Noting exponential back-off in the frequency of hedgehog visits to the garden feeding area.

I hope someone took a backup of the internet before all this happened…

It’s 1986 and my mother is shouting at me to stop touching the computer, I’m wasting my life.

It’s 2016 and I am fixing mother’s computer, regaling her about the variety of rich opportunities computer touching has given me in my life.

It’s 2026 and I am cursing my mother for ever letting me touch a computer. I have wasted my life.

Bella has opinions about cars.

I couldn't help but notice that Kelly's installing fibre on the next road over.

Does anyone have suggestions on how to dedupe/figure out/copy all my dads old thumb drives (circa 16GB each, generally ext4ish).
The first one I've tried seems to be a home directory backup (with ~1.5GB of lost+found, 3.8GB of Pictures, and the normal mess of firefox and thunderbolt caches).

Warning, danger and so on…

(it's in Leeds so the temptation is weaker for me)

This is what's in the manual of my 1989 alarm clock in case you didn't know what we lost in repairability in just 10 - 20 years

Latest acquisition. Arrived dead and sat in the workshop for a couple of weeks, but it's back in business now. It's an exceptionally well-preserved one, and yes, it's wood.

https://philtechnicalblog.blogspot.com/2026/10/the-new-eizo-cg3200x-hdruhd-monitor.html

If you work in film or TV and HDR reference monitors are of interest and you’re in the UK hit me up for an evaluation unit for what will be a bit of a “game changer”! (awful phrase, but in this instance quite accurate)

Foly huck. A small story about LLMs.

For historical reasons, I have a spare cassette for road bikes and it is not compatible with any of my own bikes so I want to sell it. Decided it would be helpful for buyers to include the teeth count of the smallest and largest sprocket in the ad, and was in a lazy Saturday afternoon mood so took a picture, gave that to #chatgpt and asked it to do the counting for me. Answer: 36 teeth.

That sprocket size doesn't exist in the Shimano universe.

So I tried to verify its count by asking it to add an increasing number next to every tooth. It complied, and the numbers ran from 1-36. That pictures is included below. You can stop reading now, look at the picture and count along.

If your ADD is not too bad, you'll notice it skipped 18, so we have 35 teeth. Not 36.

However that also doesn't exist in the Shimano universe.

Being as confused as the average republican, I demanded a #recount! It told me 36 again.

Sigh. Decided to do a manual recount while holding the sprocket in my hand. 28. That is a valid size.

Then I looked at the photo with counts again. Turns out the clanker took my original photo as inspiration, and fabricated a photo of a sprocket with 35 teeth. I am not sure what triggered it to do that and I do not want to know.

Your average #LLM is still as bad at counting as they were a year ago. Maybe worse.

Also, do not invest in that stuff ok?

Here's a nice hum from an idle FM transmitter in London, maybe it's in a lift motor room, maybe it's on a cell site. No idea… Narrowband FM demodulation. Particularly nice speed changes in the cooling fan rumble, perhaps the wind blowing into it? https://www.mossyvale.co.uk/transmitterhum1.mp3

I had a feeling there'd be a mistake, I've found two so far. The resistor labelled R7 in the photo is actually R11. The real R7 is occluded by R9. See updated image.

The more eagle-eyed reader will spot that L1 isn't a 6.8µH inductor on the physical version, but a 10µH. This is because I pressed v several times and Kicad didn't do anything, so I left it, also there's no "correct" value for this or the accompanying capacitor.

The duplicated C9 is there to provide physical support for the supply connection more than anything, if this was on a PCB it'd likely be fine with a single C9 in an appropriate place. It does require C1, the electrolytic capacitor, too, but if you used SMD parts it would probably be possible to use a single MLCC for all the C9s and C1.

Here's the oscillator that I've been working on, using exactly the same transistors shown in the circuit diagram. Also a layout for mashing them together on a very small bit of copper clad board (without the output buffer). I haven't renumbered the annotations to avoid confusing myself, sorry it's a bit weird. Edit: See updated layout in replies, R7//R11 confusion

I doubt anyone needs to hear this but a BT Minimaster 3 PBX fits perfectly in a New Rock Reactor boot shoebox.

All the PHP hate when some of the people doing the hating are using Javascript on the server, which will never be anything but wrong.

Pete Cooper turned out to be the Pete Cooper that I know.

As I keep reading over the PHP patches I keep seeing the devastation not of people who don't know how to write secure software, but decades of people with very little resources tasked with writing the most widely used internet-facing software on earth in the programming language I am a participant in shaping. I see that the slow pace of adoption of things that we were told would help people 20, 30 years ago by security experts has not been adopted, and some of the world's most complex codebases using things as fragile as setjmp/longjmp and abort for error handling.

I see, simply, that we are failing our software engineers by not having better in-language tools to mitigate and manage this level of complexity. That the pride in hacks we wore as a symbol of the power of C were in fact cries for help from a userbase that did not understand the long tail of consequences.

Good luck and God Bless to the system administrators today and tomorrow and for the rest of this month. I'll do my best to make it so C isn't like this, anymore.