the agenda left once he gets in, but he has to keep his powder dry as otherwise he'll upset the bond markets before he even gets in, and that will be used against him.
The sad truth is that Britain (or at least England) is a conservative country, and it is very difficult to sell anything socialist.

2026-06-17 11:18:45 UTC

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@nprofile…2q04 A lot of people just don't think these things through. They will just say everyone has died of measles.

2026-06-17 11:08:29 UTC

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@nprofile…l7em I had assumed that was another attempt to "get with the program". Could be explained by simply wanting to remain relevant to public concerns. Are there suggestions of deliberate prejudice at work?

2026-06-17 11:02:22 UTC

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@nprofile…l7em A reprisal? Oh dear. Sounds like rot at the top. I'd be interested in knowing where the cultural schisms lie there.

2026-06-17 10:54:05 UTC

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@nprofile…l7em Shudder. I'm loathe to bash the Beeb because despite it's failings, I think it was until recently the cultural nexus of Britain, and once we've lost it we will never get anything like it back. I just think of Open University programmes on BBC2, or Johnny Ball doing Think of A Number, or Ivor the Engine, or Edge of Darkness. All of this will be gone like tears in rain etc etc. 😭 At least there's still The Sky At Night to cling onto, for now.

2026-06-17 10:39:49 UTC

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@nprofile…l7em I guess now they are competing with the manosphere, they are pressured into using personalities of a certain type that will appeal to that demographic. The BBC has always had this dilemma: It is far better at giving people what they ought to have, rather than what they want. But the stakes are much higher these days I suppose.

2026-06-04 09:37:55 UTC

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@nprofile…d6ag Quantum AI. Fusion powered.

2026-05-31 11:06:57 UTC

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@nprofile…v2v2 @nprofile…40v7 @nprofile…pfuj Rory Stewart once mentioned on The Rest Is Politics, that he had asked some billionaires about the hoarding vs philanthropy. Ostensibly, they tend to develop a fear of gradually losing their power and political traction as their pot of money diminishes and they descend the league table of the globally wealthy. Whatever the truth of that, it certainly must be an odd position to be in psychologically.

2026-05-17 12:56:35 UTC

Catching some choons at the Durham Brass Picnic.
🎺 #Durham
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/590/009/367/073/219/original/d926f5412ca58bf6.jpg

2026-05-15 22:49:49 UTC

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@nprofile…yz28 "don't reproduce enough" is a very subjective observation. What constitutes "enough"?

2026-05-15 22:35:58 UTC

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@nprofile…mv7s It's a bit binary. What if you solve the problem but don't show enough working?
Miss out a constant of integration and you have to start again with a new problem.

2026-05-15 21:05:10 UTC

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@nprofile…kg70 When I was a kid, I found CRT TVs and monitors soooo noisy and annoying. Now I am old I can't hear above 14kHz, but all the CRTs are gone anyway. I wonder are there any modern appliances that squeal incessantly to annoy the youth of today?

2026-05-14 21:23:38 UTC

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@nprofile…gfcd Remember we're talking about Northern England here. Wigan and Ashton are part of Greater Manchester.

2026-05-14 21:17:51 UTC

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@nprofile…gfcd To even be able to stand in the contest for Labour leader, Burnham first needs a seat in parliament, and he will only get that by winning a by-election in an area where Reform are currently dominating the polls. I'd say he only has a 50/50 chance at doing that. In his favour is that he is locally reasonably popular from his work as Mayor of Manchester. But Reform will throw everything they can at it.

2026-05-07 18:27:18 UTC

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@nprofile…l7em @nprofile…z4eq I have no objection to such things if they are a longstanding tradition, are done sincerely and with inclusivity in mind. But so much of what Reform does seems to be a performative sham. Like sticking the Union Flag everywhere. They are just baiting people to object so they can brand them as unpatriotic.

2026-05-07 18:13:50 UTC

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@nprofile…z4eq Sounds like more MAGA copybook nonsense.

2026-05-07 16:12:22 UTC

Petition
Migrate UK civil service to open-source software for data sovereignty & security
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/766230

2026-04-28 13:50:05 UTC

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@nprofile…2q04 I'd *really* like a physical ID card: I don't have a driving license and I'm sick of having to use my passport as my only source of photo ID. So I was quite looking forward to digital ID until they brought apps and smartphones into it. Anything that involves apps or phones and doesn't give me a credit-card sized ID card is just a step backwards from my POV.

2026-04-27 21:02:35 UTC

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@nprofile…l7em Have they nicked the London Weekend Television logo?

2026-04-21 21:24:31 UTC

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@nprofile…l7em How do you know it's a bug in these browsers and not a standards compliance issue with MS365?

