Memories

The death of the video cassette recorder appears to be in sight after the UK’s largest electrical chain said it is to stop selling them. Oh, and if anyone comes across “extreme theme.sis” in their travels I’d be interested if you could forward me a copy…

Product quality and the modern consumer

Have you ever bought something, excitedly unpacked it when you get home only to discover that it has a ridiculous defect which prevents it from actually being useful? I’m looking for (true) stories about problems with high-tech products – what kinds of problems annoy you most? Is there something you no longer use because the […]

“They could have booked Cliff Richard. How boring would that have been?”

Anyone know anything about the bitrot characteristics of flash memory? Or where I can find out such information?

“Ok, put down your soldering iron, turn off your spectrum analyzer, and let’s play chess“

Binary systems

Tonight I headed (along with simonsatori and meme_me) over to a lecture at the Cambridge Institute of Astronomy (CIA?) about binary star systems. We knew we were in the right place when we found a bunch of geeky types hanging around in the lobby outside the lecture theatre. The lecture was quite nicely presented, but […]

Do geeks dream of electric maids? A review from jwz – “Shouldn’t your autonymous robo-maid be smart enough to clean up every monday at noon while you’re not home?”

Aside from spotting jwz pondering the viability of SimKafka, what have I been up to this week? For some reason I didn’t really get into The Calling on tuesday – the music wasn’t lively enough, or maybe I wasn’t lively enough. It wasn’t helped by the presence of someone who brought back a whole bunch […]

CODEX STAN 223-2001 “This Standard applies the product known as kimchi, as defined in Section 2 below, which is prepared with Chinese cabbage as a predominant ingredient and other vegetables which have been trimmed, cut, salted and seasoned before fermentation.”

If you wanna use my washing machine, first you gotta buy the detergent…

“Hello, this is Comet home delivery, we went to your house but nobody was in so we’ve gone away again, please call us to arrange another day for delivery” Oh, ok, so this’ll be the 30 minutes notice I asked for. Having deleted the message in a fit of ‘I’m gonna cancel my order ‘cos […]