Spyke

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Britain issues travel warning for US

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First time I ever went there (1997) I landed at Boston Logan Airport, and a guy in plain clothes, but with a gun, stopped everyone who was departing the plane and repeatedly yelled out "American citizens this way, foreigners line up against the wall!".

I never once felt safe going there, and was always relieved when I got out alive. Decided a few years ago that I'll never set foot in the US again.

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Why Companies Don’t Fix Bugs

This is something I really love about my job. It's a small company, and we don't have any of these kinds of process overheads.

It's accepted that people fuck up (and in most cases that're relevant to me, I'm the people in question) but if I can reproduce the problem, I can often get the fix in the users' hands the next day. Generally the positive effects of a quick turnaround and feeling like they matter outweigh the negatives of the problem being there in the first place.

Not to say I don't have stuff in the "tech debt" bucket, but having the autonomy to just fix the low-hanging fruit makes for a satisfying work environment.

memes

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Excellent tip

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It's an Apple Photos feature. It can be enabled or disabled in Settings -> Apps -> Photos -> Featured Content.

It will pull together photos of a person or animal over a period of time, a set of photos from a particular date, a group from a place, or similar and make them into a slideshow.

Sometimes it comes up with good ones (I get quite a few of my daughter and my dogs) and sometimes they're hilariously bad or random/contrived.

Can't say they've ever really made me sad, but I may not be in the same stage of life as the OOP / not looking for internet joke points.

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How much microplastic is generated during mountain biking?

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So, 1/3 the production rate per tire compared to a car over 100km. Not to mention half the number of tires. I wonder how much of that is due to the weight difference alone.

It actually appears to be per bike per 100km. I find that quite surprising given it's half the number of tyres, there's substantially less initial volume per tyre than a car's and, as you say, there's a lot less weight on them.

Given their focus on MTBs, I wonder if it's related to the type of terrain being ridden (higher incidence of gravel/sharp rocks than your average road) or different tyre compounds between the two vehicle types.

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GM storing poor-selling Canadian-made electric vans on Michigan lot

Years ago — late 90s — I used to travel to Vermont from the UK on business. Because of the time difference I'd often wake up at ~3:30 in the morning and since there was very little to do in a hotel room in Burlington, I'd put The Weather Channel on.

Quite often they'd report on "snow coming down from Canada", or "frigid air coming down from Canada", and I always thought it was weird how they seemed to be subtly blaming another country for weather phenomena.

Dunno why I thought of that.

Anyway, electric vans. Cool.

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What hill will you die on?

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This is the first I've heard of Branston beans, but now I'm excited to try them when I'm back in England in a couple of weeks.

I was there for Christmas and bought a relatively huge jar of pickle before I remembered I wasn't going to be able to fly with it. A lot of pork pie was eaten that day.

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BBC Says “Unprecedented Funding Challenge” Lies Ahead As Content Spend Set To Fall By $200M

I just wish there were a legal way to stream BBC content (i.e. iPlayer) outside the UK. I'd gladly pay the licence fee (as a non-resident) or more, to be able to watch all their content without having to grub around on a million different services.

Whether there'd be enough people in the same boat to be able to make up a $200M shortfall, I don't know, but it seems like it could be a pretty big untapped market.

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Why Companies Don’t Fix Bugs

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Works for a small company. If everyone in a large company is allowed the same leeway nothing could ever ship

Oh for sure. I've been lucky enough that I've only ever worked for places with at most a few hundred employees, so my experiences of larger companies have been at best second-hand — but it was enough to know that I'd never want to work somewhere like that.