Tim Holyoake

Anna Mazzola @Anna_Mazz It's 45 years since the best ever account of an attempted crime. From the Edinburgh Evening News, 18 August 1978. While they were waiting at a bus stop in Clermiston, Mr and Mrs Daniel Thirsty were threatened by Mr Robert Clear. 'He demanded that I give him my wifes purse, said Mr Thirsty. 'Telling him that the purse was in her basket, I bent down, put my hands up her skirt, detached her artificial leg and hit him over the head with it. It was not my intention to do anything more than frighten him oft, but unhappily for us all, he died? 3:41 AM • 8/18/23 from Earth • 1.7M Views

That took a turn or two

Starmer urged to stand up to EU over tough holiday checks on Brits Keir Starmer was challenged to 'stand up' for Britain and fight tough new checks for UK citizens travelling to the EU.

The folks who wanted to leave the EU and end free movement - include Farage himself - chose this outcome and are fully responsible for it. And the Mail article repeats the "travel insurance" and "return ticket" falsehoods from the Times article.
www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article...

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www.aldc.org/2025/08/local-...

BBC article with headline "Could RFK Jr's move to pull mRNA vaccine funding be a huge miscalculation?" The conspiracy theorist and spreader of false vaccine information - RFK Jr is pictured.

Excerpt from BBC article "So does Kennedy - probably the country's most famous vaccine sceptic - have a point, or is he making a monumental miscalculation?" Referring to this man as a "famous sceptic" is a rather favourable way to describe someone spreading false information about life saving medical treatments.

A really bad BBC push notification saying "Does Robert F Kennedy Jr have a point on mRNA vaccines, or is pulling funding a miscalculation?" As if his non-expert pseudo-medical knowledge is comparable to that of the entire field of immunology.

If the #BBC really had to cover a conspiracy theorist's thoughts on #mRNA vaccines, they should have started with the part where the actual experts say his claim "just isn't true". Giving credibility to RFK Jr's debunked views will lead to lower vaccine uptake and cause avoidable deaths.

Brexit has been a resounding disaster. Starmer must find the courage to change course | Ed Davey Poll after poll shows most voters think leaving the EU has been a failure. Closer ties with Europe would bring huge rewards, says Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey

Brexit has been a resounding disaster. Starmer must find the courage to change course | Ed Davey

A Gentle Introduction to Fortran

‘This is serious’: Starmer orders move towards digital ID... Scheme aims to tackle illegal immigration and crime despite past concern over civil liberties

To quote Harry Willcock, “I am a Liberal, and I am against this sort of thing”. 🔶

The ad showing a generic Hollywood star eating something they don't like at a restaurant that let them sit outside in the pouring rain, while saying that AI will fix this 'problem', should lead to the immediate sacking of the head of marketing at the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, aka Salesforce.

Former magistrate, 81, faces six months in jail for Pales... Cornish pensioner arrested at Truro cathedral falls foul of government’s labelling of direct action group as a terrorist organisation

Labour fights terrorism.

The petition against the Online Safety Act has almost 400k signatures, disproportionately in constituencies with lots of young white people

Tiverton Parkway was opened by David Mitchell MP on 12th May 1986. Some of the cobwebs on the roof look as if they've been there since then.

The rules for Sampford Peverell Ponds. I hope the heron has a current membership.

A heron at the private fishing pond next to Tiverton Parkway Station

Tiverton (Parkway) lunchtime

There's a semi-reasonable argument made in the SUC article with the patch. It might let you compile a larger Fortran source file than if you had to load it all into memory in one go.

There are definitely more compact ways of writing the code in Fortran, but this was the easiest way to do it without overthinking the problem 😊

It depends! Fairly sure that BASIC on the MZ-80K uses 128 byte blocks for data files and I think the Zen assembler uses a single block format for its source files.

Computing the nine billion names of God on a Raspberry Pi

z80.timholyoake.uk/the-nine-bil...

#SciFi #RetroComputing

VPN use surges in UK as new online safety rules kick in Jump in apps disguising internet users’ location threatens to undermine government efforts to protect children

Who could possibly have predicted this? Except literally anyone, that is

See pages 12-16 of the October 1984 (Vol. 4, Number 3) of the Sharp Users Club magazine. The patch is on page 13, it works ... and although it's specific to the Fortran compiler, I'm willing to bet it could be tweaked for other compilers/interpreters that do something similar when saving a data file

Very nice! I found a patch for the compiler that saves source files as a single block (rather than in multiple blocks of 256 bytes). Means it works on my Pico MZ-80K emulator without changing its code to deal with multi block files for the time being.

