Posts by David 132 3856 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Mar 2010
I know you know this, but the point of the colour description on the DVLA doc is to help law enforcement. A copper pursuing your fleeing vehicle (whether it’s you or a TWOCer driving it) is hardly going to radio in to HQ, “this is car 54, I am in pursuit of a puce car, it’s like fuschia but a shade less lavender and a bit more pink…”
AFAIK Monochrome is still up & running - not over telnet any more but I SSH’ed into it just a few weeks ago, as I do every so often for nostalgia’s sake.
> ssh mono@mono.org
What’s scary is that almost 30 years since I first used that BBS, I can still muscle-memory the key sequences to get to particular sections.
From the article: The user would press those on their remote to be taken to the relevant page with more subdirectories – after a few seconds of watching the number at the top tick over to the right one.
Well yes. Unless you had a sub-optimal signal due to being in a Welsh valley, or it was raining (but I repeat myself…) or the pigeons had knocked the aerial skew-wiff.
…in which case you’d key in your desired number, watch the index number in the top-right corner tick upwards.. upwards… …and right past your number without picking up the page. So you’d watch it go round again, in hopes that this time it would get it.
After a while you’d think “huh, boring ol’ ceefax, I’m going to go out in the garden and play keepy-uppy ‘till The A-Team comes on”
> I've no idea how their comments made it from the users' living rooms onto the tellybox though - this was way before email and SMS were a thing. Did you have to physically send them in by Royal Mail?
Duh. What do you think the TV Detector vans were for?
Surely you didn’t believe the government propaganda that they were to detect licence evaders? No! They cruised up and down the nation’s streets, their sensitive microphones listening for people yelling at their TVs. If the aforementioned yelling was a Teletext Reader’s comment, it would be taken back to Broadcasting House by the detector van.
At risk of validating Muphry’s Law (not to mention invoking Godwin’s), may I point out that it’s usually written as “grammar nazi” not “nazi grammar”?
I mean, the latter evokes mental images of a classroom full of jackbooted stormtroopers, repeating by rote “for you ze war is over”, “it is DIE Britischer Swine, nicht DER Britischer Swine”, “i before e except in Heil” etc etc…
Well yes, for kids whose mummy and daddy had far too much money, yes.
BBC B circa 1985: £399
Spectrum: £99-£175 or so depending on model.
I had a peer at school who, when he turned 17, got a brand new Land Rover 90 from his doting parents. I bet he had his own Beeb at home.
…the bastard.
We’re all still waiting for delivery… Henrique and his team are doing an awesome job trying to work around the global chip shortages which are just a nightmare. Currently hoping that delivery will be not too far away (Aug 2021 was the original target).
> forename.surname@company.tld is almost the archetypal email address!
I work for a large company that, as expected, uses that format. Everyone, from most-recently-hired intern up to CEO, has firstname.lastname@ as their email address.
Except for one colleague of mine, who has firstname@ as his.
How he achieved this I don’t know but I believe it had something to do with working for the IT department at juuuust the right time a few years ago…
From Youtube I learned that you can do just about anything with a banana - evidence here. (don’t worry, safe for work)
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