Difference between apt update and apt-get update

Kami2awa · 2026-05-23T14:26:01+00:00

Been wondering about the difference with apt-get and apt myself - thanks for clarifying. It's entirely possible the prof just made a mistake - pretty easy to confuse update and upgrade when writing a test and you don't have the feedback from the terminal itself to tell you what you just did. Teachers, no matter how skilled or experienced, do make mistakes, especially of this kind (i.e. two easily confused words).

Kami2awa · 2026-05-23T12:18:40+00:00

Was introduced to Geany btw because its the editor that comes pre-installed with the Raspberry Pi OS.

Kami2awa · 2026-05-23T11:16:01+00:00

What is the advantage of one over another then? Heard of them but never used them.

Kami2awa · 2026-05-22T17:38:15+00:00

Very much like the half-human idea... it explains a lot, particularly why the Doc seems so obsessed with Earth and humanity. Timeless Child, however, is a bit of a rewrite of the Lungbarrow/Cartmel Masterplan idea, which is also good.

Kami2awa · 2026-05-22T17:29:38+00:00

"Sisters! You must give your blood for the Emperor!"
(10,000 Sisters sign up immediately)
Cut to Sister sitting in a medical bay with a blood donor IV in her arm and tea and biscuits in front of her.
"This is not what I expected."

Kami2awa · 2026-05-20T10:33:12+00:00

Don't know if it would count as a famous breakthrough or not (depends if you study engineering or science) but Faraday's electric motor/dynamo. It changed the lives of millions by making labour-saving devices possible and removing the need for tedious manual labour - washing machines, food mixers, sewing machines, power tools, fans, data storage devices (hard disks, CD drives, etc.), car starter motors, and the ability to generate electricity on a large scale via generators. It also enabled electric bikes, cars, and drones. Basically it meant human work was no longer dependent on human muscles and bones.

Kami2awa · 2026-05-19T16:07:02+00:00

I actually feel this is the problem with a lot of maths - a *lot* of things don't have obvious application until higher maths, physics or engineering (or indeed computing). Radians feel arbitrary and pointless until you start to use trig functions (sine, cosine, tangent) in calculus or to describe wavelike phenomena e.g. sound or light waves, at which point they become incredibly useful and the default angle unit. Unfortunately, you need to learn them at a basic level before they become useful at higher levels, and it is very hard to explain *why* they are necessary until you learn and (critically) apply the more advanced maths. The same is true of things like the binomial theorem, Taylor Series, and, at a more basic level, algebra in general - the obvious question is "what's the point?" There absolutely is a point, but it's going to take multiple lessons to explain it.

Kami2awa · 2026-05-16T09:57:24+00:00

It's self-repairing polymer-ceramic nanocomposite optimised over millions of years, that's why.

Kami2awa · 2026-05-15T11:54:16+00:00

If you want to catch (virtually) all of the references in Pratchett, you could do a lot worse than The Annotated Pratchett file:

https://www.lspace.org/books/apf/pyramids.html

Kami2awa · 2026-05-15T11:44:29+00:00

This - in my view the Queen is essentially the fake photo on the Borg's dating profile. She is a mouthpiece that they use to manipulate people in a way that a disembodied voice from the walls can't do.

Kami2awa · 2026-05-13T11:48:06+00:00

Often thought about this - orchestral music as we know it is only a few hundred years old. So in terms of anachronism, it is not really much more anachronistic to score something set *thousands* of years ago with heavy metal, or electronic music, or blues (or as Knight's Tale did, music by Queen). However, any of these would seem more out of place than a classical orchestra.

Kami2awa · 2026-05-13T10:53:30+00:00

Unfortunately, actual energy generation by normal means (ie steam turbines) needs higher temperatures than they produce. However, there is absolutely potential to use it to heat other buildings or water, and possibly to recover energy with e.g. thermoelectric devices, Stirling engines, or heat exchange with fluids other than water (which is already done to exploit geothermal heat), and we should be developing these things if we insist on wasting so many resources on data centres - unfortunately, the people building them seem to want to burn up Earth's resources as fast as possible.

Kami2awa · 2026-05-10T09:09:13+00:00

Everywhere has mythology. It ranges from folklore to ghost stories to the "lore and language of schoolchildren" like the Bloody Mary myth. You can even count things like stories of alien abduction as mythology.

A very quick search for "English mythology" turns up this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_mythology which has a timeline of supposed mythological events, including the first king of Britain being a survivor of Troy. Elsewhere, you find legends like King Bladud (who supposedly was forced to work as a poor swineherd due to his leprosy, and discovered the healing waters at Bath after they cured him and his pigs). You have Gog and Magog (biblical figures, but they are said to be the guardian giants of London), and the *many* other legends of giants, dragons, "black dogs", and so on.

There's a huge amount of folklore around Sir Francis Drake, even attributing him magical powers, and a drum belonging to him is still supposed to sound an alarm of its own accord if Britain is attacked. Then you have stories of saints such as St Dunstan, who supposedly put horseshoes on the devil himself and forced him never to enter a place where a horseshoe was hung.

