Timbones

We are living in the world that could rapidly become the Star Trek ideal. UBI, free healthcare, many jobs done by machine, freeing up humans to pursue the arts, education, exploration.

But it's being run by the fucking Ferengi.

Comic. [two connected spacecraft hovering in space above the Earth] Houston, the view is superb. We can see the continents spread out below us, right where they’ve been since the Earth formed. [caption] I still can’t believe we developed spaceflight before we figured out that the continents moved.

Continents

xkcd.com/3159/

Let me tell you a story (before the ship explodes):

Some absolutely top notch orange cattery here

Is social media just...boring now? Social media is destroying democracy and accelerating idiocracy. But it's also just...really, really boring.

I wrote about how and why social media has largely become boring and why it's a bad idea to eat your own brain: www.forkingpaths.co/p/is-social-...

GenAI truly was the worst technology to come along at this moment.

An energy and water guzzler when we most urgently need to take climate action.

A disinformation machine as our journalism fails.

A bias machine as fascism takes root.

A job killer in a cost of living crisis.

In the late 1970s I worked in a computer shop where we sold 4kb memory cards for £100 (£550 in today’s money). So… if those prices had held, the 24gb of main memory in the computer I bought today would have set me back £3,300,000,000! Exponentials are wild.

Why you should care about Net Zero. Friends, in an unprecedented media blitz, this article is being co-published with newspaper publishing giant, The Maidenhead Advertiser. =============================== Who am I to talk about Net Z…

protonsforbreakfast.wordpress.com/2025/10/10/w...

Why you should care about Net Zero.

My attempt to sum it up in 450 words for the good people of Maidenhead.

Image featuring a graphic from the Bradford District Green Party. The background is green with the Daily Express logo in the upper left and a photo of Zack Polanski speaking into a microphone on the right, holding a cartoon-style bundle of cash with a pound sign. Below, a mocked-up newspaper headline reads: “Zack Polanski wants to redistribute our money and turn Britain into a Left-wing haven.” At the bottom, the Green Party logo and web address Join.greenparty.org.uk are displayed.

Don't threaten us with a good time, Daily Express.

Skipton starling murmuration chimney photo 'a fluke' Skipton in North Yorkshire has seen regular murmurations since the start of the year.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-engl...

Blustery day, isn't it? Here's the National Grid: Live generation data. Wind and solar are generating 74.2% of our electricity. Gas is generating 13.1%. And yet our household electricity prices are pegged to... the volatile price of gas. Which is the basis on which the right attacks... renewables.

Bad Keyboards Thread:

So I like to make intentionally bad keyboards, in part because of my unfulfilled blood feud with mechanical keyboard enthusiasts, but mainly because I like being a chaos gremlin.

Most recently, the Juggling Keyboard:
bsky.app/profile/foon...

the post office is a public service. it doesn’t need to make money. public transit doesn’t need to make money. the library doesn’t need to make money. some things exist for the public good and we desperately need lawmakers to stop thinking about them in terms of capitalism. these are not businesses.

1817 map snipping, "Well. Well. Well."

Look what we have here then.

YouTube video by BBC My blackberry is not working - BBC

Harry Enfield and Ronnie Corbett's "My Blackberry is not working" sketch. God, it's *exquisite*. Not a line out of place, everything works beautifully and there's some free Harry *almost* corpsing thrown in as well. www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAG3...

The Magdeburg Unicorn, a truly ludicrous "reconstruction" with two legs, no torso or neck, and one enormous horn projecting from its horse-like skull.

Reconstructing animals from their fossilized remains requires meticulous artistry and scientific rigour.

What was done to bones partly of a woolly rhinoceros discovered in Germany in 1663 arguably involved neither.

Behold the 'Magdeburg Unicorn' in all its tea-spitting glory.

(Yes, it's real.)

The Equilux Day and night are equal at the equinox? You're thinking of the equilux.

Happy "aktually, equal light and dark occurs a few days later" Day to those who celebrate.

www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/eq...

Photo of 2 men with white bold letters that say “men who abuse their power are the real threat to women, not trans people”

Trans people are not a threat to women’s safety.

Over 52,000 women have signed the open letter to say not in our name.

Will you join them?
notinourname.org.uk/petition/not...

I dragged this iMac G3, kicking and screaming, 25 years into the present by swapping its innards for a brand new Mac Mini M4. Matt Gray | http://mattg.co.uk | @MattGrayYes This video is sponsored by PCBWay: https://www.pcbway.com/ 📋 Credits 📋 Editor - Alex Bate @alexjrassic 📱 Follow Matt elsewhere on the internet 📱 All my social links are at https://mattg.co.uk https://chaos.social/@MattGrayYes (Mastodon) https://patreon.com/MattGrayYes https://instagram.com/MattGrayYes https://www.tiktok.com/@MattGrayYes https://twitch.tv/MattGrayYes 🛠️ Parts Used 🛠️ iMac G3 Mac Mini M4 - https://amzn.to/46lOIgE USB C to VGA adapter - https://amzn.to/42pwgm3 Rocky Hill's PCBs - https://github.com/qbancoffee/imac_g3_ivad_board_init BetterDisplay - https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay Used while developing USB Tiny ISP Programmer - https://amzn.to/4n2KXnv Mini Logic Analyser - https://amzn.to/4pmiKcZ VGA Breakout - https://amzn.to/4gl6Uvr D-SUB 15 Breakout - https://amzn.to/3K07H9c 🎸 Music 🎸 The Fly Guy Five - Another Pineapple Please 💷 Advert 💷 This video is sponsored by PCBWay: https://www.pcbway.com/ Want to contribute towards my videos? Sign up to my Patreon: https://patreon.com/MattGrayYes Want to sponsor a video? More detail here: https://mattg.co.uk/contact/ 💸 Full Disclosure 💸 💷 PCBWay provided their services for free and paid me for the advert in the middle of the video. 💷 My Patreon supporters' help meant I could work on this instead of other paid work 💷 All Amazon links are affiliate links which give me a small percentage of what you pay them as a tip for sending you their way. It doesn't cost you more. Hi, I'm Matt Gray. You may know me from my work with Tom Scott, The Technical Difficulties, Matt Gray is Trying, or even as a broadcast engineer working in radio and TV. This 25-Year-Old iMac is Faster Than My Gaming PC

The iMac G3 from 2001 is my favourite-looking computer of all time, but it's completely unusable these days because of its age.

So I tore out its insides (leaving the CRT screen intact of course) and replaced them with a brand new Mac Mini M4.

Star trek strange new worlds has been bought by itvx for any uk fans who don't want to bother with paramount plus. Spread the word.

"Bright and airy"

Sloan. Puts the wizz in wizzing.

"I'm not angry, just disappointed"

Trans people have been around your whole life. You’ve been sharing bathrooms with them your whole life. They’ve been in your communities your whole life. They’ve even been playing sport your whole life.

And you didn’t care *at all* till a few years ago when every right wing org decided you should

enshittification | noun | when a digital platform is made worse for users, in order to increase profits

But on the other hand, having a battery plus smart tariff changes the savings you get from panels.

Also be aware that a bigger battery isn't necessarily better value if that extra capacity is hardly used, depending on how much you can load shift into cheap periods.

Maybe. Ask solar installer for their projections with and without it to see if it's worthwhile.

The individual panels are cheap, and small proportion of total install, so get as many as will fit on the roof. Helps for those overcast days.

Could the chimney be removed? We got rid of ours, allowing more panels to be installed and no shading.

Tip: scaffolding is a significant part of installation cost, so getting two jobs done at the same time could be a big saving.