She'd probably object to me using any networked appliance (including my phone) to take photos of her lady parts

Stay up at the support end. The business end is for the professionals

That would be great if there weren’t any House Republicans. Our new conservative government in Australia has decided that the previous government’s plan to do that (to 96% of houses) was not a good idea, and instead we’ll all be getting 25Mbps by 2019. Good one!

In November 2012 we used 140kWh (we were away for part of October 2012 which rules it out for comparison). In October 2013 we used 311kWh. Getting a new sauna will do that! Thanks to the smart-meter, it looks like a sauna takes about 8kWh over about two hours. It’s an 8kW heater, but only uses full power during the initial phase.

My electricity retailer has just been bought by a company I can never use because they appointed a debt collector for money I didn’t owe them. So it’s time to search for another one. Last time I analyzed pricing they were all much the same when all their pricing idiosyncrasies are accounted for. If my new company hadn’t made me the angriest I’ve ever been in my life I would say that I would be prioritizing doing my tax over choosing yet another electricity retailer.

My friend dragged me along to see it. I’d seen the trailer, which was just troopers & bugs, and gave no idea of what the movie was actually like. I really enjoyed the satire, and Denise Richards’ cute smile as the “piloted the spaceship”. And it had Neil Patrick Harris, who is awesome!

All the people in the movie were thinking exactly what they’d been told to think. Maybe Verhoeven was playing a joke on all the people who thought what it looked like the movie was telling them to think.

I don't want any frequencies boosted or attenuated, I want a flat frequency response. I don't want it to "sound good" I want it to faithfully reproduce the original performance. I want it to sound like the musicians are in the room with me, and you won't get that with MP3s.

If you were really keen, you could listen to some music on a high-quality speaker system, then try to approximate that in your headphones with appropriate EQ. But the next best thing is flat- let professional sound engineers do their job!

Hehe, the car I bought this year was a bit cheaper because no other buyers wanted manual transmission. Talking to people who actually know about cars, it seems (good) automatic transmission is just as good as manual these days. I’d rather be reading than watching the road or changing gears.

+1

I don’t really like driving and I absolutely hate parking. Both problems solved.

This year I bought a 2011 car to be able to use a child’s seat. I really hope it’s the last human-driven car I buy.

To not really answer your question, blind singers (who do have both their hands free) follow the music with one hand and the lyrics with the other.

In 2007 I had a lot of choral music at my wedding, including an original piece. One of our friends is blind, so a few weeks before, I sent off all the music to the local Institute for the Blind where someone put all the music into braille. Automatic tools for putting music into braille would save choirmasters a lot of planning and free up the volunteer transcribers to do other things.

Yes, I was surprised, because Lua is the only programming language my brain has taken kindly to. Of course, it could just be my brain, but is more likely to the WoW’s WTF folder, as mentioned elsewhere.

I think we have a winner. Even my abacus had more storage than that.

I so wanted one of those... a Spectrum seemed too much to wish for.

In the end my VIC-20 had 3K.

I've had this signature for a while:

I suppose I rarely see films at theatres these days, and when I do go it’s to see films that idiots would avoid. If they made a “use your phone” rule I would never go again, but it’s an economic thing– how many people can’t do without their phones vs. how many people absolutely wouldn’t tolerate them. A low-attention-span idiot’s money is as good as mine to the cinema.

Of course it would be possible for the cinemas to have different sessions for different people.

Last summer I devised my optimal hot chocolate recipe using my wife’s electronic kitchen scales. I came up with 9 grams good quality cocoa powder, 11 grams caster (or superfine) sugar, and 175ml milk. Sifting the cocoa and sugar makes it much more amenable to being mixed in with the milk.

Working with PCM sound at work, it’s occasionally necessary to measure lengths down to the sample, or 1/44100 of a second. I didn’t answer the poll because nothing was anywhere near, unless “has an accuracy in 454ths of a pound” is close.

My boss and I (who share the same studio at different times) both share the same ‘piling system’. It works absolutely fine 98% of the time, which I think is fine in terms of the low energy we put into it.

As long as there’s somewhere where high entropy is OK, it’s easy keep the rest of the house neat. When I was a bachelor sharing houses, this area was my room. Now I’m married, it has been the (otherwise unused) second bedroom. Unfortunately (entropy-wise, anyway), our imminent baby will get the second bedroom, and eventually will start to care about its surroundings. So I think the plan at the moment is to try and defy the second law of thermodynamics.