On plus-side - old iPod has failed but seems battery not HDD related. On negative-side - does not connect to laptop at all (windows 11) even thru iTunes On plus-side - downloaded all the content thru iTunes as I still have old subscription for mirroring content in Apple Music

Dosette box is good idea but comes in such dull/low contrast colour that mum keeps losing it.

Moon shaming is more BS

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 16h ago

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman on rockets crashing into the moon: "It's not a big deal right now. The moon has clearly seen better days."

In today’s episode of #FixTheForms, @rufflemuffin.bsky.social speaks on behalf of all 5 million of us who have been forced to use the Companies House verification “service” (Aka kafkaesque nightmare)

Sarah Drummond@rufflemuffin.bsky.social · 19h ago

Absolute shambles of verifying your identity for Company House. Swear down I'd done this, logged into everything, assigned companies to my name, provided codes when submitting statements and just found out, I'm still not verified I am DIGITALLY LITERATE! Now sucking up the customer support time

Tried Shift Happens - new 0.5% beer from Stroud Brewery. It’s perfectly drinkable session IPA beer.

Good reminder that built environment design isn’t just about humans www.pearl.place/post/guide-d... One of core problems with Exhibition Road shared space was it misused tactile paving. The dogs were not trained to recognise different contextual meaning.

Guide Dogs Built Environment Project at PEARL

For many disabled people, including people with a vision impairment, bus travel is the most convenient and affordable form of public transport to use. However, some types of bus stop design that’s bei...

pearl.place

Human perception shifts rapidly to detect slop. The stories of inevitable undetectable digital realism always fail. Digital SFX from late 80’s/90’s onwards was always a lesson about this.

Michael Kupperman@mkupperman.bsky.social · 22h ago

It's impossible to miss how AI has fucked up every digital interaction, and the awful, bile-inducing "art" is everywhere, but until my son started pointing it out, I had not realized how much AI-generated music there is being played in public

My holiday trip to Berlin, Prague and Ljubljana would have been a lot weirder and less nice in 1986

Constantine@ajaxsinger.bsky.social · yesterday

Food, man. Food is so much better than it was in 1986. All of it. Poor-people food, restaurant food, fresh food, frozen food. Food is just a hell of a lot better.

Interrail/Eurostar holiday in July meant this queue problem was very minimal bestforbritain.org/faq-what-is-... Airport queue problems have varied a lot previously.

FAQ: What is the Entry/Exit System (EES)? - Best for Britain

Heading away on your summer holidays? Or visiting the Schengen area for work, or to see friends or family? You might be wondering what the new...

bestforbritain.org

Only well-paid or powerful people need to have or can have any sense of morality or ethics. Like ‘not everyone needs to go to university’ or have more than vocational skills syllabus at school, it’s minimising being human

James Austin@jamesdaustin.bsky.social · 21h ago

This is *such* a revealing line about Kemi's world view and contempt for those who do the day to day work of keeping our society functioning

Lots of emails today about Beacon CRM being hacked so personal details across manu organisations I’ve dealt with are compromised

Explanations (thru Wiki, AI, pop sci’ books, etc) can be bad. If they pave over engagement with complexity and critical thinking. Sometime the effort matters.

Are you offering an explanation as a bridge to enable people to cross over to do more or as a rug to cover up some complex issue they should engage with but you don’t want them to? Thinking about The Score for talk on seriousness. Should people be made to face complexity explicitly?

Reminded of Not The Nine O’Clock News sketch where Youth Opportunity Scheme members are used as furniture. Job creation is easy if the jobs are meaningless.

Lucy Fisher@lucyfisher.ft.com · yesterday

EXC: UK govt is “stripping back” onerous public procurement rules in pro-growth shake up of system, Louise Haigh tells FT Overhaul will make job creation/skills development the only ‘social value’ requirement for biz competing for Whitehall contracts worth £90bn annually www.ft.com/content/9878...

The lady vanishes by @smellosopher.bsky.social "The overwhelming absence of women in intellectual history is constructed. And we won’t prevent the fading of women from future history simply with an occasional reminder about the existence of a few remarkable individuals" aeon.co/essays/why-a...

I fear we might see a new alignment between a radical right death cult and a rural revivalist "simplicity" drive, which views collapse and a return to "organic" communities as a solution to decadent urbanism. A century ago this convergence led to a very bad place. www.monbiot.com/2023/10/04/t...

The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People

The astonishing story of how a movement’s quest for rural simplicity drifted into a formula for mass death

monbiot.com

Just had to look up how many grams a Scruple is (just heard original recipe for Fry’s Milk Chocolate and it includes ambergris)

If the defence of a journalist is that all the hateful and racist stuff written while alive was that it was humour and satire, isn’t there a point where everyone has to say that clearly all the points made are vile and clearly unsupportable by any reasonable person?

"These aren't the druids you're looking for"

Son wants to use iPod. Checking it’s still working. Has booted up Ok.

Brad Pitt coffee advert mostly aggravates me with sudden appearance of dog in last shot

Powerless powerful people are everywhere nowadays. The people elected to positions of power who then abandon any attempt to use it and hold onto the position to prevent anyone using power

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 2d ago

Cornyn: "There's nothing we could do to rein in the president"

You’ve got to be cruel to be kind in the right measure youtu.be/b0l3QWUXVho?... 1/2

NICK LOWE - CRUEL TO BE KIND - HQ Best Version. New Audio.

YouTube video by StiffRecordsLtd

youtu.be

Design fiction about #AgenticAI from 14 years ago acuity.design/meeting-the-... from UK government-funded conference on digital futures, identities and post-death existences #AI

Wearables on artists and authors to provide a data stream that they are being creative and not using #AI. More tech surveillance will always be the answer when data is the only acceptable proof.

BlueSky timeline this morning rather proving new CEO’s point about diversifying content. It’s mostly liberals being unkind to prove how empathetic they are.

In accidental movie double bill - The Martian followed by Princess Diaries.

New UV torch (for spotting lichen in Argyll) and the inevitable amount of microplastic/artificial cloth on my skin

Age verification for kids = personal identification for everyone

Ben Schwarz@benschwarz.bsky.social · 3d ago

Australia’s eSafety commissioner buried a report (released Friday afternoon) that shows the under 16 social media ban didn’t tangibly reduce teen social media use, and also resulted in parents tuning out of kids usage. We traded our privacy for no reason. theconversation.com/more-than-80...

eBay emails to me seem to be about heavily discounted hoovers by Dyson or Shark. Which is either algorithm or market oversupply.