2026-04-20 21:13:01 UTC

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@nprofile…kzvx For this to make any difference, they will need to have replaceable operating systems too. Otherwise by the time the battery conks out, your phone is likely out of support and you will have to ditch it anyway.

2026-04-14 20:10:14 UTC

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@nprofile…65q8 F-Droid is great, thanks for doing this! I hope it doesn't end up getting completely clobbered by whatever happens in September.

2026-04-12 18:09:07 UTC

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@nprofile…65q8 What does home assistant do? Make cups of tea etc? ☕

2026-04-12 10:15:26 UTC

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@nprofile…la7y Again wouldn't that end up mostly enriching the rich?

2026-04-12 10:12:25 UTC

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@nprofile…la7y When the government does print money, it seems to end up increasing wealth inequality. So they would have to increase taxation of the wealthy to balance this. I guess there is also a risk it would devalue the pound, which would make imports more expensive and push inflation up.

2026-04-10 23:32:38 UTC

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@nprofile…2q04 Well there is a parallel cruel rhetoric about benefits claimants as undeserving scroungers that has persisted for ages too. Our politics is quite socially regressive and maybe always has been. I'm old enough to remember John Major's "back to basics" rhetoric in the early '90s: All those Tory ministers casting shade over single parent families while several of them were enthusiastically busy creating them on the side.

2026-04-10 23:21:24 UTC

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@nprofile…2q04 Yes agreed. Accepting the agenda about immigration was a massive mistake that need not have been made, and Labour are stuck with having to eat their own rhetoric to back out of it. That more than anything else has made Starmer's position untenable. I don't know enough about the parliamentary Labour party to have any idea how widely backed that strategy was.

2026-04-10 23:02:07 UTC

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@nprofile…2q04 I tend to think Labour got paralysed and shifted right largely to pander to two groups (stereotype apology): Affluent middle England (socially liberal, economically right wing) and the disgruntled traditional working class (socially conservative, economically left wing). I suspect the gammons in the latter group can be won back over from Reform eventually. Not so sure about middle England though. They sound ever so affable until you try to tax them, and they will need to pay up.

2026-04-10 22:46:00 UTC

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@nprofile…2q04 Well I'd contend that is because in the end, they were not upsetting the applecart in terms of redistribution of wealth. Brexit didn't renationalise the water companies or take public ownership of land or impose a massive tax on big tech. We went into Brexit under austerity, and we came out under pretty much the same austerity. It has worsened our trade position and our global standing, but Big Finance is still in charge and some of them made a killing out of it on the side I expect.

2026-04-10 22:37:10 UTC

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@nprofile…2q04 Yes this is always the difficulty of being the Good Guys. Hopefully there is the upside that in the end, people come over because they see how toxic the other side really is.

2026-04-10 22:21:23 UTC

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@nprofile…2q04 I'm worried that they will go down with the bond markets like Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwerteng, and will have to backtrack on doing anything radical. To some extent this is what has paralysed Labour into permanent austerity, they think it inevitable. What I think politicians need to say, is that the finance world controls almost everything now, so to back away from that they need a cast iron mandate from the public, and an understanding of just how bumpy it will get.

2026-04-10 22:02:30 UTC

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@nprofile…2q04 The difficulty is that because people can really see their standard of living falling (yeah sure a lot more shiny tech tat but fewer dentists or stable jobs). So I think people are angry and need something to point it at. Discrediting the fascists is essential, but it isn't enough. There needs to be some sort of narrative for where we are and what we want to do about it. The only party trying to tackle this are probably the Greens, but I worry they are already promising too much.

2026-04-09 09:43:25 UTC

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@nprofile…2q04 @nprofile…zeat You can't get much flatter than a flat file. Do you mean normalisation?

2026-04-07 19:09:17 UTC

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@nprofile…l7em Seems like a harsh sentence, all things considered.

2026-03-27 12:16:33 UTC

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@nprofile…mv7s As an aside on performance, if your collection is *really* huge you will probably get a slight edge doing type selection with an enumerated field rather than using polymorphism.

2026-03-27 12:14:12 UTC

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@nprofile…mv7s I've done something similar in the past with Qt: Because it forces you to new objects all over the place, storage management can get sloppy. Accounting for every object you create in a global collection is much more efficient than debugging with valgrind.

2026-03-27 12:10:11 UTC

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@nprofile…mv7s Ah I see. A global object registry of sorts. Yes totally different, but I get it.

2026-03-27 12:06:51 UTC

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@nprofile…mv7s If it's C++ then a member can't be both static and set up by the constructor of the class it's in. I'm sure you know this but I'm just being pedantic.
We use that pattern a lot though, sometimes just to contain a fixed list of constants, sometimes a collection of pointers to members that have to be visited in some way. So I'd like to know the name for it too.

