Need an Adobe pdf Reader replacement for Win11 - they keep pushing their pointless AI dross, and yet recently on my PC the text search feature is completely broken. Weird. On Mac/iPad I just use Preview.

Today I learned that the keyboard shortcuts to get to the start or end of a line on an iPad or Mac are the same as in Emacs. High spot of the week!!!

Watching the AI bubble burst ought to be funny. But it'll probably tank the global economy and wipe out my pension, which takes the shine off it somewhat.

Some trees round here are still hanging on to their leaves

I have Chrome on my Mac for occasional use if a website needs it (rare). But I've just noticed it's got 4GB of LLM model files lurking on my hard drive. It'll have to go, not having that!

Weirdest thing! My 10 year old Intel Atom powered Surface 3, which is FAR from Windows 11 compliant, has just auto-updated itself to Windows 11...

Woah - just got the Meta offer to pay £3.99 per month for no ads. Read the stuff on what data they collect and realised there's more app locking down required! Tempted to delete tbh

@bearlypolitics.co.uk: ~ Are Foreigners Draining the Welfare State? | Bearly Politics ~ https://www.bearlypolitics.co.uk/p/foreigners-are-claiming-benefits

Updating my LEGO White House

Our cat, helping with some test marking, circa 2017

Recently sold our car we'd had the past 11 years. Pretty sure it's still rocking the same software as when it left the factory 15 years ago. Whereas our "new" (used) car is internet connected...To AWS as I discovered this morning 🤪. So its geolocation is being tracked 24/7 on a server in the US 😭

I haven't posted on here for several weeks. So here's a pic I took in Naantali back in the summer

Took the afternoon off yesterday and we walked up on Black Down in the Mendips. There was no-one else there apart from horses. Bliss.

Today the Church of England remembers Theodore of Tarsus, second Archbishop of Canterbury, who had never set foot in these isles before being appointed, and who had to learn the local tongue on the journey here. There would be no British Christianity without immigrants.

Microsoft fixing things worse (that weren't broken): I wrote "this experiment was a just concept deomstrator" & MS Word suggests I fix the typo by changing it to "protester" 🤪🤪🤪 Another AI benefit I guess

Macclesfield last weekend.

I am reading the pdf manual for a newish car. It's ridiculously complicated ~600 pages, covers features which are different depending on model. I am having huge difficulty resisting the urge to click the Adobe AI button that says "explain this document to me" just for laughs

Led By Donkeys have got Fartrage's number.

What an absolute steaming load of tosh. The number of Euros cities with fantastic integrated public transport, good cycling infra etc. this is just shilling for US tech firms trying to sell a product that doesn't work as advertised, and which no-one wants

No photo of me exists which was not taken "when I was younger"

I was annoyed last year when I was forced to buy a front+back mudguard set to replace the rear one on my bike. So when the front mudguard broke last week I was perversely pleased. Shame I can't budge the eccentric bottom bracket to fix the loose chain tho

Why A-levels don’t matter, by celebrities with careers based on luck and total crap buff.ly/SX03YQB

Linköping was brilliant. Tiny, only about 3 flights per day. Efficient. Friendly staff. Perfect.

Modern AI tools emulate the classic con-man tricks of mentalism, tricking people into believing that they’re far more clever - and sapient - than they actually are. Fantastic piece by @baldurbjarnason.com : softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llme...

Slightly diminish a band: CRT Soundsystem

Social media is getting depressing today. Here's some pictures of birds I took recently

I think I must be dreaming or something. This can't be real...

Feels surprising that it's almost a month since I took this, on my "Summer" holiday 😎

On the one hand this is clearly V bad. OTOH I have location permissions turned off for virtually all the apps on my phone via the main OS settings so hopefully already protected against these sorts of shenanigans. But Meta's covert browsing tracking via localhost shows they can't be trusted

Saw this mystery aircraft last month in Cornwall. Seems to be a civil registered Canadair Challenger but with a ventral radar fairing. I was on a beach so no long lens, and no phone signal to check ADSB. Internet searches have proved fruitless. Think it was on finals to Newquay 23/Jul. Intriguing!

Interesting! I spotted this UFO drone on ADSB a few nights ago, and wondered what it was. Now I'm fairly confident I know what it was 😁 www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Fascinating thread

Oof. In the office, I just overheard a recent engineering graduate from a top UK university, looking at some points he'd plotted on a graph in Excel. "If only we were allowed to use ChatGPT here, I could easily fit a polynomial through these". I think it's going to be a two coffee morning

Any GPT-type system trained on lots of fundamental physics will be able to write reams of stuff that looks a lot like fundamental physics to most people - even well-educated people. It's surprisingly easy to do that: hence the Bognadov affair and similar. gizmodo.com/billionaires... (1/2)

I've ditched the crazy costly "lifetime guaranteed" non-stick frying pan that never lasts (mentioning no names). Trying a proper made-in-France commercial-kitchen carbon steel pan, massively cheaper and genuinely will last for decades. Now to see if I can manage to season it well enough to use it 🤣

Interesting - for the first 20 minutes after getting out of bed this morning, when I was stood in the kitchen making coffee, feeding the cat etc, my Garmin watch says I was in a "light sleep" state!

My wife bought a Canon compact camera in 2014 for £149, used it intermittently, took about 1000 shots, but by 2017 it went permanently into a drawer, replaced by her phone. I've just discovered this exact model is trading on eBay for typically >£200. Crazy youth fad I guess!

Daughter bought a hat this week, which had this great label: "trust us we to be fluent in the language of fashion"

France Selects Saab GlobalEye to Replace E-3F AWACS The joint declaration of intent includes two GlobalEyes and an option for two additional aircraft. Story: theaviationist.com/2025/06/18/f...

I went on a school trip to see a play at the RSC in Stratford in Summer 82. We were all on the river bank playing football in the afternoon (or pretending to in my case) when some actors came out, and some joined in. I think a few were famous, but the one who I really remember was Jenny Agutter

No-mow-May has gone quite well, but as it's now mid-June I suppose I'd better get the mower out this weekend

I stood next to Robert Plant in a pub in Bristol in the 80s. My friends poked me and said "it's Robert Plant!" I replied "who's he?" and he gave me a funny look. The scrum around him made it difficult to get to the bar and it was my round so I was a bit grumpy about it

I've just about the "taco" thing. Funny!

Only a week ago

Today I learned that you can still access the old archive of scanned pdfs of Flight International magazine (back to 1909!) by using the Internet Archive. Happy day, I thought they were all gone forever 😁 Suppose search will be harder tho... And I can't say I've checked that *everything* is there

Seems encouraging, even if it doesn't go anywhere near where I live. Frustrating that these infrastructure projects are so sloooow

Squeeze, bang, suck, blow… RR and Bristol coming together again! www.rolls-royce.com/media/our-st...

Early exit polls suggest the new pope did particularly well with male voters aged 45-79.

An oil-spill response Boeing 727 has just cruised over Bristol at 9000ft, ably demonstrating how much quieter airliner engines have become through my lifetime!

Had some free time this eve, and actually managed to finish a book instead of doom scrolling the bin fire of social media #winning 🤣