Potatoes. PO - TAY - TOES. Boil 'em, mash 'em, stick 'em in a stew.

(I will sleep well tonight! And dream of potatoes. Or a potato-hilling machine.)

Does this make anyone else nervous when posting something?

#melbourne

Q: "If cats could wear pants, how would they wear it?"

A:

#caturday #caturdayeveryday

@davidgerard yes, but there is a problem with this edition.

As with every eastern culture, microtonal sounds are very prominent in Azerbaijan music. And if you look very closely, azerbaijani musicians achieve microtones by bending the strings behind the saddle part (contrary to western musicians, who bend strings on the fretboard).

The original Tornado had a rather long section behind the saddle, and they were able to play microtones by pressing that part with their wrists. This makes it much easier than fretboard because the bending is very frequent during the song

Howard Levy talking about this detail: https://youtu.be/OIBOlHZCW6I

Beating the heatwave with fun!

RE: https://eigenmagic.net/@vampiress/116859241032699772

“I poisoned my own mind.”

More and more programmers are writing retrospectives like this — and a huge THANK YOU to Elissa for doing so — where they discover that Programming Is Not Special.

It is particularly interesting to read this from a solo game developer who is both a programmer and an artist, who began by thinking the programing isn’t art, and discovered by an emotionally torturous process that it actually is.

Reasonable preventions for ClickFix attacks would also probably kill "benign" curl | bash installation—and that's good.

Figure out better installation pathways, devs.

you'll never guess how this rightmove listing ends. https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/90003912#/?channel=RES_BUY

It’s called “augmentation fees,” and they’ve always done it.

(I had to budget for augmentation when I ran the project to build internode’s adl6 datacenter in 2007)

It’s how the grid operator protects itself against fly-by-nighters: “You might be broke and gone in a year, leaving us holding the bag. If it costs a billion dollars to upgrade the substations and transmission lines to supply your facility, then we’re going to get you to pay for that up front at the time it’s built.”

https://reneweconomy.com.au/network-seeks-to-charge-data-centres-for-full-grid-connection-capacity-whether-they-use-it-or-not/amp/

Morning 😐

So ... I didn't know how to write about this yesterday when it happened, but I was napping at lunch in the crane when an automated alert on my phone woke me. It advised us of an imminent tornado, and to seek shelter immediately.

I looked over my shoulder to see a wall of weather coming at us, so I warned the rest of the job, weathervaned the crane, closed the windows, and put on my boots to prepare to climb down.

The wall hit us for a half hour with 80km/h sustained winds peaking at 105km/h, and torrential rain that flooded the area.

Here are some pics that I took, and some that other people took... in the long panorama I am in the downtown at far left. Shitting my pants in that tiny cab lol.

Capitalization, punctuation, spelling, exist as conventions because writing is a lossy medium, and using them in consistent ways boosts the signal-to-noise ratio.

I wish I could explain to young people with perfect vision that some of the signal loss happens between my screen and my brain, and it’ll happen to them too if they are lucky enough to not die young.

This has been a subtoot but it is also a plea to just find the Shift key.

So, my uni women's rowing club decided to restrict membership to cis women only. In response, a new "open" division was created that anyone can compete in.

Lots of women left to join the open division instead, and now the women's club are complaining about losing their best rowers.

Be transphobic, lose support.

That's the conses of your quences, folks.

a final reminder about the end of financial year coupon just for my mastodon followers that expires tonight! use code MASTOEOFY & get 20% off - that's a full year of sizzle for just $48 - visit https://
thesizzle.com.au/payme.html to use it!

it's tax deductible and there's an RSS feed now - look how happy you'll make me if you subscribe (made this gif to sign off on a promo email, lol)

i promise this is the last self promoting post for a while - but EOFY is when I get like 40% of my annual income so i gotta put some effort into letting people know the sizzle exists

Conflicted over how much of the future understanding of the PC and Apple industry ok the 80s is going to be poisoned by AI and how much is going to be poisoned by @NanoRaptor

So these signs went up all over downtown Ottawa, and now they are being taken down rapidly. The issue is the second word in the title, which is missing the letter “L”.

This highlights the difference between spell checking and proofreading.

Kid 1 is traveling around Europe right now and found himself in the south of France. So he visited Monaco just to say he had. And, being my kid, decided to circumnavigate the country on foot, because how many countries could you even do that?

So proud!

#travel #monaco #MonacoCircuit

🔋 Finland's 'sand battery' survived its first brutal winter. But the viral story gets one big thing wrong.

What's real:
- Polar Night Energy built a commercial thermal battery in Pornainen, Finland (5,000 people)
- 2,000 tons of crushed soapstone heated to 500-600C
- 1 MW power, 100 MWh capacity
- 100% oil reduction (literally zero oil used now)
- 70% CO2 emissions cut, 60% less wood chip combustion
- Survived winter 2025-2026 without interruption
- 5 projects across Finland, 9M euros funding

What's misleading:

1) It stores HEAT, not electricity. The 100 MWh is thermal energy. It can't power your lights or EV - it heats buildings via district heating. 'Store electricity in sand' implies grid-scale electrical storage, which this isn't.

2) It's crushed soapstone, not ordinary quartz sand - but geologically, "sand" refers to grain size (0.0625-2mm), not composition. So crushed soapstone of the right size IS sand. Still, soapstone outperforms quartz sand in heat capacity (0.98 vs 0.83 kJ/kg/K) and density. 'Sand battery' is branding, but geologically accurate.

3) The 80-90% round-trip efficiency is company-claimed, not independently verified. And it's electricity-to-heat-to-heat, not electricity-to-electricity. Comparing it to lithium-ion (90-95%) is apples-to-oranges.

4) The underlying tech (packed-bed thermal storage) is decades old. What's new is the application, branding, and business model.

The sand battery isn't competing with your Powerwall. It's competing with oil boilers - and it's already winning.

Full writeup: https://hermez.prose.sh/finland-sand-battery-survived-winter
#science #energy #renewable #Finland #engineering #CleanEnergy

It is not antisemitic to publish news coverage of a genocide without also covering the genocider’s emotional state.

This is one of the clearest examples yet of the conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism: Jews weren’t annihilating Gaza, Israel was. Why on earth should it be necessary to sympathize with the State aggressor to avoid charges of antisemitism?

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-29/bondi-antisemitism-social-cohesion-royal-commission-resumes/106819456