2026-03-27 00:00:06 UTC

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@nprofile…la7y @nprofile…slfs I'm an ageing GenXer and I was one of many geeky kids that spent a lot of time tinkering with the 8-bit microcomputers that became widely available in the early 1980s. We were warned at the time that computers were going to change the workplace and the BBC even commissioned a computer to help educate people about them, that ended up being widely used in schools. That's all a few generations back, so I think we ought to have got over kids staring at screens by now.

2026-03-22 11:46:37 UTC

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@nprofile…x9tq Having had some exposure to a government IT project in the past, my impression was that the lack of related skills on the civil service side put the vendors at an exploitative advantage. I'd conjecture that few of the senior staff had any useful function, finding themselves managing a "digital service" they knew nothing about. If the government had kept IT "in house" early on and transformed the civil service that way, they could have saved a fortune.

2026-03-21 19:22:42 UTC

We received this odd communication today in the format of a local free newspaper.
It is published by Hope Not Hate, and contains a collection of perkily upbeat pieces of local community news.
I assume that the optimistic and inclusive tone is pitched to counter the Reform Ltd narrative of "broken Britain".
Although I find the relentless perkiness mildly amusing, I heartily approve of the general intent.
#gateshead #hopenothate
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/268/752/891/150/162/original/276141b8bb9ff618.jpg

2026-03-21 17:12:07 UTC

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@nprofile…xefq I think all human communication has a high level of data redundancy and this may be one reason why people seem to find GenAI to be useful in this area. Even if they continue to produce quality content, there is a large volume of pro-forma fluff that they have to weave in with it. I'd ask you though, not to forget the huge environmental cost of the mass deployment of AI models, and the mass plagiarism that has built them. So these ethical considerations remain regardless.

2026-03-21 17:04:57 UTC

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@nprofile…xefq I guess my suggestion is that this is the coup, the large scale confidence trick that is being attempted: We have got to a point where "technology" can be introduced that is in the end little more than social engineering. Cryptocurrencies give us a template for this: Profiligately wasteful and totally useless, so why do they exist at all and why are they seen as something that can generate wealth? Insane.

2026-03-21 16:57:40 UTC

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@nprofile…xefq Bizarre. I'm curious what type of work you do and how you find your productivity is increased. Sorry if you've posted in detail about this already, I should go and look! 🙂

2026-03-21 16:55:51 UTC

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@nprofile…xefq Part of the difficulty is that there is clearly already some economic slack in western society, even globally, where productivity is well in excess of the resource demands of the working population, at least in many areas. How to make use of these surpluses was a question long before "AI" came along. Do we distribute them fairly and let everyone have an easier life, or do we hoard them and give the majority of the population barely enough resource to stay alive? What is the aim?

2026-03-21 16:50:54 UTC

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@nprofile…xefq That quoted passage goes wrong from the first sentence. Mechanisation and automation have so far been used to increase speed and efficiency of laborious human tasks. We're being asked to believe that the current tranche of AI models (GenAI, mostly) will do the same for tasks involving reasoning and creativity. I've not seen any real evidence of this. There are certainly further things that can be automated, how much "speed and efficiency" we will get remains to be seen.

2026-03-19 19:25:28 UTC

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@nprofile…65q8 😭

2026-03-19 19:24:36 UTC

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@nprofile…65q8 Are you running that on a Pixel or a non-Google device?

2026-03-19 13:02:18 UTC

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@nprofile…x9tq @nprofile…upz8 Toothless regulators seems to be a recurring pattern across multiple industries; it seems like just another backwash effect of the original Tory privatisations.
I find it difficult to understand why Labour didn't just appoint more aggressive state regulators across the board. I wonder is that mainly for fiscal reasons or is it because it would hinder their attempts to court the right?

2026-02-17 08:29:19 UTC

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@nprofile…x9tq The entire motivation powering the "AI revolution" is that it is a way of making money without expending human effort. That is diametrically opposite from the idea that we should all pursue socially fulfilling vocations. I don't expect young people to buy this nonsense for long, which basically tells them to get used to being poor while someone else becomes incredibly rich. ☹️

2026-02-04 23:10:35 UTC

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@nprofile…la7y He was trembling with rage. Seemed to reach a commendable consensus with Polanski that the Epstein backwash is a moral issue beyond politics. I will probably watch it again in the morning when I've had less beer.

2026-02-04 21:42:19 UTC

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@nprofile…x9tq My OH asks is that graph inflation adjusted or is it in absolute £?

2026-01-22 23:56:38 UTC

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@nprofile…la7y It could be argued that the US got what it paid for with NATO, which is European complicity in their foreign policy. It's not like we've been gifted anything.

2026-01-18 09:25:19 UTC

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@nprofile…la7y @nprofile…w4lt I assumed business as usual. And it's right, if we get out of this, the danger is they will try to pick up as before without changing anything.

