s3krit

it depends what type of waterways you’re after. for the sea, https://map.openseamap.org/ is very good (but no route planning sadly - for that you’d need opencpn and some charts obtained. For inland waterways i can only speak for the English canals, for which i recommend https://opencanalmap.uk/ which uses data from both OSM and the Canal and River Trust. Again, sadly no route planning but for that I use https://canalplan.org.uk/

and the fears that Saddam Hussein was going to buy a bunch of PS2s because the cpu was SO POWERFUL they would be used for missile guidance systems or something

Reading and reciting this poem and the works of Benjamin Zephaniah (particularly ‘dis poetry’) in gcse English convinced me that it wasn’t ‘lame’ and poetry can be inspiring

I’ve been involved in this once. There were two of us in the QA department that did subtly different jobs. They wanted rid of the other guy, but as we had very similar roles I had to be involved in the consultation process. What they did is very specifically outline the differences and that his were the ones that were redundant. My manager and friend pulled me into a room beforehand and told me ‘you’re gonna go through some shit but trust me you’re keeping your job’. It all left me with a fairly sour taste in my mouth and to this day I’m not entirely sure it was all above board. If a company wants you gone, they’ll figure a way to do it.

I remember the formation of /r/playdate! Good times, I remember getting very drunk on voice chat, I barely remember what we were playing, maybe CSS

Basically, yeah. It actually has its origin in MUDs, from 'spec_proc', short for special procedure.

1888 is very much not 'pre-industrial revolution', which had started over 100 years prior.

Not quite the specific chemicals anymore. As I understood it, when they outlawed 1v, the legislation was changed to also consider the weight of the molecule. Ok fine, still whack-a-mole, it just took the clandestine chemists slightly longer to figure out what mostly inert structures they could add to the LSD (though not actually add, since that would mean they were at some point making LSD, which is illegal) that would be cleaved off metabolically so you end up with LSD in your system

Oh interesting, thanks! Which makes that comment in the code even more confusing

I’ve used it probably daily since about 2006. Which is kind of sad actually.

/ck/ from around 2015 to hmm… maybe 2018-19 was pretty good, and probably my home board. Decent cook along threads (I hope Patti is doing ok), /ck/ challenge threads where there was some theme we had to follow and posts would get ranked… and of course the yearly lemon pig [1] threads. Sadly I guess fast food posting, shitting on foodtubers, and general /pol/ shittery made it go down in my view. Still went there most days until yesterday though.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_pig

Based on one of the comments in the leaked source, at least php 6, though no idea what specific version:

> // In PHP 6 this... doesn't seem to do anything? Let's try again in 7.

You can 'fix' the texture filtering to nearest neighbour in hl by adding the following to userconfig.cfg (should be in a directory called 'valve' in the game's root directory):

gl_texturemode GL_NEAREST_MIPMAP_LINEAR

gl_ansio "0"

gl_round_down "0"

Or just entering those lines in the consoe, preceded by 'set'

The electric fence is for keeping foxes out, not chickens in

You set them free and they’ll find the bugs. You can also give them a huge variety of food waste. This mostly only supplements their feed though

My surname is an example of this! Pugh comes from ap Hugh (though more commonly spelt in Welsh these days as Huw)

This has been the case of years. My first FOSDEM was about a decade ago and it felt like that then. You go to a room a talk or two before the talk you actually want to see because of the queues, which means you’re in a talk you didn’t necessarily want to go to, at the expense of someone who might have wanted to. So they’ll queue a talk or two ahead next time, ad infinitum

Actually, given enough practice, you can literally just get your eyes to do it. I started doing magic eye puzzles as a kid and loved it, so just eventually learned how to control my eyes in that way. Even today, if I see any repeating pattern, or even anything vaguely similarly shaped, I can’t help but do it

> Once you have learned it, it is hard to unlearn, to the point that once in a while my eyes and brain will snap onto repetitive patterns like grid paper or just text without any intention to do so.

Rare that I meet someone else that does this. I learned how to do magic eye puzzles as a young child, I think my first was in a magazine and I ‘solved’ it the standard way of placing it close to your nose then slowly pulling back. Before long I could just do it on command and as an adult I find myself doing it all the time, often unconsciously. Makes spot the difference puzzles trivial, that’s for sure

> Actually, I did phone the super mario 64 help hotline as I was missing level 10

Aha, snowman’s land! Jump through the wall that has the snowman portrait reflected in the mirror. Blew my mind as a 10 year old

For the last level, you can get onto the moving platform on the first cycle if you're quick

Engraved onto something like titanium would be better than a fireproof safe - they're only safe for X amount of time (I want to take a stab in the dark and say about 90 minutes?). This is how I have backed up some (since retired) crypto seed phrases in the past.

