billybofh

I think the first artistically ambitious TV show I remember coming out of the US was 'Twin Peaks'.

I've watched GBH a few times since it aired and I think it still holds up. Certainly give it a go if you get the chance. The original UK TV version of 'Edge of Darkness' is also still very, very watchable. Some remarkable scenes and performances.

I knew an old-time naval engineer who used to live by "If you've tried brute force and it didn't work, you just didn't use enough brute force"... ;-)

If it's a self-add thing, possibly just hasn't had the word of mouth yet over here?

My commute is ~1hr and I'm only going around three miles. I could go on at length about the joys of the bus system... ;-)

And if you're so inclined you can pop over to Jura and have a nosey around the cottage Orwell wrote most of 1984 in :-) It's quite a pretty spot too :-)

https://flic.kr/p/kkwkuk

Just to add some anecdotal pain... I recently bought my first audio book from Audible. I didn't realise it was a proprietary DRM'd format which has no sensible playback on Linux. So rather than spend time hacking together something to rip it, I ended up torrent'ing an mp3 of the book I'd just bought.

It's entirely put me off buying anything else from Audible :-/

In a similar line, I've been using 'streisand' for the past little while - might be worth looking at for inspiration if nothing else.

https://github.com/jlund/streisand

I fondly remember playing 'Midi Maze' on the ST back in the 80's. LAN gaming has moved on a little, but I remember the joy and amazement of playing it :-)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hSoy1S43dw

I can relate to that - we used to have two related systems which couldn't talk to each other. So the solution was to print out (landscape, tiny font) 1000's of lines from one system, then sit with a ruler and highlighter pen re-typing it into the other. Day in, day out.

A newer system which replaced some of the functionality and cost many millions of dollars will only export as .xls and only import from .csv (no API offered). Better than typing it in by hand, but it still pains me every day :-/

I'm just down the road - I might pop past at some point for a nosey :-) The only things of note I'd ever spotted in Govan were Titan Props and Film City - live and learn!

We're a CERN connected site and originally 'only' had 10x10G feeds. When the first data started to come in the network guy was looking a bit worried and said "the plane's coming into land, and the runway isn't nearly long enough..."

I remember when the bus system was being privatised and watching the transport minister on the news explaining that he'd been 'inspired' by watching multiple double-decker buses crossing in front of parliament - all with no passengers and his feeling that 'something must be done'.

Yet London got left alone while the rest of the country got the full 'freedom' of the private sector. It's a tad annoying ;-)

There's also a good documentary about the lead up to various nuclear power issues in the Adam Curtis documentary 'A Is For Atom' :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora's_Box_%28TV_series%29#...

Have you tried the follow up - 'Lila'? It goes at it somewhat differently.

Not really non-fiction, but Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is always a good read. Also if you're just interested in 'stuff', Plato's The Republic is very worth reading :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycle_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_%28Plato%29

You might prefer "Time Management for System Administrators" :

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596007836.do

It's a little bit GTD-ish, but has a direct practical IT take on it without so much dwelling on terminology. Certainly changed the way I worked for the better.

There is a quite good 70's sci-fi film (well, I like it anyway) where an AI becomes for all intents and purposes The President (and then some) :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus:_The_Forbin_Project

I remember watching a video of her washing all the goodness out of a bit of dough then baking it into a hard inedible lump of starch. Take from that what you will ;-)

And on ubu : http://www.ubu.com/sound/oram.html . Also a lot of Delia Derbyshire's work : http://www.ubu.com/sound/derbyshire.html

I think the EU certainly helped a lot by trade and free movement of people. It's a lot harder to make people from another country into demons if you've met them and shared a bottle of wine with some of their (almost inevitably from a UK perspective, better) food. Not impossible - but much harder.

I think we've had proxy wars by major powers going back millenia - I don't think that's such a strange situation for Europe compared to free movement and cheap flights.

> Europe has been at peace for a logn time

I think in terms of peace it's useful to distinguish between the EU and Europe. There have been a couple of wars in Europe in my lifetime. Not to mention a few military dictatorships (which had a kind of 'peace' I suppose - but not a good one), assassinations of leaders etc.

Maybe (hopefully!) we'll get through this without it imploding - maybe end up with a more Hanseatic League kind of set up, maybe more like the US. 'May you live in interesting times' and all that... ;-)

No worries - the only thing I did was slide the time forward by a couple of hours - it was rendering ok before that :-)

It's giving me what look like quite unlikely wind conditions (FF42/Linux) : https://imgur.com/QejZqTY

It seems to want to take my email address so you can email me 'stuff' - and also I need to use OAuth2 via your site for... something? I'm afraid I've given up on it after about three minutes :-/ Our servers aren't connected to the internet so this kinda fails the 'self hosted' test for us...

Brings back to mind the row about Eddie George's comments : http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/197995.stm

I've been looking for a copy of that for ages - thank you!

Like you, I cook fresh pretty much every day. I find it quite relaxing (but then I find housework quite relaxing, so I may be broken!).

One thing I'd add to the list is a slow cooker. I don't use it very much in summer, but in winter it can be great (the winters here are fairly bleak. Actually, so are the summers - but let's not go there...).

Keep an eye on your local supermarket for special offers on cuts of meat - shove it in the slow cooker in the morning with some tomato/herbs/spices and when you get back in the evening it's done (and your kitchen has that lovely warm home-cooked smell that takes the winter chill off!). You can easily cook enough for several days in one go too.

They also, as I remember, used to broadcast data at the top of the picture (possibly just about off-screen) during 'The Computer Programme' or one of its follow-ups, that a BBC Micro could decipher with some kind of dongle.

I think my favourite (rather savage) line from the series was in the Xmas special which went along the lines of "Whether you're busy hanging decorations in London, or busy being decorated for a hanging in the Philippines - it's Christmas!".

Outside of London we were gifted the 'marvels' of deregulation in the 80's though and the prices & service are now pretty bad. I remember watching the minister responsible at the time espousing how marvellous deregulation was going to be and how he'd been inspired after seeing two empty buses going over Tower Bridge - yet London largely escaped despite being the inspiration. Count yourselves lucky ;-)

This Guardian piece has some numbers : http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/aug/26/bus-deregulat...