That is a thing of beauty. Bring the gravy boat to the table so that you can top it up to the brim, heaven.

I’d some plans to write my own e-pub reader, since all the existing ones are shite in their own way, but since e-pub files are secretly xhtml and css in disguise, it’s actually a hell of a job, much bigger than I’d anticipated.

I don’t think making network requests for files nor parsing any of those formats is so difficult, and while the actual layout rules interact in a complicated way they’re not insurmountable. However, doing it securely and in a way that runs at an acceptable speed is much harder. Tokenizing JS and interpreting it isn’t so bad, but that’s not going to run a modern website with tens of thousands of lines of scripts. Displaying video with hardware acceleration? Best bust out some code.

Moving to another protocol will either need the cooperation of everyone everywhere all at once, or since that’ll never happen, alternatively convincing all the major browser manufacturers to support both for a while so that other companies can enter the market, which will also never happen. Going to be a tough sell.

I’m still trying to make ‘sloppers’ happen. Perfectly describes the lack of thought that goes into what they produce.

You can turn off “delete”, but modification is a danger, it’s true.

Turning off delete makes it excellent for eg. backing up photographs on your phone. I’ve got it doing this from my Android to my raspberry pi, which puts them on my NAS for me. Saves losing all my pictures if I lose my phone.

Ritardando = slowing down, it’s a tempo notation.

pp = pianissimo (very soft), mf = mezzoforte (medium strong). One of my old conductors would say “it’s not about volume, it’s about feeling”, so intensity is a good word, although it often refers to volume. One of the main jobs of the conductor is making sure the music is interpreted in a way that fits the venue; pianissimo can be quite loud (but ‘soft’) in a big auditorium.

Die doesn’t mean anything - at least, not too me as a violinist. Might just be a percussion instruction to let the sound die away, rather than muffling it.

Nothing to me says ‘sexy’ quite like your grandad and your great-grandad being the same guy, or your (great * 5)-grandmother / grandfather being one man and woman, when most people have that responsibility spread between 64 people.

Close family. Must have made Christmas easy - having the in-laws round isn’t so bad when they’re your own blood relatives too.

Cats develop bigger cheeks under the influence of testosterone. So I’m assuming that lad struggles to walk normally due to the enormous pom-poms he’s got hanging off the back, because his face is ROUND.

Although you should give the egg to the thief (he can open it and you can’t) and then kill him and retrieve it from his dead body later, otherwise you can’t win the game. Obviously.

This, exactly. When we redid our bathroom, we went from “immersion tank” hot water with about three metres of pressure behind it, to central heating in a closed system, where both hot and cold have the exact same pressure, about thirty metres head. Went from being basically impossible to have a shower, to being an absolute pleasure where nearly the entire range of the tap gives a useful temperature, and it’s got a right blast of pressure behind it too.

Another alternative would be an electric shower - since you’re just heating up cold water, the pressure is “always the same”. They tend to be a bit pathetic and crap, tho.

It’s one of those materials that has an almost complete list of superb properties, with one overwhelming downside. It’s cheap, abundantly available, completely fireproof and can be woven into fireproof cloth, adds enormous structural strength to concrete in small quantities, very resistant to a wide range of chemical attacks. It’s just that the dust causes horrific cancers. See also CFCs, leaded petrol, etc, which have the same ‘very cheap, superb in their intended use, but the negative outweighs all positives’.

One of the ‘niche industrial applications’ was the production of pump gaskets in high-temperature scenarios, especially when pumping corrosive liquids. We’ve a range of superalloys that are ‘suitable’ for these applications - something like inconel is an absolute bastard to form into shapes, but once you’ve done so it lasts a long time. But you still need something with similar properties when screwing the bits together. For a long time, there was no suitable synthetic replacement for asbestos in that kind of usage.

If you know that the asbestos is there, have suitable PPE and procedures, then IMHO it’s far from the worst industrial material to work with. It’s pretty inert, doesn’t catch fire or explode, and isn’t one of the many exciting chemicals where a single droplet on your skin would be sufficient to kill you. What is inappropriate is using it as a general-purpose building material, which is how it was used for so long, and where it was able to cause so much suffering for so many people.

Fortunately, wages have increased to match, right?

Ah yes. I remember preparing a recipe once that included frying up the ingredients in a cup of oil, and that turns out seriously fucking greasy if you use the UK cup size.

Bear in mind that the gallon we use is different from the US gallon, too:

• a UK gallon is eight (imperial) pints of 20 fluid ounces, so 4.54 litres
• a US gallon is 231 cubic inches, so 3.79 litres

The reason that I thought American car fuel economy was so terrible as a child is partly because UK mpg is +20% on US mpg for the same car on the same fuel. But also, because American car fuel economy is so terrible.

That’s not correct, I’m afraid.

Thermal expansion is proportional to temperature; it’s quite significant for ye olde spinning rust hard drives but the mechanical stress affects all parts in a system. Especially for a gaming machine that’s not run 24/7 - it will experience thermal cycling. Mechanical strength also decreases with increasing temperature, making it worse.

Second law of thermodynamics is that heat only moves spontaneously from hotter to colder. A 60° bath can melt more ice than a 90° cup of coffee - it contains more heat - but it can’t raise the temperature of anything above 60°, which the coffee could. A 350W graphics card at 20° couldn’t raise your room above that temperature, but a 350W graphics card at 90° could do so. (The “runs colder” card would presumably have big fans to move the heat away.)

Tell me about it. The numbers that I’m interested in - “decibels under full load”, “temperature at full load” - might as well not exist. Will I be able to hear myself think when I’m using this component for work? Will this GPU cook all of my hard drives, or can it vent the heat out the back sufficiently?

Oh yeah. Partying like its 1989 and I’ve booted up my Amiga. Let’s get some unicycling friends in here and do some hacking in 3D.