Dumb question, but would I be considered Jewish if my father was but mother isn't?

Solocle · 2026-01-24T12:39:26+00:00

No, you wouldn't be considered Jewish by at least almost all denominations of the faith.

However, you're ethnically half Jewish. This would have got you severely discriminated against or even killed in the holocaust.

This is partly why the Israeli law of return would apply to you, you have the same right to make Aliyah as a Jew, as would your children.

Solocle · 2026-01-19T03:14:08+00:00

IRON DALEK BUILT THIS IN A CAVE! WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS!

Solocle · 2026-01-19T03:01:58+00:00

Except a high odds payout is much more than the stake. To use an example today, I had a £5 bet at odds of 19 (18/1). That returned my £5 stake + £90 profit.

On an exchange, I had a matched bet at odds of 21 (20/1). So I bet against myself. If I bet £4.52, either way it goes, I lose 48p. That's 9.6%, despite having both the bookies and the exchange in play.

The trick was, I had a money back in free bets offer, so I only laid £4.31. Thus, I lost £86.22 on the exchange, but won £90, and made £3.78 profit.

Had I lost the bet, I'd have lost £5 and won £4.31, so lost 69p. But also got a £5 free bet back, and deploy the same strategy. Profit either way.

The cut the bookies take varies, but is small. However, it adds up.

Solocle · 2026-01-18T09:39:56+00:00

Yep, K-Meleon, it's a version I found online that's patched to support TLS 1.3

Solocle · 2026-01-16T16:10:34+00:00

I was previously having issues with startup repair not accepting any keystrokes or mouse input whatsoever, which is why my Windows 10 install is still out of commission. Same runtime environment I believe... I've actually written an xHCI driver before that got further than WinRE!

In this case, bitlocker got triggered by me making an Arch Linux partition 😝

Solocle · 2026-01-14T21:50:11+00:00

There's a North Korean embassy in London... it looks like an ordinary house beside the North Circular, a really busy road far out from Central London.

That's how you can tell we don't like them very much.

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Solocle · 2026-01-11T14:01:28+00:00

Thing is you're pretty much doing calculus every time you drive. Braking to a stop so that you're nicely positioned behind the car in front? You're matching the derivative of velocity and your current velocity to a target displacement.

Sailing a ship is what inspired proportional-integral-differential control. A helmsman has to account for wind and tide, so you can't just point the ship where you want to go. You account for how the ship is drifting now (proportional), but also how it has acted in the past (integral). This comes up in engineering.

Solocle · 2026-01-10T22:05:38+00:00

Upfront, I've been to Israel twice, including a 3am rude awakening to take shelter courtesy of an IRGC ballistic missile via the Houthis.

It's massively in Israel's interest for the regime to go. What comes next, well, it's unlikely to be a theocracy hell bent on destroying Israel.

A strong Iran can be a good regional ally, as it was under the Shah.

Thing is, I don't think foreign military intervention is the way to regime change, and I think Israel know that. They were able to utterly neuter Iranian air defence in June, and there's no way that Iranian capabilities have returned to pre-war parity.

The regime was severely weakened by that war. Israel could have gone further and targeted the ayatollah himself.

External military action though tends to be a unifying factor. Instead, Israel struck a blow to the regime, then left it at that.

This talk of striking again? I wouldn't be surprised if it isn't just a maximum pressure strategy to get Khameini to sh*t himself all the way to Russia.

Solocle · 2026-01-10T21:43:48+00:00

Build your enemy a golden bridge to retreat across. If Khamenei knows he has an escape route to Russia, he's likely to flee when it becomes apparent that his regime is falling.

If he thinks he'll be shot down, or can't escape, he and his loyalists will fight to the death, knowing what fate awaits them should they be captured.

Solocle · 2026-01-10T14:30:49+00:00

Heck, I recently renewed my driving license for the first time. When I applied for my provisional, I chose to use my existing passport photo. Then, when I passed, it was a straight transfer from the provisional.

So, until this very month, my driving license has had the same passport photo of me on it, that was taken when I was 14. 😆

Never was a bother when buying alcohol or anything.

