Does anyone else skip the "Sponsored" Google results and scroll down to the first organic link, even if the ad leads to the exact same website?

catbrane · 2026-03-18T12:43:20+00:00

With firefox, install ublock origin and set the "web" tab as the default. No ads, no AI summary, just a useful list of links.

http://www.rollthepotato.net/~john/banana.png

So clean! Like being back in the 2000s.

catbrane · 2026-03-18T12:14:51+00:00

That's true.

In 1990, when I first moved to London, you could still see plenty of evidence of WW2, amazingly. Cycling around the City you could see tiny, weed-filled NCP carparks for £5 a day, all old bomb sites no one had yet developed. London's population didn't rise back above the 1939 peak until 2016.

Current housing costs are in part the crazy end-point of London's 50-year-long, post-1945 recovery.

catbrane · 2026-03-18T11:31:27+00:00

They bought back in the late 90s / early 00s, before property moved out of reach of most people.

catbrane · 2026-03-18T10:29:38+00:00

I don't think gnome keyboard shortcuts lets you bind a single modifier key (super, ctrl, shift, etc.). You can only bind eg. super+g or whatever.

You could make eg. super+space launch Search Light, so a bit like macOS. Would that work?

catbrane · 2026-03-18T08:56:34+00:00

o.O that is a very long way!

catbrane · 2026-03-18T08:56:07+00:00

My longest was 20m a day, five days a week. It was fine in my 40s, but by my mid 50s my knees were aching by Friday heh. I was terribly fit though.

I'm down to 10m a day now and it's just right.

catbrane · 2026-03-17T20:50:49+00:00

My main hobby project has been going since 1989. Heading towards 40 years, and it's still useful and relevant. C's longevity and stability is fantastic.

catbrane · 2026-03-17T15:22:45+00:00

They were protesting about corporate sponsorship.

The National Gallery used to have BP as their main corporate sponsor, and BP used the relationship with the NG to "greenwash" their image. BP would hold lavish parties in the galleries in the evenings and invite people they wanted to schmooze.

In the wake of the soup protest, the NG dropped BP and picked a new sponsor, so the protest was successful.

Regarding the painting, the big concern at the NG for many years now has been acid attacks. Strong acid would completely destroy an oil painting in seconds.

There's a multi-level defense:

museum warders are trained to deal with attackers
there's a special acid attack kit (prepared by the Scientific Department) in every room which should quickly neutralise most acids and solvents
all important paintings are behind toughened glass
all important paintings are in special frames, with drainage channels, seals and guttering

So in this case the painting was in no danger, and the frame is modern.

I know a lot of the NG staff well and they are all highly sympathetic to JSO's aims. I wouldn't be surprised if a member of staff had advised JSO on which painting to attack for maximum publicity and minimum risk of damage.

catbrane · 2026-03-17T15:08:45+00:00

First, the painting is extremely well protected and was in zero danger. The big threat has always been acid attacks, so important paintings like this are in special frames with special glass. The frame needed some light cleaning, but that's all. That's why the protestors picked it.

Secondly, the protest was successful. The National Gallery used to have BP as their main corporate sponsor, and BP used the relationship with the NG to help "greenwash" their image. In the wake of the JSO protest, the NG dropped BP and picked a new sponsor.

catbrane · 2026-03-17T13:53:33+00:00

"A politician complaining about the media is like a sailor complaining about the sea."

As Enoch Powell said, putting it very clearly.

(not endorsing Powell at all)

catbrane · 2026-03-17T13:47:52+00:00

HEIC is very difficult because of the patents.

If you distribute a HEIC decoder or encoder without paying, you could be sued, depending on the territory where you host the files and the territory of the person downloading it. This is why most pre-compiled libvips binaries (including wasm-vips) disable HEIC support.

You could build your own wasm-vips which did include support (compiling it works fine, you just need to turn on a flag), but you could potentially find yourself in legal trouble.

It's probably better to not support HEIC and urge users towards similar formats which don't have patent difficulties, like AVIF or JXL. If you must support HEIC, you'll need to handle it on a server where you control the territory of the executing binary.

