After a couple of months of grindingly typing out URLs by hand, it seems that Firefox's URL autocomplete has started working again! Hooray! 😅

A halloween cartoon for this week's @newscientist.com

Ordered takeaway to be delivered after the kids are asleep. It arrived half an hour early, making bedtime take longer, and guaranteeing it'll be stone cold when we finally go down to eat it. Boohoo 😢

This morning I replaced a radiator's valves for the first time 💪

103 emails waiting in my inbox this morning! Yikes!

My #Ubuntu servers seem not to be updating #PHP - one is stuck on 8.5.4, for example. Have the patches been backported?

I just destroyed myself riding my bike like a madman to catch a train, and now I'm on the platform I see it's 15 minutes late 😭

"Sorry Ross" is tantalisingly close to being a palindrome

Maths intuition fail. Taking clothes out of the tumble drier I lined up the odd socks on the edge of a table. Whenever I took one out that matched one on the table I rolled them together and added them to a pile of clothes to take upstairs and put away. When I took the last sock out of the drier […]

The bucket bike has turned into a Jack O'Lastenrad! #CargoBike #sewing

The solar panels are making electricity faster than the house battery can take it in, so I've turned on the two big electric heaters I bought last month

It's a clever design idea, but Région Bourǵogne Frańche Comté??

I don't like web forms that only show you a few questions at a time. It's not always a given that I will want to bother completing the whole form - a quick read of all the questions would help me decide that.

Work email: "Join us on the 5th of November for the first NUWomen Menstrual Café! Refreshments. Single-use cups will be limited, so please bring your own reusable cup if you can!" That's the most unfortunate choice of words I've read all month.

Wow, I've managed to get an error message from #webR that has literally zero results on duckduckgo! It doesn't occur in the webR source either, so I think it might be from WASM. It's "bad generic call environment".

Does anyone know a clever way of finding the distance from an arbitrary point in the plane to the curve 𝑦 = 1/𝑥 ? I've reduced it to a quartic that I don't fancy solving.

I'm refereeing a paper which uses ∓ by default rather than ±. Is this normal anywhere? (Middle-east?)

How has this only just been added to the #OEIS? https://oeis.org/A398406 "Hexadecimal expansion of the square root of 2."

Ubuntu 26.04 has a new default terminal app, which I've dutifully switched to using. But as far as I can tell, it doesn't come with a colourblind-accessible palette, so I've just lost half an hour to working out how to copy over my customised palette from the old app. Like, a significant […]

This Water Sort level drove me mad! I've been stuck on it since yesterday, and since my PC is spending hours doing a distro upgrade, I decided to try brute forcing it with a python script. The solution it found takes 65 moves 😭 "Relaxing colour-sorting […] [Original post on mathstodon.xyz]

wowww, the server in South Africa that I admin for work is only getting 7KB/s from my server in the UK

Searching for the phrase "only known" in the #OEIS turns up lots of lovely factoids: https://oeis.org/search?q=%22only+known%22&go=Search

RE: https://mathstodon.xyz/@sioum/117352858757884208 Another counterexample found by ChatGPT

Flathead screws can do one

If I was still doing integer sequence reviews, this one would get a very low score: Indices of record low-water marks of the sequence abs((sin(p))^p) where p is the numerator of the k-th convergent to Pi/2, starting from k = 1. https://oeis.org/A399429

I hate you, bit of wall next to the door that is narrower than my wallpaper scraper.

with all these new clever terminal emulators that do things like show images, is there one that could use a different font, depending on which machine I've SSHed into?

Thomas the Tank Engine has had a less-problematic remake in recent years. Where's the decolonialised Babar remake?

Interesting collection of symbols on my Octopus energy statement. Do you think that £41.39 is going to me, or to Octopus? The line below is definitely in my favour - it's the amount for electricity exported from my solar panels.

Aperiodic monotiles, in the Geobunnies style. Mathematics is hugely improved by the addition of a face, ears, and a little fluffy tail.