Young liberals' concerns over the online safety bill

It was never about protecting the young for Labour. With the convenient excuse of online safety, this government has restricted access to: footage from protests across the UK footage from Gaza, Ukraine and many more zones of atrocity support forums for sexual assault victims and LGBT+ activism Discord, Reddit, Wikipedia and many more sites of social discussion All in under 24 hours OfCom's unchecked power to dictate what is "harmful" risks silencing dissent and chilling open discourse, particularly for those who dare to challenge the status quo.

We are concerned that this is an effort to gain control over what we say, what we see, and how we think, given that this government has repeatedly shown a lack of respect for freedom of speech, expression, and protest. Who will stop them if they come for encryption and VPNs? Who will protect our sensitive data in the hands of private companies? Therefore, we, the Young Liberals, strongly encourage our federal party to speak against this draconian attack on free speech and society under the guise of online safety.

For freedom, Young Liberals UK Bristol Young Liberals Oxford Students Liberal Association Cambridge University Liberal Association Edinburgh University Liberal Association Highland Young Liberal Democrats University of Warwick Liberal Democrats London Young Liberals King's College London Liberal Democrats Berkshire Young Liberals Lancaster University Liberal Democrats Ealing Young Liberals University of York Liberal Democrats Durham University Liberal Democrats

A joint statement from YL and our branches regarding the Online Safety Bill.

(Now Go Bang!) Computed GOTO, in MS BASIC Jumping for fun with MS / Commodore / AppleSoft BASIC.

I wrote a blog post, I wrote a blog post! (🐓)

This time, it's about computed GOTO in MS BASIC and similar #BASIC dialects.

www.masswerk.at/nowgobang/20...

In Britain, this is what terrorism looks like.

At last! Thank you Rosie for bringing it to public attention that cream of tomato soup is a weapon of terror.

An AI generated circuit for a classic 555 timer IC based autofire. Many components miss connections, nearly everything is mislabeled, there’s a transistor that doesn’t make any sense and many more things that render this utterly useless. It looks plausible at the surface if you don’t know how to read schematics but it won’t work at all (you would even have trouble building it in the first place).

A viewer sent me an email, asking me to look over a schematic for an autofire circuit that he had a generative AI create for him.

This is the circuit he sent me.

It doesn’t make any sense.

I sent him a circuit that works from an old magazine I used before.

Don’t fricking trust AI with anything.

YouTube video by MZ Sharpworks [Gameplay] "Block Out" for the Sharp MZ-700

www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiyz...

This is "Block Out" for the Sharp MZ-700. As was often the case back then, a commercial game has been written in BASIC (and not then compiled - even by the publisher!). That said, it's not a bad Breakout clone for BASIC.

Interesting and looks playable. Does it get faster as you move through the levels, or is that the fastest it goes? If so, it could definitely do with a compiler! Also, I'm not convinced that the physics of the ball / block / bat interactions is right!

A picture of the Torch Triple X in its case with Gotek floppy drive and small Sony monitor. The kernel window is displayed but everything is in low resolution for no explicable reason...

A picture of the Torch Triple X in its case with Gotek floppy drive and small Sony monitor. The OpenTop desktop is displayed but everything is in low resolution for no explicable reason...

Torch Triple X looking mighty fine. Just don't look at the back with all the power cables to the ATX supply hanging out...

And, for some reason, the bloody thing keeps booting up in low res, sixteen colour mode which does not play well with OpenTop..

🤔🙄

The joys of retro computing.

Launched today: #ReviveTheRiverOtter

The middle and lower reaches of the River Otter are now so contaminated with sewage, that it is classed in the bottom 20 per cent of rivers in England for water quality. South West Water must act now.

For more: www.richardfoord.org.uk/news/article...

Richard Foord helps launch campaign to revive the River Otter Richard Foord , the Liberal Democrat MP for Honiton and Sidmouth, has joined forces with the Otter Valley Association in a new campaign - #...

“The river Otter should be crystal clear and teeming with fish and invertebrates, but instead, the middle and lower sections are murky, slimy and sick. This is largely due to untreated or inadequately treated sewage being discharged into the river, by South West Water.“ #ReviveTheRiverOtter

Wind turbines power 'surprising' tourism boom A tourism industry is growing around windfarms in south-east England, including Rampion in Brighton.

I think we can put to rest the notion that offshore wind turbines spoil views and economies. The fact is that they can make coastal sites far more interesting and boost tourism as people travel to experience them, sometimes even up close.

Boat tours to see the turbines are "surprisingly popular."

The whole saga is astounding. I can't wait until these people decide that DIY brain surgery under the instruction of an LLM is a good idea. Or maybe they already have and this is the result 🤔