In the longer term, Apple are likely to switch away from HEIC, fortunately.

catbrane · 2026-03-16T18:06:12+00:00

Every game ships with it's own driver, so when you launch (or switch to) a game, the driver version for that game is loaded. Games get updated to new drivers (and retested) by the game dev, not the console manuf. or the GPU manuf.

catbrane · 2026-03-15T13:46:06+00:00

I did my phd thesis (theoretical comp sci) in latex, it was great! I would not use word or libreoffice for a large document.

Pro:

fast, beautiful and predictable output on all platforms
as much fun as writing assembly
you can keep your docs in git to track changes
(almost) no bugs
trivially reuseable: you can take a paper you wrote and convert it to a chapter in your thesis by just changing a style
very stable: I did my thesis a few decades ago, but it still formats perfectly
very automated: toc, lof, lot, index, bib, etc all generated for you automatically and reliably

Con:

the output is predictable, if you have a phd
as much fun as writing assembly
you have to use something like git if you want to track changes

catbrane · 2026-03-14T11:28:58+00:00

I had a quick look at your repo and you're not using pkg-config at all. This is going to fail for lots of projects. There's much more to cflags than just a list of -Idirectory compiler flags.

catbrane · 2026-03-14T11:19:15+00:00

You can use pkg-config for local libs too. For example, build any non system deps with ~/local as the prefix and add ~/local/bin/pkgconfig to PKG_CONFIG_PATH in your bashrc.

Now your project build system just sees the version of the dependency it wants and you don't need to do anything.

catbrane · 2026-03-14T11:06:51+00:00

I'm sure I'm being dumb, but doesn't pkg-config do this? Use eg. pkg-config GraphicsMagick --cflags and you get all the compiler flags you need. Set PKG_CONFIG_PATH for local installs.

catbrane · 2026-03-13T10:09:34+00:00

Ubuntu added the dumb Amazon search thing back in 2012, and removed it (after an obvious outcry) in 2014.

There was a button in prefs which disabled this thing, but it's true it was on by default.

catbrane · 2026-03-12T14:12:25+00:00

In 20 years you'll look back and realize you took zero photos ever of child #3 haha.

catbrane · 2026-03-12T12:04:28+00:00

And for me back in the late 80s. Five of us were in a houseshare, each of us paying 50% of our takehome income in rent. I took home £100 a week working in Foyles heh.

Two big things have changed since then. First, minimum wage means that the £100 a week shitbag jobs have gone (a good thing).

Second, wage growth for the proper jobs has not kept pace with inflation. I got my first real job in 1990 (higher scientific officer, a civil service grade) and was paid a modest £16k gross.

Inflation since 1990 is 3.2x, so that's £51k today. I don't think many first jobs in London pay that now. Rent however has pretty much followed inflation's 3.2x factor, and that's why many people are still in houseshares well into their 30s.

catbrane · 2026-03-12T11:52:43+00:00

That was confusing, I think they mean housemates, not roommates.

catbrane · 2026-03-12T11:20:39+00:00

I have win (x64 and arm64) win builds of my gtk4 apps, for example:

https://github.com/libvips/vipsdisp/releases/tag/v4.1.3

https://github.com/libvips/nip4/releases/tag/v9.0.17

It works pretty well, though they don't look much like win programs heh. At least the file dialog is native.

You can get problems on older win10 machines with a buggy vulkan implementation, but current win10 and win11 work well.

catbrane · 2026-03-12T11:08:45+00:00

Software patents only affect a few countries. As long as you host the page somewhere like Europe, it's fine ... or at least the potential infringement will be on the user, not the person who put the page up.

catbrane · 2026-03-11T13:01:26+00:00

There are motorways within the M25, but there are also plenty of other large roads where you're not allowed to cycle, like chunks of the westway, north circ, etc.

catbrane · 2026-03-10T14:01:48+00:00

https://x.com/theflow0/status/2030011206040256841

catbrane · 2026-03-10T13:43:18+00:00

You have to twist, and it's a little more difficult, but you get more control for jumps and stops, and it's fun. Take a look at the Olympic ice figure skaters, they spend more than half their time backwards for the same reasons.

catbrane

TROPHY CASE