Posts by Robert Carnegie

Re: Non-Techy tries too hard

So if I set my laptop MAC address to be the address of your PC that I just unplugged...?

Re: 20 year old calculator still running

One piece of spreadsheet programming I wrote was never used at all. I'm still proud of it. No user complaints! (No users!)

Re: Evil Books!

Pianola music and Hollerith cards are pretty much digital, but I don't say I could find any.

Re: Imperrfect

How to prove it's you writing... spell idiosnycractially? ;-)

Re: firewall

Suppose that Russia demanded that Britain stops lighting up its public buildings blue and yellow, or London is nuked.

I think the freedom and the message of having famous landmarks thousands of miles away from Ukraine look temporarily as though they're not, while being a freedom that I love, is not the hill to die on. Literally.

We'd still do Edinburgh Castle of course. I'm in Scotland and we're thrawn.

Re: looking down from the railway bridge

You're thinking Segways perhaps.

I wonder if people will or should go back willingly to mass-occupancy public transport and breathing shared air as, with as much good luck as we can hope for, SARS-CoV-2 persists in its omicron form that infects everyone every month whatever you do but leaves alive most of the people that the other variants didn't kill first. Not to mention influenza, winter lung-vomiting lurgy, and just thinking about all the people who don't wash their hands before using a bus or after doing anything.

I do use a bus again... but I don't pick up the freesheet newspaper that my seatmate laid down. Not these days.

So, I'm sort of expecting to see new buses with each seat in its own cubicle with outside door. Or shower curtains all around each seat. Then some kid gets on with a Bluetooth speaker playing "that" music from "Psycho".

Seated on a normal properly adjusted bicycle, your feet barely reach the ground on tiptoe. In fact, my ride does have trademarked "Flat Foot Technology", but stopping and starting is still uncomfortable, and an impediment to making progress. I will fall over at 1 mph, but what I want to do is to as-good-as-stop, look around, and get going again from being not-quite-stopped. It's much easier.

Does the lane function react to your indicators? I think someone here just mentioned that theirs did not. Also, I advise indicating well before you start the manoeuvre. This should show other drivers that you are not making a straightforward lane change since, indeed, you are not doing it yet.

A self driving car ought to be made able to recognise a cyclist with a jacket bearing a large camera logo, as it is on road signs, because cyclists report that this improves the behaviour of human drivers considerably.

It is not true that cyclists hate pedestrians, and, of course, they do not try to kill pedestrians. They are not really allowed to.

Recently on weekends in the middle of Glasgow, I've seen the near exception of food delivery couriers on bicycles, who presumably are paid according to their speed, and not by whether they're riding on pedestrian pavement or riding safely in traffic and at junctions. I assume there are a lot of accidents, and I take a view that Something Must Be Done. But maybe this situation is everyone else's normal.

Re: Elaine Herzberg RIP

I disagree with your description of the incident. As a cyclist, like her, I wouldn't get too stoned to ride and then walk with my bike and a load of groceries briskly straight across the road and into the path of a close approaching car on a dark night, like her. And the Uber driver seems to have been watching a video on Hulu. As Wikipedia tells it, the self-driving software braked the car but it was set to leave the driver to execute hard emergency braking, and I think The Register reported that the car adapted by Uber was built with its own emergency braking function that Uber took out. How dark the night was is contradictory; I've seen versions of the video where I would and wouldn't have cycled over her. If the image can be enhanced to make her visible, then she should be visible to the car - but not if processing and enhancing the image takes ten minutes per frame...

I expect there are more, therefore more interesting, incidents with self-driving cars where another road user was injured but survived. Though maybe a lot of those victims are paid to keep quiet.

Quora dot com has a lot of stories of U.S. drivers being stopped by police and even given tickets because they're driving just under the speed limit but the rest of traffic is running faster so apparently they are meant to as well.

But it also has a lot of stories of U.S. drivers being stopped by police apparently just to have a conversation, such as, I was thinking of getting a car like yours, what do you recommend.

And police in other countries, sometimes.