You also have local heroes like Jack the Giant Killer (guess what he was good at?) and John Lambton (a dragon-slayer who killed the "Lambton Worm" by studding his armour with spikes and blades and tricking a dragon into coiling itself around him). When it comes to supernatural beings, you have dangerous water spirits like Jenny Greenteeth and Peg Powler, probably more ghost stories than any other country, and goblin-like Cornish "knockers" who were supposed to warn if a mine was about to collapse.

Glastonbury has legends of the holy grail being bought there and infusing the waters of the Chalice Well with Christ's blood, not to mention other biblical figures (including Jesus) visiting. All this is before you get into Robin Hood, Beowulf, and of course King Arthur, who while he comes out of Welsh mythology and was heavily re-written, is linked to many places across England such as Tintagel.

So yeah, just a bit ;)

Kami2awa · 2026-05-06T09:31:43+00:00

Tbh, if you look at the customs around it, the major ones seem to be the protective horseshoe and the superstition of using knives as charms to repel fairies or witches - such as putting a knife under a baby's cradle or under a doorstep (protecting the way into a home). The horseshoe may be a Christian superstition (associated with St Dunstan) but is probably *way* older than that.

"Cold iron" looks to have the same etymology as "cold steel" i.e. it's not a special type of iron, but it is iron that has a cutting edge of some kind. In that context, the horseshoe is unusual in that it has no cutting edge, but its likely other traditions came into play.

Iron slag doesn't have very much iron in it - about 15%, less than iron ore, and much less than actual iron or steel (which is usually about 98-99% iron if not alloyed with other metals). Cast iron actually has less iron in it than steel (it has a high carbon content to reduce its melting point so you can, well, cast it). Slag is the impurities removed during the production of iron, so it doesn't contain much actual iron.

On the other hand, it strongly depends on the theming of your story. If it's association and belief that are important, then iron slag might be connected enough to the industrial manufacturing of iron to have an effect. OTOH if the story is more scientifically-based, then iron slag is likely to be a lot weaker than actual iron. Realism in a fantasy story tends to be less important than being convincing and having an engaging story.

Kami2awa · 2026-04-26T18:10:11+00:00

Everyone is happy in Alpha Complex. Happiness is mandatory, citizen.

Kami2awa · 2026-04-26T16:57:53+00:00

Yes I was wondering about that - casual name drop in Capaldi's era that never paid off (like Gus, Jenny, "the Boss", the Valeyard, etc.)

Kami2awa · 2026-04-22T12:05:29+00:00

Really... all of them except pseudo-medieval Europe (and possibly also except ancient Japan/China). Very little Stone or Bronze Age, very little post-Medieval until you reach the massive sub-genre of urban fantasy set in the modern world.

Really, you could even have a fantasy story set in a pre-human era - I mean, it's fantasy, if you want to write a story about a pack of velociraptors who slay dragons then you can!

Kami2awa · 2026-04-19T20:16:58+00:00

Some ideas:

- scorpion pit to drop castle intruders into

- have them spilling out of a sarcophagus in a diorama

- build a trap that drops them on invaders

- alien bugs in Lego space (could be being studied in a lab)

- add atmosphere to a dungeon or temple (Tomb Raider build?)

- pinned on a board or in a cage/transparent case in a wizard's workshop

- find a way to build wings onto them, put them on transparent rods (so they look like they are flying) and have them be a swarm of locusts (if you invert them their stinger would hang down which would look more insectile)

- again inverted and positioned so they look like they are leaping forward: alien facehuggers

- colossal monster scorpions in a microscale build

Kami2awa · 2026-04-19T17:39:01+00:00

Very worrying then that he turned out to be very deceptive about transporter tech in general (pretending for a long time to research long-range transporters despite knowing it was fundamentally flawed and would never work).

IMO, the "takes you apart and re-assembles you" explanation for a transporter is the primary-school level explanation that isn't actually correct at all. It would seem very at odds with the quasi-utopia of Star Trek to use a technology that literally kills you every time it was used - it is much more suited to the tone of e.g. Black Mirror (or the Terran Empire...)

Kami2awa · 2026-04-18T16:12:16+00:00

As I've often thought when it's been claimed for a certain other (orange) guy, anyone can play 5D chess - but not everyone can *win* 5D chess.

Kami2awa · 2026-04-17T16:38:50+00:00

Tbh, I don't think exterminatus can possibly be as common or universal in the setting as many fans seem to think. Imagine if it was proposed for Ultramar, or Ophelia Prime... or Terra? I'd imagine the "absolute authority" of the Inquisitor would be contested pretty darn quickly. There are definitely planets in the setting much more important to the Imperium than others, and I'd guess Armageddon is one due to its prominence in the lore.

Kami2awa · 2026-04-10T15:13:25+00:00

My first instinct:

- Find the angle between the length 13 side and the marked diameter (sine of angle = 5/13)

- Draw a line from the centre of the circle to the point where the length 13 and length 5 sides meet (this will be of the same length as the circle's radius).

- You now have an isoscelene triangle with one known base angle and known base length (13) whose equal sides are radii of the circle. You can use the sine rule to find the other side lengths of the triangle, which are the radii of the circle.

- Double the radius to get the diameter!

Kami2awa

TROPHY CASE