I watched a bit of the first episode of "SkyMed", a Canadian TV series about general-aviation medevac flights in northern Manitoba.
The acting is horrendous. The scripts are worse. But the King Air and hangars are kind-of cool, and the scriptwriters at least knew to have the pilot call "Radio" instead of "Tower" at an MF field.
Now, if the pilots would only stop making 90° banked turns with a critically-ill patient on board. That's a lot of Gs. 😕
Today this family #tech support guy learned that some (?) smartwatches register themselves with the phone as Bluetooth headsets, so that calls can end up coming through the watch even when someone answers on the phone.
It seems weird to me that that's on by default for the #PixelWatch, and a little bit of web searching shows I wasn't the only one taken aback. Turning off that dubious feature also apparently will save battery.
Agatha Christie wrote Nemesis, her final Miss Marple novel, in 1971 at the age of 80-81.
While no formal psychological assessment was made public, she was likely living with early #dementia at the time. Her writing is more repetitive and simpler, but the novel has a great plot and she wrote memory loss into it, letting Miss Marple tell us what it is like from the inside and how she tries to cope with it.
Maybe-contentious claim: for technically-oriented people, no user interface has ever surpassed the Unix shell.
I remember "discovering" it in 1987, 9 years after I'd started writing code in FORTRAN and BASIC. The old-timers showed me how I could do things in minutes that took weeks on other systems, like generate a full sorted concordance of a text in a single pipeline of shell commands.
(If I were ever forced to use a Mac, that's where I'd spend a lot of my time.)
Here's a different perspective on Threads. I mentioned the federation question to a younger (late 20s) relation who's very active in social media — they just laughed and said "Threads? Who's on THAT?"
For all our soul-searching here in the fediverse about federating with them, #Threads is considered a bit of a joke in the commercial social media world, this decade's reincarnation of Google Plus.
Bad headline: "Fediverse 'purists' reject Meta's Threads"
Good headline: "Meta's Threads fails at federation — unable to moderate abuse and hate speech"
My dad the judge taught me that it's not enough for justice to be done; it needs to be seen to be done. The world needs to see that problem is Meta.
(I recognise that we risk weeks of rising abusive behaviour before the defederation happens, and I respect the opposing arguments from people who want to prevent that.)
@soapone As an ideal, we take safety as a collective responsibility in the fediverse: people in vulnerable groups shouldn't have to keep fighting the same battle over and over in isolation.
Our reality is still very far from that, but the ideal should guide our actions. Waiting for the flood of abuse from Threads to happen before defederating them isn't an easy choice. While I disagree, I do understand why some instance owners have been proactive.
I read an interesting Christmas story by Margery Allingham.
It's set in the mid 1950s. A young family lives in a small basement apartment in west London, in a run-down neighbourhood. He works in the City in a white-collar job, but housing in cities has never been easy.
The couple is obsessed with Victoriana, which is just coming back in style. Their tiny sitting room is almost completely filled with a 6-place Victorian dining set, leaving room for only a love seat and a small TV…
There is no "right" projection for maps; it all depends on what you're using them for.
For example, if you're navigating a long distance by lat/lon (e.g. chronometer and sextant), #Mercator is actually a useful projection, because lat and lon are consistently spaced, making it easy to fix your position.
If you're planning a flight, a series of 1:500,000 charts in Lambert Conformal Conical are best, because you can measure distances the same in any direction. etc.