>yet it generally doesn't seem to make them a worse, better, or even different person

I think there's a vague consensus that one must 'integrate' the experiences you have on psychedelics in order to meaningfully impact your life, if that's your goal. Those profound experiences and feelings you can have on psychedelics are certainly incredible and moving in their own right, but in order to make that have an effect on who you are (increased empathy and better framing of life events are often mentioned), you the taker of those drugs has to put some work in to learn from it. It always bothers me when I'll see statements like 'this drug changed my life', especially when talking about psychedelics. The drug didn't do it alone.

This is also seen in the early work using MDMA by psychiatrists - the drug itself was just one part of the treatment.

I got FOSDEM flu from FOSDEM 2020 and sometimes wondered if it was COVID-19. Absolutely horrendous flu, and a few of my friends also got it. This was obviously pre all the testing that would become commonplace in the coming months. Who knows.

After doing some internet sleuthing, I'm about 95% sure I know what he's doing today, and if it who I suspect, he has had a decent career in IT. Would rather not post my findings to respect the man's privacy.

You're not allowed to dump any human waste in any of the canals or rivers (ignore the fact that plenty of companies in the UK do this...).

There are two common approaches to dealing with human waste aboard canal boats; cassette toilets which you can carry to 'elsan points' placed frequently along the canal to dump semi-regularly (I hear anything from a week to a month depending on how many aboard). They look like [1] - you remove the bottom bit and carry that to empty. And secondly, pump-out tanks with a macerator toilet which chews up the excrement before being deposited into a tank. They're much bigger so need to be emptied less often (over 3 months for our 500 litre beast). They need to be done at marinas or the ever-decreasing number of Canal and River Trust-maintained self-pumpouts. Costs about £10-17 per pump-out. Elsan disposal is free as is covered by your license fee. Hundreds of thousands of words on forums have been written about the pros and cons of either of these approaches, and is considered on the canalworld forum to be a bit of a holy war.

A much less common approach is composting toilets. There's not a lot of room on boats, so storing the waste long enough to turn into an effective compost doesn't seem too feasible. And then once it's done, what are you gonna do with it? You're on a boat, you don't have a garden. And recently CRT informed people that they cannot dispose of this compost toilet waste in their provided refuse bins.

[1] https://marine-deals.freetls.fastly.net/media/catalog/produc...

For the history of the canals, wikipedia[1] has a pretty good page. The Canal and River Trust (CRT) is the current authority for much of the canal system in England and Wales, and they have a site[2] with plenty of little articles on individual little bits and bobs.

If you're after more of a modern angle - i.e., stories and insights from people that live on them (or just use them) today, there are many blogs from boaters, but I tend to not read them unles I come across a particular post addressing something relevant to me (usually repairs...). There are also tons of vlogs and youtube channels where people document their journeys which other people in the comments have mentioned, and even TV shows! I highly recommend Canal Boat Diaries by Robbie Cumming, though outside the UK I'm not sure where it can be found. He also has a youtube channel [3] which is less highly polished and a bit more 'real'.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_British_canal_s...

[2] https://canalrivertrust.org.uk/things-to-do/canal-history

[3] https://www.youtube.com/c/RobbieCumming

Hmm I investigated that and the missing sections on OSM are indeed tagged with boat: yes and motorboat: yes. I'll do a little more digging

PS. Despite using OSM for many years, I've never looked into editing it. Thanks for giving me the impetus to start! There are bits and bobs I've noticed aren't entirely correct as we move around the country, and now I'll be able to fix them where necessary.

I have, however, seen the Canal and River Trust's assets stolen from their working boats (steel fencing, tools, the door or something off an excavator if I heard the guy correctly). Not by boaters, but by the nearby travellers.

You'll often see articles in the newspapers here gushing romantically about how a couple moved onto the canal in order to save money, and it's all so very nice and wonderful. The reality is once you've factored in a mooring, maintenance and other things, it tends to be comparable to living on land. A lot of people can't continuously cruise as we do, due to jobs and other responsibilities.

A few grand a year for a mooring, plus around £1k/year for your license (all boats on the Canal and River Trust's waterways must be licensed). Every few years you need your boat lifting out and the blacking on the bottom re-done (more £££), and in winter you get through a fair amount of coal and other fuel to keep the boat heated (I think we're at about £100/mo for diesel + coal, but some people burn a lot more coal than us).

You really have to want to do it for the experience of living on the canals rather than a way to live cheaply (though it can be done).