Posts by Whiskers

Re: Space station video

No sound here. Very disappointed that the video looked like a thumb obscuring the lens; I was hoping to see the round shadow racing across a continent.

Re: A very timely RFC: RFC 9518 Centralization, Decentralization, and Internet Standards

<settles in for a bit of a read> Looks like a timely offering indeed.

Re: Demise

For those who can afford €10 a year, Individual.net ("The Berlin Server") is still around. They were very reliable for me. No binaries :))

Re: Good riddance!

The increasing disruption originating from Google Groups users, was one of the factors that encouraged me to stop using Usenet, some years ago. Other distractions from "real" life also had something to do with it. I might have another look, now. This is good news indeed.

Rooster-tiger

<plunders web for data>

Hmm. Seems I'm a Yang Metal Tiger, for what it's worth. I'll confess to the alleged character traits I like ...

I'm a night owl too; sometimes I am still awake at tomorow's dawn. I have been known to wait up for a crack-of-dawn airoplane departure time - far easier than trying to wake up early.

Perhaps we could go back to what some places did in the Good Old Days and start counting the hours from observed sunrise (&/or sunset). Local priests or government employees could visit every timepiece to adjust it - a particularly useful service if the hours were also required to vary in length with the seasons.

The Japanese had it all worked out <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_clock>.

Re: Last paragraph

Ah; "Yes, Minister". Tricky chaps, words.

Re: Once upon a time...

We (humanity as a whole) got the web search and journalism etc services we deserved. Getting people to pay money for them just didn't work; "free" and "pretty" are too tempting.

Re: Last paragraph

Tried to respond to the quesstionaire, but got too angry at the loaded questions and gobbledegook to continue. Even if normal people were aware of it, how many would persevere to provide a complete response to what seems to me to be a deliberately skewed quesstionaire designed to generate responses the "researchers" want?

That's a common fault of "opinion polls" and so on, not only government-sponsored ones.

Re: Power socket on the lighting circuit?

There were Y-shaped lamp socket adaptors so that you could plug your shaver/iron/toaster into one side and an incandescent bulb into the other. Or indeed have a 'tree' of Y adaptors plugged into each other and various appliances all running at once from the light socket ... I've seen it done, in an old house with no power sockets in the kitchen but one central light fitting. I associate the crackle of the electricity with the paraffin (kerosene) fumes from the room heater/stove.

Re: Power socket on the lighting circuit?

Indubiitably! :))

Re: Power socket on the lighting circuit?

My grandmother did that. Likewise the (1920s vintage) toaster. I suspect the wiring in that house was fairly rugged.

Re: Power socket on the lighting circuit?

In the '60s we moved into a house in the UK with mixed 15A (each one individually wired to a big fuse board under the stairs) and 13A ring-main power sockets, plus 2A and 5A sockets wired to the lighting circuit in some rooms. I remember the 15A plugs had switches, whereas the 13A sockets had them - although some 13A plugs also had switches. The 2A and 5A sockets had no switches.

It was handy being able to move table and standard lamps to different places in the room and still control all the lights from the switch by the door. There were a couple of non-switching 5A sockets too, for powering wireless sets. And there were hard-wired electric clock connectors too, I had one for my alarm clock. We had a large box full of assorted adaptors and extension leads.

We also had a 'transformer' buzzing away all day and night, adapting the local 220V supply to the 240V used by the appliances we brought with us from the next county; that may have been a slick bit of salesmanship by the local electrician.

In the '70s I worked in a '50s office building where the lack of power sockets for calculators had been ameliorated by wiring a 5A socket for each desk as a spur from the nearest original 13A socket So workers then built their own 5A to 13A adaptors so that we could use the power warts our calculators needed - each one of which had to be checked by the house electrician, and given a sticky label, along with instructions to hide all such adaptors at night to stop the cleaners from plugging their machines into them.

Re: Pointless

"We didn't pay for content before Facebook, Twitter and Google."

We most certainly did. In my family, it was a Sunday ritual to visit the newsagent to pay for the week's newspapers and magazines. Some people still do that, even though there are also "free newspapers". There is paid-for content on line too; many people seem to be happy to pay for their entertainment and other stuff.

According to GPS, the actual physical meridian marked on the ground at the Greenwich observatory (and by a big laser beam too), is wrong by more than 100 yards.

A drawback to having a single time zone for the whole planet, such as Swatch Internet Time, is that the date and day of the week will change during the working day in many longitudes (about half as a rough estimate).

Imagine having to wait until tomorrow for lunch-time ...

Re: Here in the EU...

The printed "NHS COVID Pass" I received the other day after applying via the NHS web site, doesn't seem to have an expiry date.

The barcode "Your unique reference use this to confirm your NHS COVID Pass" printed at the top of the letterhead is read by my smartphone as a meaningless 8 digit number (not resembling the long alpha-numeric code number printed below it).

Although it shows my name address and birth date, it doesn't reveal my NHS or NI numbers.

Brexit wasn't and isn't a continuing process, it was a once-only event that has happened and that's that. Its aftermath is of course ongoing, and that's what has to be handled now. Too bad there wasn't any real preparation in advance, or even proper negotiation of its terms.

Re: A Good Thing

At least he wouldn't rely on magic or miracles

Re: A Good Thing

For some reason, this discussion brought to my mind the once-famous government job of "President of the Board of Trade". Not something I've heard anything about for many years, but it would seem to be pretty much what's needed now; someone to guide and inspire and enable "Trade". Not "Brexit", that's history, nothing can be done about it now.

Whimsically, I referred to Wikipedia <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/President_of_the_Board_of_Trade> and found that not only does the job still exist, there's an incumbent. Someone called Elizabeth Truss, who's been in post for nearly 3 years. I wonder what she's been doing and is it her "thinking" that the successful applicant is expected to "change"?

Newsreaders

Claws Mail can handle usenet quite well, and is cross-platform, more or less (essentially a Linux program, but there's a fairly usable Windows port). There are Android apps too, although they have limitations and can produce posts that annoy because of faulty formatting.

Slrn and Gnus are probably the ones to go for if you use Linux and get serious about usenet.

I seem to remember Mac users have always been rather poorly provided with newsreaders.