spjwebster

8 ms·

1.
by spjwebster 4mo ago
My eldest is currently taking her GCSEs, and for the English Literature exam this week she had to write an essay on A Christmas Carol. Whilst helping her, I couldn't help but realise that the overarching messages around the importance
2.
by spjwebster 2y ago
Yours is definitely the spud gun I remember, and I suspect that's true for most folks of a particular age from the UK: a small die cast red gun and a monster potato to feed it ammunition. If we're talking home made back garden ars
3.
by spjwebster 3y ago
A well-known UK startup, renting an old building just outside of London, is (or was, as of a few years ago) paying square footage cost for an entire floor that doesn't exist. The previous occupants - a government department - had the f
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by spjwebster 3y ago
I wonder how many niches still use slide rules today. I'm currently training for my private pilot license, and many of the calculations for flight planning are still done using what is essentially a circular slide rule [1]. Having grow
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by spjwebster 4y ago
Makes me smile too. Around 2008 while I was at Yahoo! I built a standalone library called Dhaka (literally stuck a pin in a map and used the place name as the project name) that did almost exactly this. It was used on a few of the EU sites
6.
by spjwebster 4y ago
Having written a bunch of books on Flash and PHP back in the early 2000s, my experience is very much aligned with this. For a relatively young guy the income was welcome, and after the first book did well I got a pretty decent advance for t
7.
by spjwebster 4y ago
At the risk of being ridiculed, when I was a lad growing up in the UK I saw something that I later learned might be described as ball lightning. It was late winter in the South West with overcast skies and melting snow on the ground, and lo
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by spjwebster 5y ago
To be fair, on-foot gameplay (née "space legs") has been on the promised roadmap since the original kickstarter campaign, and it's a natural extension of the landable planets and SRV gameplay added in Horizons. Frontier defin
9.
by spjwebster 5y ago
I'm a regular Elite VR player, and a more careful wording of the state of VR support would be that there is no VR support for the core feature added by the latest expansion: on-foot gameplay. The existing VR support (in the ship and in
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by spjwebster 9y ago
I can highly recommend the book - Why We Sleep - mentioned at the top of the video. It goes into quite some depth on the reasons for and mechanics of sleep in a way I found approachable for someone with only a layman's understanding of
11.
by spjwebster 9y ago
Stripe give you a `funding` property on a card source [0], which at least in the UK distinguishes between debit, credit and prepaid cards somewhat reliably. 0: https://stripe.com/docs/api/python#card_object-funding
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by spjwebster 9y ago
I recently lost more of my life than I care to admit to Zachtronics' more graphically pleasing follow-up Shenzhen I/O [1] that I think I first heard about from HN [2]. The backstory that unfolds through your fake inbox actually gi
13.
by spjwebster 10y ago
tails.com | Front-end & Full Stack Developers | Richmond, London | ONSITE, full time tails.com is a tech-centric startup, using the power of technology combined with applied nutritional science to change the world of dog food for good.
14.
Pyflame: Uber Engineering’s Ptracing Profiler for Python(eng.uber.com)
1 points by spjwebster 10y ago|0 comments
15.
by spjwebster 10y ago
The official python debugger is called pdb, so this is following convention. Moreover, bdb and gdb have coexisted since the 80s without causing much confusion. I think we'll survive.
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by spjwebster 10y ago
I've had very much the opposite experience with Fitbit, twice. 1. I had an old FitBit Ultra that stopped syncing to the base station. They sent me a replacement base station but that didn't work, but I forgot to follow it up. Fast
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by spjwebster 10y ago
It is when they decide which order to process debits and credits in to maximise their fees: https://www.fca.org.uk/news/commitment-high-street-banks-ret...
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by spjwebster 10y ago
It was slightly more insidious than that - they were processing debits before credits, and charging a fee for insufficient funds if your balance dipped below zero (or below your overdraft limit) in the process: https://www.fca.or
19.
by spjwebster 11y ago
From the article you linked to: "At the end of 2015, the combined market share for IE8 (8.95 percent), IE9 (6.67 percent), and IE10 (4.18 percent) was 19.80 percent," Sure, use flexbox exclusively if you want to push away nearly 2
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by spjwebster 11y ago
FWIW, towards the tail-end of my time at Yahoo! I played a bit part in a team working on a more modern open source PHP-based version of the template localisation system that was at the heart of Jake. Remarkably this still exist on the Inter
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by spjwebster 11y ago
Every time static generation rears its head, I'm reminded of Yahoo!'s ... unique... take. Back in 2006 when I worked for Yahoo!, and they had a CMS / template management system called Jake that statically generated templates
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by spjwebster 12y ago
ALAS covering this vulnerability: https://alas.aws.amazon.com/ALAS-2015-473.html As usual, the Elastic Beanstalk team (with their forked yum repositories) are lagging behind on a fix.
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by spjwebster 13y ago
I did some research on this a few years ago [1], and Steve Souders recently re-ran the test with the latest http archive data [2]. Given the percentages, I'm still not convinced that it makes sense to reference jQuery or any other libr
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by spjwebster 13y ago
I wish I had more than one up vote. Just yesterday I had a fish finger and salad cream sandwich for lunch, followed by a crisp sandwich for dinner. These tasty snacks - along with Pot Noodle sandwiches - fuelled me through university many m
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by spjwebster 13y ago
I've previously done this kind of thing with an ND filter and long exposures to save getting frustrated by occasional passers-by. Here's a series of photographs of major cities around the world done using this technique by Lucie &
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by spjwebster 14y ago
Interestingly, Gerstmann went on to found GiantBomb [1] as part of Shelby Bonnie's (CNET co-founder) Whiskey Media group with a whole bunch of ex-GameSpot people who left in the wake of Gerstmann's dismissal. GiantBomb was recently acquired
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by spjwebster 14y ago
They could have had both if they'd used window.history.replaceState()[1] [1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/DOM/window.history#...
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by spjwebster 14y ago
It may well be pirated regardless: http://www.themillions.com/2010/01/confessions-of-a-book-pir... In another life I wrote technical books, which at the time were only available in physical formats. That didn't stop electronic versions of
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by spjwebster 14y ago
I've been using appfigures.com's status page for that: http://www.appfigures.com/itcstatus
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by spjwebster 14y ago
Not that this needs to turn into an exercise in finding prior art, but here's one from 2002: http://www.actionscript.org/showMovie.php?id=459 Over a decade ago I was a moderator on the FlashKit forums[1], and this page turning effect was

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