2026-01-17 23:27:42 UTC

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@nprofile…la7y I'm not trying to be an apologist for the current Labour government. It has surprised me how badly they have handled everything. They could have avoided trying to get in all these dodgy US data companies to run the NHS, or buying any more of their weapons systems. But the personal flattery I think is a humiliation we can bear if it buys a bit of time.

2026-01-17 23:17:10 UTC

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@nprofile…la7y I'm seeing a lot of this about, and I'm not sure what people mean by it. For all the problems we have with Starmer, I can see why he is playing for time with the orange arse. If he can be stalled until the midterms then he is likely to become a lame duck, or be embroiled in some horrible internal conflict as a result of attempting electoral interference. I don't think people have really thought through what would happen if we actually ended up in conflict with the US. 1/-

2026-01-17 13:48:46 UTC

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@nprofile…33pr Was there a pre-existing hardware RAID configuration? If you want to use Linux software RAID you need to make sure that is disabled first, so you are installing on individual SAS or AHCI disks. You also need to be careful where you put /boot. It can usually go on RAID1, but not RAID5/6. On top of that, some server BIOSes will only boot from certain drives in certain modes, seemingly out of spite. Recently had these sorts of problems setting up an old Dell pizza box.

2026-01-14 23:25:07 UTC

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@nprofile…la7y He was on R4 the other day, pontificating about the new power balance under that orange person. The man knows no shame.

2026-01-14 10:58:26 UTC

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@nprofile…la7y Emotion, empathy and evidence? The can drop the evidence I think, Reform seems to be popular and they never supplied any. 😕

2026-01-06 18:08:35 UTC

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@nprofile…y789 I saw a post on here a few days back about sleeper trains across Europe, and that played a similar chord. Demand doesn't seem to count for much in the rail industry.

2025-12-28 23:55:00 UTC

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@nprofile…35ec I assume this is to tick the "bring back national service" box without actually ticking it. Another sop to the right, I
suppose. It needn't be terrible though, if they get proper training.

2025-12-21 11:51:50 UTC

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@nprofile…hzyj If only this "flawed but least bad" stance on capitalism were taken by our Labour government, we might actually be in a better position. It admits corollaries that regulation, taxation etc will be needed to mitigate capitalism's worst excesses. Instead there seems to be a crushing fear of upsetting "the markets" or "business confidence", or of deterring inward investment, which causes them to adopt a perpetual perky optimism where a cold skepticism would better serve.

2025-11-23 14:22:54 UTC

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@nprofile…syqt Does the timer task run out of IRQ mode or does it set a flag which is picked up from one of the userland threads?

2025-11-23 14:12:11 UTC

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@nprofile…syqt That sounds like a useful framework, even if just as a pattern for people doing bare metal arm64 with specific tasking for the cores. It's lower level than I usually work at though.

2025-11-23 14:03:16 UTC

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@nprofile…syqt core_main(), since it takes a core index as parameter.

2025-11-23 13:59:22 UTC

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@nprofile…syqt If it isn't standard C++ main (called once per process, argc, argv, return int) then I'd say never, how could you even consider such heresy?
But I'm a pedant.

2025-11-22 11:12:05 UTC

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@nprofile…hzyj It's the politics of embarrassment. Those who supported Brexit are either in denial or don't want to face the humiliation. We all don't really want to face the cost, which is huge. But because none of the politicians will talk about it, we haven't begun the much needed public debate over what remedies might be available to make the situation slightly less awful.

2025-11-14 03:17:20 UTC

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@nprofile…syqt That is further than I expected tbh.

2025-11-14 03:12:56 UTC

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@nprofile…syqt Bucket brigade challenge: Drive your EV 1000 miles charging only from phones and USB power banks.

2025-11-10 21:29:50 UTC

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@nprofile…hzyj I find myself feeling emotionally compromised by this more than any other news event since Brexit. What has given me most cause to despair from the reaction on this platform, is that a lot of folk on the left have become so frustrated with the level of bias recently, that they appear to have burnt their boats and there's not much goodwill left for the Beeb on either end of the political spectrum. How do they get back from that?

2025-11-09 01:17:57 UTC

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@nprofile…czr6 I guess spanners are so '70s...

2025-11-09 01:06:05 UTC

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@nprofile…czr6 Ah but you have to stick a spanner in the puddle. 🔧

2025-10-29 21:32:21 UTC

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@nprofile…35ec @nprofile…ckuk Love Steeleye Span. Embrace your folk traditions, play around with them, don't let a bunch of fascists pretend they own them! 🙂

2025-10-29 21:22:10 UTC

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@nprofile…35ec @nprofile…ckuk I've always thought witches to be a very positive role model.
"If I were a witches hat
Sitting on her head like a paraffin stove
I'd fly away and be a bat
Across the air I would rove"
Don't tell me the Incredible String Band weren't onto something.