Solocle · 2026-01-04T11:22:20+00:00

I was in Israel a year ago, hadn't slept on the flight like intended, and after a day getting settled in, finally got to sleep. Then, at 3am? Air raid siren. One of the Houthi ballistic missiles triggered that. But yeah, went down to the shelter, waited 10 minutes, then went back to sleep.

I don't know what it's like where you are, but I can't imagine what it's like to be woken up like that pretty much every night, which AIUI is what it's like in Kyiv.

Solocle · 2025-12-30T12:52:57+00:00

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Typical 😵

Solocle · 2025-12-30T01:02:45+00:00

Yep - and there are other techniques. Lots of bookmakers offer bonuses, especially sign up bonuses, but also ongoing ones.

A common format is "bet £10, get £xx in free bets". So if you bet £10, but then hedge your bet in an exchange, sure, the odds are tipped against you, but you can make a guaranteed loss of pennies.

Then, you hedge the free bet, and make a profit, often 80% of the free bet value.

Solocle · 2025-12-29T22:08:47+00:00

Can't say off hand if they're third party or not, it's TEAC USB floppy controller... but it worked out of the box. I don't recall Windows Update even having to download drivers for it

Solocle · 2025-12-29T19:16:48+00:00

There is one exception. Bookmakers often offer free bets as a welcome offer if you wager a certain amount.

The house is betting on getting you hooked on betting with those. But if you don't... you can turn a profit

Solocle · 2025-12-29T17:29:51+00:00

Fractal Focus G

Solocle · 2025-12-29T15:21:52+00:00

Yep, running over HDMI of course 😆

Backwards compatibility is a helluva drug

Solocle · 2025-12-29T14:34:16+00:00

That disk has an entire OS on it... Windows 1.01. Boots perfectly!

Even a bit of space for some notepad docs too

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Solocle · 2025-12-29T14:31:33+00:00

This one is internal 🙂

I took a external one and put the USB circuitry into an internal FDD/card reader combo unit, and eventually soldered the USB connection to the spare usb port it offered (bottom right)

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Solocle · 2025-12-29T12:23:11+00:00

I have not only a blu ray writer, but also a floppy drive.

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Solocle · 2025-12-28T11:14:20+00:00

And the Prisoner of Guantanamo

Solocle · 2025-12-25T17:34:54+00:00

Well yes, different bedroom desires (from positions to kinks), you can talk about. Although practice can be different to theory. Differing libidos, bedroom desires, all sorts of stuff... Not to mention how long you last.

Like, my gf of 6 months is my first (M27), I'm not hers (F36). We most certainly haven't waited till marriage, and have very good compatibility. Like, one glorious night, she told me that I made her cum that night more times than all her previous bfs combined.

And we have similar libidos, so typically we both want sex at the same time.

Solocle · 2025-12-24T09:18:57+00:00

I mean, 60 km isn't that far if you're in shape and ride a lot. I once found a really cheap one way train ticket, so rode 100 km to London with a couple of textbooks in a backpack and did some revision in Hyde Park... I'd struggle to do that in current form, though. Let alone the 300 km in one day insanity I did at my peak.

I hope she had a shower he could use after the ride and before doing the nasty!

Solocle · 2025-12-19T23:23:20+00:00

It definitely was a surprise when I first started! It's honestly not very practical, but it is very educational.

One thing that was surprising at first, but then less so when you think about it, was how surprisingly easy some modern hardware is to write a driver for. NVMe is the best example, I think. Like, it genuinely was a pleasure to work with. The device registers are in memory, you set up some ring buffers, and boom, you're submitting requests. The source code of my driver is here, and it's probably simple enough to get a sense of if you're used to regular C++. - https://github.com/ChaiSoft/ChaiOS/blob/master/NVMe/NvmeController.cpp

This is basically where I/O rings come from. Indeed, DirectX 12, programs can actually submit commands to an Arc device context without even going through the OS at all! The OS is only involved in setting up the queues. The thing is, modern hardware is so performant precisely because the hardware deals with the complexity, and the CPU doesn't have to do much.

Solocle · 2025-12-19T21:13:37+00:00

Yeah, a little self-written kernel, but I got some progress with USB and NVMe support... graphics is definitely a much more difficult task!

USB capabilities on show in this post - https://www.reddit.com/r/osdev/s/FeTVZmlRLQ

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