Posts by Kubla Cant

Tesco automated checkouts have an "own bags" button at the start. A nice idea that discourages the use of one-trip plastic carriers.

Unfortunately, nobody seems to have thought this through. When you put your hessian bags-for-life in the bagging area, the till says "Please wait while we verify your bags" and blocks until the harrassed assistant notices your flashing light and comes over to "verify". If you're in a hurry it's best not to be ecologically-minded.

And at the other end of the scale

I recall reading an article about five years ago, on an overclocking site, where somebody immersed the electronics of his PC in a tank of Mazola or something. Workable but messy.

Why Powershell?

For the first 30 years or so, Microsoft refused to accept that their operating systems would be better for having a decent scripting and command-line language. Instead they made half-hearted updates to the brain-dead MS-DOS batch language.

Meanwhile, 99% of non-Microsoft operating systems* offered the same family of scripting languages. They aren't perfect, but they are powerful enough to do pretty much any job you want, and they work in much the same way everywhere.

So when Microsoft come along and say they have this great new Powershell thing that can be used for scripting on Windows, I'm afraid my reaction is "Do I have to learn this? Why?"

* made-up statistic

Forth Bridge

Until about ten years ago, painting the Forth Bridge was a handy metaphor for a never-ending task*. The idea seemed to be that the bridge was so massive that they no sooner finished than they had to start again. But if you put yourself in the position of an employer with a big maintenance requirement, you realise that the correct number of people to hire is exactly the number who can work on it continuously. Anything more is wasteful.

What's this got to do with mineral reserves? The No-Breakfast doomsayers need to perform a similar thought inversion. If they did, they would realise that the economical amount of any resource is the smallest you can safely get away with. It applies to minerals, components for factories, stocks in supermarkets and painters.

* I understand they've now developed a paint that lasts so long that continuous painting is no longer necessary. Where are we going to find a new metaphor?

Bling

Everyone raves about Maseratis. I'm sure they're great cars, but the styling does nothing for me.

From the trident badge to the elliptical clock there's a definite air of bling about the look. There's also a strange whiff of boy racer - that carbon fibre finish is available on FleaBay as a wrap, if the interior of your car is knackered enough to need it. As for the "sharky side vents ... another Maserati design cue", they look like something you might find on a 1970 Ford Capri.

I recently bought an OBD2-USB cable from Amazon. It came with a software disk, but also with the statement that the software only runs in Windows XP. So now I'm searching Amazon for a time machine.

Sounds like a robotic implementation of the Black Knight.

a Buster Keaton tribute as Hay and Hulbert end up hanging off the clock face of Big Ben

It sounds like it was actually a tribute to Harold Lloyd. The famous clock face routine is in his film Safety Last.

(To confirm my recollection, I searched Google for "buster keaton clock". Oddly, the first page of results contains four images from the Harold Lloyd film, a YouTube link for the Harold Lloyd film, a Wikipedia article about the Harold Lloyd film, and five other links related to the Harold Lloyd film. The interwebs seem to think Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd were the same person.)

Razor blade

No mention so far of audio editing with razor blade and Sellotape?

As far as I know, the similar method of video editing on a Steenbeck machine lasted well into this century.

Paying people money

The Government has a multitude of platforms for paying people money.

Unfortunately, none of them seem to belong in this century. It used to be that when you sold a car the VED went with the vehicle, so it was all a neat cashless transaction. When they changed the process, they decided instead to refund the unexpired VED to the seller, and make the purchaser re-tax the car.

I received my refund the other week. In the form of a cheque - an instrument of payment that I haven't seen for years. It sat on my desk for about a week while I tried to work out when I might be near a bank. In the end I found an old paying-in slip and posted it.

Progress, eh?

Where's my flying car?

I can't help wondering if the driverless car is going to be as endlessly deferred as the flying car. In both cases there are working prototypes and announcements that a production roll-out is just around the corner, but....

I'm just thinking of the level of ingenuity required to be a car commuter in Central London - knowledge of rat-runs and back doubles, judgement about which route is appropriate for the time of day and traffic conditions, knowing that this side road is the one to use when joining a main road because there's an upstream pedestrian crossing that causes breaks in the traffic and so on.

It's been a while since I lived in London, so last time I visited I used the satnav. I think it routed me through every major traffic hotspot it could find, and I arrived an hour late. At this rate, driverless cars will spend most of their lives stationary in traffic jams.

Navigation is the easy part of the driverless car requirement, but even that seems to need more work.

Promises

If they were a bit closer they'd be able to read Ed Milliband's election promises on one of them.

Priapism

My initial thought was that the mosquitos' aerodynamics would be compromised by priapism. But it's the female mosquitos that fly around biting people, so I guess it works by giving them something else to do.

Recollections

One of the striking things about bubble cars in the 1950s was that two of them bore names familiar from wartime German planes. In the case of the Messerschmitt you could easily imagine that they'd just removed the wings and tail (assuming you were 11 years old and had only ever seen Me109s in comics). They should have produced a Stuka, too.

There was a rumour that people could get trapped in the Isetta because it had a front-opening door and no reverse gear.

I used to own an original Mini, with the pre-Hydrolastic rubber suspension. It had an 1100 engine dropped in, which didn't actually seem to make it go any faster (though repeated incompetent attempts to "tune" the SU carburettor may have been a factor). I also used to ride a James, though mine was a 250 twin.

Interesting article. I just wish I could stop reading the name of the fish as "oompah".

It's not clear from the pictures whether the catch-up content will be accessed through the same UI as real-time broadcast. If it's just a matter of putting a BBC iPlayer button on the EPG, then I'm less than impressed. If, on the other hand, it will make it possible to avoid using the atrocious iPlayer UI, then I'll start to think about changing my TV.

"We are unhappy with harassing behavior on Reddit; we have survey data that show our users are, too"

They needed a survey to find that out?