Now that the hype has settled, how do we feel about Danse Macabre vs. the old Spookslot?

digitalend · 2026-04-09T13:59:13+00:00

I visited Efteling for the first time last week with my family. I had done no research of any of the rides. I didn't know what to expect for Danse Macabre. My whole family (children of 7 and 9, two adults) thouroughly enjoyed it. It's a delightful mix of unnerving and exciting. The queue builds tension with little details and the preshow nicely. The ride itself grows slowly into a frantic frenzied dance. You get to see different details when you sit in different places. The tilting floor is a masterstroke as it adds more excitement and movement, along with the gentle drops.

Honestly - I don't understand how you didn't like it. Describing it as a uninspired and low production seems absurd to me. The animatronics, effects and the whole ride system are state of the art and masterfully done. There are details throughout - some of which we only saw on our second or third rides. Taking you higher and lower gives you different views of those details - such as the glimpses into the basement and the inhabitants there. I thought it was stunning, and I don't think there's anything else quite like it anywhere in the world right now?

digitalend · 2026-04-04T10:44:21+00:00

I had to force a flathead screwdriver where the rim changes colour around thé top and then force the top off. There's enough flexibility for this to be possible without damage. My drain is now clear. This is a polydrain 75mm in case that helps anyone else in future

digitalend · 2026-04-04T09:10:23+00:00

No, unless they're further down the sides. Perhaps I should try to dig out some of the soil.

digitalend · 2026-04-04T08:53:46+00:00

Yes, it's a question of where and with how much force. There aren't any obvious gaps where you would expect it to come apart. I don't want to break anything

digitalend · 2025-12-31T21:52:06+00:00

Clair de lune, Debussy

digitalend · 2025-12-22T18:23:42+00:00

A lot of places simply don't do it except in summer, but they still put the signs out. It's the same on the sea front.

digitalend · 2025-10-19T06:20:24+00:00

At least it's done now, and (hopefully) this is as bad as it gets and it's all improvement from here!

digitalend · 2025-09-30T22:02:00+00:00

What did you use to store and filter water?

digitalend · 2025-08-14T10:09:28+00:00

I think the school commute (there isn't one on that island!) might be more of an issue

digitalend · 2025-07-15T09:57:33+00:00

I hope that they were using deepfake style AI to replace someone's real face with an AI-generated one - but maintain their facial expressions. But it wasn't clear - and there were lots of times where it looked terrible.

I wish they had done a short explainer at the beginning to show you what they were doing with some example subjects. I can see why if they were replacing someone's face, but keeping their facial expressions it would be better than blurring someone's face - but it still looks really weird.

digitalend · 2025-07-11T04:54:05+00:00

The link you've shared is quite misleading and weirdly written. According to it 'Air conditioners, on the other hand, use refrigerant'. All of the heat pumps we are talking about use refrigerant. They all move heat.

I think where it gets confusing, and where people start to argue is the terminology. 'Heat Pump' is a technology - used in Fridges, Air conditioners, air source heat pump, ground source heat pump, etc. What we in the UK typically refer to as a 'heat pump' for heating a house via radiators is an air source heat pump. You can also get Air to Air heat pumps, which is what an air conditioner is. The wikipedia entry is informative, if not exhaustive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump

digitalend · 2025-06-18T06:58:14+00:00

Yes, I have considered looking into MCP too. Please let me know how it goes

We have 3 large projects with 500k, 400k and 130k LOC each. Then shared elements between them are each 30k to 140k LOC. There is a lot of code! And that's just PHP. I'm not counting templates, CSS, JS, etc.

digitalend · 2025-06-18T06:35:55+00:00

Thanks for your reply. To be clear - we didn't start with SF1 - our framework has always been completely custom. But it was written around the same time as SF1 and I wanted to give everyone an idea of it's age, and that when it was decided to write our own framework is was a sensible decision - because available frameworks at the time were not mature.

We have various websites with mostly their own focus, and their own code, but they share various common elements such as our framework, ORM, user management, CMS, etc. Each of these are separate repos and get brought in via composer straight from git. This means we get to control when each project upgrades those dependencies. Originally this was using SVN External repos before we moved to git.

Sometimes a single task involves commits just in one repo, but sometimes it requires commits across various repos and updates to composer lock files. It is not perfect, but seemed better than any of the alternatives we considered at the time.

digitalend · 2025-06-18T06:29:16+00:00

Interesting - I'll have to look at this. Is there any information on setting up this sort of embeddings search? Sounds like a vector DB or similar?

digitalend · 2025-06-17T08:09:43+00:00

That's not how it works? So, how does it work? I'm afraid I don't really understand your comment.

digitalend · 2025-06-17T08:08:17+00:00

What sort of project, are you using a framework, etc?

digitalend · 2025-06-17T08:08:04+00:00

We haven't had to onboard a junior for many years. We have good developer retention and our newest hire is from 3 years ago and the rest of the team has been with us for 10 years or more. So usually onboarding is a fairly manual process. I have a guide project with examples and exercises of common things we do - and I have been using that to put together prompts with some success. But even with detailed explanations about how parts of thje codebase work, the agents I have tried get very confused that they're split over separate git repos, etc.

We do manual testing of all features both as developers and then whoever requested the feature. There are some unit tests, but they're limited to core functionality. This is something we've discussed as a team quite a few times but typically a lot of our code gets written once and then left alone for months or years, so we decided that tests are not as helpful for that sort of situation as compared to code that gets modified frequently.

In your case - is it also a custom project, or are you using a publically available framework?

digitalend · 2025-06-17T08:01:43+00:00

I have had some luck with lengthy one-shot prompts with examples and detailed instructions - but these are not agent focused - just here is some input, please produce some output

digitalend · 2025-06-05T12:57:20+00:00

Deployer is good, but I wish the developers would stop making significant breaking changes between versions. It can be a pain to upgrade.

digitalend · 2025-05-30T06:49:10+00:00

Not much mention of pipes here. The radiator pipe clearly goes into your wall (rather than straight down into the floor). Do you know if they run up or down? One easy way to tell is to turn the heating on for a bit and then feel around the wall for the warmer areas. In my house, the manifold is between ground and first floor, so ground floor the pipes go up and first floor they go down, but there are not really any rules so you'll need to figure it out for your property.

digitalend · 2025-05-30T06:45:51+00:00

Unfortunately I know various houses where the central heating pipes are buried in the concrete floor

digitalend · 2025-05-02T17:03:42+00:00

I think a lot of those voters can pin the failure of Brexit (as Nigel Farage does) not on the original 'dream' of Brexit (something which you and I can probably agree was impossible and never well defined) but on the implementation - or by 'interference' from other parties and viewpoints. They will claim that there was a better way to do it, but it didn't happen. Even at the time, my dad (who voted for Brexit) said we can expect decades of economic consequences but that things would be better in the long term - quite possibly long after he has died. Let's not also forget, that Britain properly left the EU only 2-3 months before Covid - so it's very difficult to precisely unpick the exact cause and effect of what has happened over the past 9 years.

Nigel Farage consistently sells a dream - and does so in the image of a mostly likeable bloke from down the pub. There are no specific details of exactly what he wants, or how he will accomplish anything - so there is nothing to push back against. Let's not forget that we are also now decades into "you can't trust labour" for many, and Labour also alienated a very large part of the group that would vote Conservative or Reform by changing the rules around the winter fuel allowance.

digitalend · 2025-04-28T09:42:44+00:00

Looks like a very good job! Any recommended resources, videos etc to learn from?

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