LG G5 (2016) running Lineage OS.

Android security update
5 August 2022

Best wishes,
Bob

I've got a phone from 2016 which still does all I want. It is a LG G5, running Lineage OS. Decent SOC, 5G wifi, LTE, NFS, good speakers, 3.5 headphone jack, user replaceable battery, 512GB microsd card, >500 ppi display, etc. I see absolutely no reason to replace it.

Best wishes,
Bob
 

You make some good points, but I'm not sure that I would put it in terms of "above average", unless you mean in a need for hardcopy. ;)

Even in my family there is quite a difference in printing. I print more photographs (inkjet) and very little text (laser), my wife, who does quite a bit of copy editing, both of her work and others', prints (a lot) more text (laser}, since she prefers to work on hardcopy. Perhaps not maximally green. However, at last we don't have to drive anywhere to get our stuff printed. This is particularly good since neither of us has driven a car for 30 years (she never).

Best wishes,
Bob

I have 3 instances of a workhorse laser printer (HP 4100n). Home, college office and wife's college flat. However, I also have an A3 inkjet (Canon IP850). This is for printing photographs. No laserjet I know of prints photos well.

Best wishes,
Bob

Absolutely. My first printer was an Epson MX-80 dot matrix printer. It was great.

Best wishes,
Bob

Sure. At the least it is something that takes a bit of skill, perhaps even more than wearing sequined garments. I'm really interested in the micro engineering. I also like the graphic design aspects (dials). So I revel in the ability and opportunity to express the necessary (hard won) skills in putting together watches.

I also have an interest (philosophical) in the nature of time. And an interest in how it is measured. For precision timing, I turn to my Raspberry PI based NTP server, which is reasonably accurate.

----- cut here ----
chronyc> tracking
Reference ID : 50505330 (PPS0)
Stratum : 1
Ref time (UTC) : Tue Aug 02 22:35:41 2022
System time : 0.000000036 seconds slow of NTP time
Last offset : -0.000000028 seconds
RMS offset : 0.000000035 seconds
Frequency : 8.165 ppm fast
Residual freq : -0.000 ppm
Skew : 0.001 ppm
Root delay : 0.000000001 seconds
Root dispersion : 0.000022498 seconds
Update interval : 16.0 seconds
Leap status : Normal
chronyc>
----- cut here -----

Best wishes,
Bob

Perhaps there is something in what you say. I was once wearing a different, larger watch at a train station when a stranger asked me about it, saying he noticed it when we were on an escalator. He was particularly interested in learning about the brand. I use "F&J" as the brand for my watches. I told him that it was a DIY jobbie and "F&J" stood for "Flotsam and Jetsam". He lost interest. I suspect that he was a collector.

Mind, this is the only time anything like this has happened in about 20 years of wearing F&J watches.

Best wishes,
Bob

I almost never go out of the house without a mechanical watch on my wrist. I have a number of them. None are expensive. Most of them are ones where I fixed a movement, made the physical dial for it, printed the dial (pad printing), and found hands and a case to fit.

My favourite has a Longines movement from 1939 (calibre 12.68N), a dial I made, an Omega RAF case from around 1951, and a home made leather strap. The movement (needed fixing; in particular, a new balance staff), case and strap are all gifts from friends in the "watch community". It runs within +/- 8 seconds a day.

Why do I do this? It isn't because I think that people will notice. It is because I can. :)

Best wishes,
Bob

At least it will produce electricity on dark, still nights. Perhaps what we need is a variety of sources.

Best wishes,
Bob

I got one of these cards (Minion) for the first time ever a few months ago. I was pleased. It turns out that I was putting together a reference signal for calibrating the input of a (wrist)watch microphone into an escapement analyser program. (Using a OXCO 10MHz crystal divided to 1PPS.) The speaker from the greeting card was perfect for getting the 1PPS signal to the microphone.

Best wishes,
Bob

I once had a Salvador Dalí etching, "Rembrandt". (Ended up giving it to my brother as a wedding gift.) I thought it was very good, and reasonably traditional. He did his weirder stuff from a base of good classical training. Similar sort of stuff as above.

https://dali.com/gallery/0533_...

Best wishes,
Bob

It is unclear whether the claims are about sentience (ability to have sense experience or feel) or sapience (ability to think).

This is a bit crude. but here are some categories.

- Respond to environment (machines, organisms such as viruses).

- Sentient / feel (sheep, dogs, and the like)

- Sapient / thinking / self aware (humans, perhaps some other primates, perhaps other animals, perhaps aliens)

- Agents / capable of moral responsibiity (sufficiently developed humans)

Some of the interesting question are about the relations between categories. Can there be sapience without sentience, that is, non-feeling thinkers? Can there be sapience without agency, that is thinkers without the capacity for moral responsibiity? I'm inclined to think that agency requires sapience which requires sentience which requires responding to environment. The most interesting question for me (given that I do moral philosophy) is whether entities (of a kind) can be capable of sapience without being capable of agency.

Best wishes,
Bob

One of the first things I did at the beginning of lockdown in 2020 was to buy a Canon A3 printer (IP8750), some good non-Canon ink, refill system, chip resetter, etc.

This was for two reasons. In online teaching I use a camera pointing at a printed sheet (on which I can write) instead of a white board. This is either a document camera (A5) or a full field camera (A3). I wanted to be able print in colour. All we had was a B/W laser printer (HP 4100N), which is a good home office printer and gets lots of use.

The other is that I thought I might have more time to print photographs, and wanted to print A3. I have done quite a bit of this. Less expensive and more environmentally friendly than having lots of digital frames.

Having a colour printer has proved very useful both for work and my photographic hobby. (Workflow is film -> scanner -> GIMP -> printer. All colour calibrated.)

Different strokes ....

Best wishes,
Bob

It is a bit tricky. Of what are they abstractions? One might try to see natural numbers as abstractions, e.g., from groups of cows. It is trickier when it comes to infinity, reals, or complex numbers.

The cool thing here is your claim that reals are no more or less real (different sense of "real", I take it) than complex numbers. Say you want to be a realist about science, and physics, in particular. That is, you believe that it attempts to describe reality, rather than, for example, it telling an interesting story that may be fiction, but which is useful (a model). Then you should be committed to the existence of the elements of story. If this result is correct, complex numbers too. (Logicism won't help, even if plausible for natural numbers, which I doubt.) So, there seems to be a package deal, realism about physics and complex numbers, or anti-realism about both. That is seriously interesting!

Best wishes,
Bob

I too use Nextcloud (and before that Owncloud). However, I have it on a hosting service along with my website. Other things being equal, I prefer not to have any incoming exposed ports on my home LAN. For "sensitive" documents, I encrypt locally and only have the encrypted files on Nextcloud on the hosting service. It is very useful to have stuff stored on the cloud.

And, I too am a bit over the top with regard to backups. Two NAS for backup. One in the house and one in the shed/garden room at the end of the garden ( sort of off premises backup). I've been using Borg/Borgmatic, which is simple and seems to work quite well. Just to be a bit safer, I also do a reasonably regular sneaker net backup elsewhere.

Best wishes,
Bob