Spending our 30th anniversary in Walla Walla - a wine town in Washington State. Biggest surprise so far - walking to Safeways! I thought this sort of walkable mixed use planning was illegal in America these days etc...
Although I'm staying in an apartment with built in garages, and for places probably built this century they're surprisingly small. My Focus doesn't fit that easily, and we just watched a guy take 20 minutes to park his Honda Pilot - he finally had to park it diagonally to make it fit. This is semi-rural Washington - Cabernet Cowboy country!
Rewatching Twin Peaks, and of course everybody knows it was filmed near North Bend and/or Snoqualmie in Washington State. And I've been there a bunch - it is a lovely part of the world - and seen the signs for the Twin Peaks tourist traps etc.
But then the Sheriff's Department pops up and HOLY SHIT that's DirtFish Rally School! I know that place well - we go there once a year to drive sideways in mud. At the time of filming it was a lumber mill, which DirtFish took over afterwards.
The sharp-eyed may also recognize this place from the Dirt 4 rally game, since DirtFish was featured in that as a playground. So you too can do donuts in front of the Twin Peaks Sheriff Department!
Drag racing guys are so weird. Half their cars are "garage queens" - they look great, but they never actually use them. But oh look at the heavy tools they reach for if you call them "drag queens"...
Well it's too hot for my celtic brain, I'm knackered from having fun in cars all day, and I've just failed to see the aurora from either of my houses, and now I'm whingeing about it on the internet. I'm having a real #FirstWorldProblems day. Time for bed.
@TomF I got to see it once as a kid though and it was magical. I was camping with family, and it was just me and a cousin staying up late letting the camp fire burn down, and my cousin spotted it up above us. It was gone not long after.
I'm glad Biden has found a place to draw a line against Netanyahu. It feels like he's been wanting to for a while. Behind the scenes the politicos have been trying to dangle the carrot for ages, and it's not worked, so now it's time for the stick.
Unfortunately, I don't think even copious applications of the stick months ago would have made a single bit of difference. Bibi just wants to kill people. What a mess.
Finally finished The Good Place. What a masterwork! The density of jokes, the forwards and backwards references, the stuff you have to pause to spot - all so delicious.
Almost none of it is quotable without gigantic spoilers. Amazing.
Discovered today that the Windows Snipping Tool does video (and audio) recording now. Works great - does a screen subrect, captures the mouse, can pause and resume. When did this happen? Super useful.
Huh. I discuss electric vehicles with people quite a bit, and a lot of them would like to avoid Tesla for many reasons (build quality, El*n) but it's so hard to get away from the goodness of the amazing charging network.
And now that's gone. Seems like a poor decision. Oh well.
@TomF I hope it pushes the major providers in my area to start building out again, they'd put expansion on pause because tesla was planning on building a bunch out here and we ended up in a situation where there's not nearly enough chargers for all the EVs on the road driving long distances, and pretty much outside of the chargepoint and zef stations everything is level 2. (then on top of that shell bought one of the major providers here than shut down ALL their stations...)
I don't agree with punishing companies who happen to be in Israel. But I see no other way to stop this bullshit than to use every lever that exists. And the government of Israel won't listen to screaming people. But they will listen to screaming companies.
Are boycotts a form of economic terrorism? Abso-fucking-lutely. But companies aren't people. So this is how it is.
A bit of rain at lunch time, but the afternoon turned into a lovely day to go vroom with friends. Now if my car will just stop disassembling itself mid race...
There are four cars in this picture - the pace car, pole position, second, and third (me). Three of us agree about which way the track goes. Pole... he's done his own research.
This is all happening at about 30mph - nobody was in any danger - he just looks like a total muppet. Me and blue were both giggling like children at the shit we were going to give him after the race.
Computers like the ZX Spectrum had each 8x8 block have 1 bit per pixel, and that 1 bit selects between two colours chosen by an 8-bit attribute. For the Spectrum the attribute had 3 bits for colour 0, 3 bits for colour 1, 1 bit to make them bright, and a completely pointless "flash" attribute.
But what if you had twice as many bits?
Well, you'd have four colours per pixel to choose from, and a 16-bit attribute chunk. So 16/4 = 4 bits per colour. Same as the Speecy. Buuuut....
...what if the 16 bits were 3 colours of 5 bits, and a single bit to say whether colour 0 was black or white? Having the other 3 colours be one of 32 colours is veeeery interesting. That's twice as many as the C64!
BTW it is distressing to me that the Speccy could have had the same palette as the C64 if they'd just used their bits better. Burning an entire bit for "flash" - a thing the CPU could have trivially done in SW - is just criminal. It also chewed about 10% of the ULA. We could have had 1-bit PCM sound with those gates!