winterknell

winterknell, 10 months ago

@StillIRise1963
They really work. Yazd has (or had, in 2007) a Water Museum filled with details on the building and maintenance of badgirs and qanats. Well worth seeing.

On a stinking hot day when I was drenched with sweat walking around outside, I visited a couple of houses cooled this way. They were as cool and comfortable inside as if by modern air-con. But they were quite large, and how well the system would work for a tiny bungalow is open to question.

Pics my own, from 2007.

In the courtyard of the Yazd Water Museum, showing a display dummy using a wooden rotary hoist to draw water from a well. The hoist is two x-shaped frames with joists connecting them at middle and corners. It rotates on the centre joist, which is fixed to the ground by posts, and the rope is wound on the outer joists as the device rotates.
Inside the Yazd Water Museum, showing a room with heavy walls and a number of glass cases holding exhibits.
Inside the Yazd Water Museum, showing the paddle of a water-driven mill.Some blades are missing but the remaining blades show how they were angled and set in a rotating case built around a fixed metal shaft.

winterknell, 10 months ago

@pluralistic
"But what if, instead of trying to force Zuck to be a better emperor-for-life, we passed rules requiring him to let his subjects flee his tyrannical reign?"

This is crucial.

Meta won't let people delete their Threads account unless they also delete their Instagram account. That's Meta's Berlin Wall around Threads, designed (though they will have lots of "technical" reasons why it isn't) to prevent Threads users leaching away into the Fediverse.

That wall must fall.

winterknell, 10 months ago

@mjeaton @searls @pluralistic Thank you for this. This link-list gave me the pleasure of discovering https://blog.testdouble.com, which I personally hadn't come across before.

Part of the pleasure was that the blog worked perfectly, even with scripting disabled. I browse with Noscript and Ublock Origin, and I'm resigned to landing on pages that show nothing until I allow them to run scripts. A generated page that just works is more impressive to me than any brag-page of past coding achievements.

winterknell, 11 months ago

@jon Does "not facilitate" mean they don't accept foot passengers, or just that they don't offer a specific "deck" fare?

I recall taking a ferry from Holyhead to Dublin as a pure foot passenger, back in June of 2008. Cost me £25. (FWIW the train from Stratford-upon-Avon to Holyhead cost me £53 and one night in a cheap hotel in Holyhead cost £50, so as you can see the ferry itself was relatively inexpensive.)

winterknell, 1 year ago

@Quokka I've never quite recovered from losing the wonderful 102-key desktop board (with the numpad). My laptop lifestyle is fine, but my fingers do miss doing the alt-numpad dance.

Now I Ctrl-WınKey-O to get the onscreen keyboard, WinKey-Space till the right keyboard appears, click the desired key, then close the onscreen keyboard. I have French, Russan, Greek, and Turkish keyboards defined, so I can usually find the character I need.

For anything else, like you, I go to Google.

winterknell, 1 year ago

@eddie1perez No tags on NPR, BBC or ABC either. Looks like His Mucks is having some sort of rethink.