As a cyclist, I recognise the value of stop signs, but if I stop, I fall over. So I prefer to brake down to probably 1 mph, which is falling over speed anyway (I can balance comfortably at 4 mph) but I can look around then either actually stop, or accelerate again and use the junction. I think the difference in this from stopping is not a difference that affects anyone's safety... unless children or the police are watching. For children, I don't want to set a wrong example, for police, I don't want to be caught doing it!

Re: pedestrianism

If you walk everywhere, then getting to America presents a difficulty anyway.

Simon and Garfunkel "walked off to look for America", but I think they were close by already. And in fact, I think they only walked to a bus stop.

Re: On foot, on crutches, in wheelchairs

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/the-highway-code/rules-for-pedestrians-1-to-35

does have rules: part of the "sidewalk" may be for cyclists only, and in any case, "Where possible, avoid being next to the kerb with your back to the traffic" - which means that "your" side is facing towards traffic on the traffic-facing edge of the sidewalk, or facing in the direction of traffic and on the away-from-traffic side.

In practice, I leave the away-from-traffic side to less able-bodied walkers, and children, while trying to not bump into traffic, but which side of the road I'm on is more likely to depend on where I can or can't cross the road safely.

An interesting rule is that parades are supposed to keep to the sidewalk ("pavement"). I have seen parades which did not. I suppose this is by special arrangement.

Anyway, if X is a cyclist, and the sidewalk is divided between pedestrians and cyclists, then the cycle track part of it is not for pedestrians.

Pedestrianized paths and arcades with COVID-19 around have set up separated opposite direction walking lanes, and I think that extraordinarily busy areas like London's Oxford Street had previously tried out marked westbound and eastbound lanes on the sidewalk, but most of this doesn't have the force of law, and if it's there now, it doesn't show from above on Google Maps.

Re: Site Acceptance Test

Wouldn't that inconvenience them too?

Re: Any direction will do

On consideration, maybe only the radio antenna needs to be inside a metal container. A biscuit tin, or a tin can, maybe the long one that hot dogs come in. Or else wrapped in aluminium?

Re: GIGO for the goddesses sake!

I don't know how many distinct fields for "identity of radio station" DAB provides, but each radio that I own seems to use different ones, and in a different order. Is it "BBC 6 Music" or is it just "6 Music"? Does it depend on the day of the week? Hypothetical since except for performer documentaries, Six seems almost never to be accidentally playing something I want to hear. It's uncanny, however do they do it. John Peel's son being there helps probably. :-)

Re: Any direction will do

I suppose you could disconnect the radio antenna, thus removing the offending signal. Or maybe find a metal shipping container and park in it while you sort things out. But then the issue of carbon monoxide fumes comes up.

Anyway, it isn't clear that any of these measures would actually relieve the problem.

Re: Remove the Battery

I haven't investigated, but all they're saying here is removable. One time.

Survive disconnection?

Ah, I think I need something explained. I have some UNIX shell experience and almost no Linux, but I use one Linux system, by ssh, that drops me when I'm not looking. I'm usually not doing anything I can't pick up, but I've been typing

while true; do echo Robert Carnegie; date; sleep 60; done

- to keep my session going, but being confident that there's a more elegant alternative approach...?

Re: I was once responsible ....

Where possible, I favour putting important facts in the e-mail to others subject line, especially if the important fact is "The process ran OK" or "The process failed". Then it crossed the eyeball even of the colleagues or manager who never read e-mails.

Telegraph, wasn't it? Not the "news" paper, the precursor of Internet.

Cigarette cards then.

Re: Missing options

It can go "rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb" then. And you know what makes that go, I mean grow. You get it from horses. (Though, having horses, do you need an e-scooter?)

In the UK it's illegal. If it isn't roadworthy by car or possibly motorbike standards. Lights and cigarette lighter and such. And if it's on a public road or sidewalk.

Re: elevator I say it's plausible

If the force that holds the elevator up is removed, what force causes it and the people in it to do anything but proceed straight downwards? Not the weight of your feet, for one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_elevator_accidents mostly refers to mining and construction projects. Possibly they are not equipped with the Otis safety device, which has certain specific requirements. The list also is in order of decreasing interest / death toll, so the top cases tend to be big people carriers like in "Metropolis".