Simon Hampel

Just wait until the donkey turns up!

I'm only here for the UFO discussion!

Cover of Isaac Asimov's book "The Complete Robot" released in 1982

I've been reading The Complete Robot - a collection of short stories by Asimov written between 1940 and 1977 - they are probably more relevant today than they've ever been, both from a pure robotics perspective, but also from an AI perspective. Really interesting considering when they were written.

your body does know - high fructose corn syrup is processed differently by the body than cane sugar is - cane sugar is "less bad" for you. That certainly doesn't make it "good" for you though! Best choice is to avoid both forms of sugar - they add zero dietary value!

Outside of the US, most soft drinks / sodas have always been made with cane sugar rather than high fructose corn syrup - which is far worse for you, metabolically, than cane sugar due to the way it is processed in the body. Either way, it is still unnecessary sugar and adds zero dietary value!

The challenge from a service provider perspective is that email deliverability is a difficult exercise given the constantly shifting landscape and restrictions imposed by 3rd party mail providers. It would be difficult to offer a quality email delivery service for low cost, given the work involved.

Ahh yes - this is the perennial problem in the modern era of mail deliverability - you need your emails to be delivered but don't have the revenue available to pay for it. This is a common problem for forums that are not run for profit - I spend a lot of time explaining to forum operators about this

What price point are you looking at? SparkPost not PAYG, but has some pretty good starter plans at $20pm for up to 50,000 emails/month with $1.00/thousand extra and $30pm for up to 100,000 emails/month with $0.85/thousand extra. Then if you want to add dedicated IP addresses, plans start at $75pm.

The opposite problem is arguably worse - I frequently find myself staring at a screen for hours at a time having an internal battle about which approach would be better and whether implementing things a certain way will be better than another way. Would be more productive to try it and then revert.

I tried a BT keyboard and it was a horrendous experience - never again - have been wired ever since. I use a wireless mouse, but it's a Logitech via their dongle and not BT.

Right arm out to your side, photographed from behind you. Not exactly a comfortable position, nor particularly useful, but it is possible.

I was implementing some VLOOKUPs just recently - was quite satisfied with the result.

We had someone post adverts for beef products for pet food on @zoochat.com - an actual person not a bot which I call "meat spam" (vs "bot spam")

So we had a meat spammer posting spam about meat - but advertising genuine beef products, so there was no actual spam in the meat spammer's meat spam!

Wow - so cheap! I just found an article from 2002 which stated that our two largest telcos here in Australia had increased prices from 22 cents per SMS to 25 cents (AUD). Although some phone plans saw people pay somewhat less as part of a package deal.

Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper

And then Jesus turned to his disciples and said:
“One of you will betray me in the group chat”
“Not I my Lord!” they all cried, except for the one journalist that someone had inadvertently invited

Made the mistake of upgrading to @camtasia.com v25.0.0 and the editor user interface is so sluggish, it is almost unusable - even on my 12 core machine with 64GB of RAM. Re-installed Camtasia 24.1.5 and the editor is very responsive as expected. Don't upgrade!

I previously considered this a necessary deal for Australia - but based on recent events in the US, I am now of the strong opinion that this is very much not in our own best interest and we should be seeking greater independence from the US - they can no longer be considered trusted allies

Very interesting stuff and well done on the new Canada region. Can we Australians put our hand up for our own local region as well please? 🙋

Could also become a learning opportunity. When he complains about being tired tomorrow - you can gently ask whether staying up too late was the cause of that and reinforce the importance of getting enough sleep - especially for growing children!

Agree 100% - about the only saving grace is that they do actually have phone apps that work pretty well in my experience, so arguably the mobile responsive website isn't that critical?

2 and 3 are well worth it

The bathroom is so narrow, but only the toilet can fit in it.

.bathroom {
width: fit-content;
}

#memes #CSS

If you at all enjoy the art of film-making, it would be worth watching some of the making-of stuff behind John Wick and then watching the movie again, paying attention to the detail and not just the action. This is just a masterful movie regardless of whether you enjoy the action genre or not.

Blame the Broligarchy

(I just learned this word today and am equal parts delighted/saddened to find a use for it already)

... so while it's not directly comparable to your product sales page - I do find it very interesting that growth in mobile for my sites seems to have reached its peak for my sites and we are still at nearly 40% desktop usage across a wide range of demographics.

Interestingly, I run several large online communities - one skews older / wealthy individuals, the other skews much younger / generally average wealth users. In recent years Mobile usage has topped out at 60% with desktop 39% and tablet making up the rest. Breakdown has been stable for years now ...

Can't you just flip a coin to choose a decision-making framework? 🤔

nah - you'll just lose the piece of paper. Just send yourself a WhatsApp message instead - but then you'll forget to look at your own messages and next time you have the idea to send yourself a message you'll be confronted by a heap of old messages you never paid attention to, so 🤷

The cheap phones (eg low end Samsung A series) don't use gorilla glass, and so are quite fragile. I know this because my kids break a lot of phone screens, while my 5yo S20 is still going strong with zero scratches on it and no screen protector (although I do have a Samsung Smartview case)

I recently upgraded to the new Google TV Streamer (4K) and it does everything we need - we never use the TV's built in functions. Supports all the streaming services, plus all our local free-to-air channel apps, plus Plex. All family friendly enough that my wife and kids use it without complaints.