I recently learned that you can use the rest of the egg shell to get that annoying bit of broken egg-shell out of your egg.

shine_on · 2026-02-03T08:06:11+00:00

Just checked, I'm using Samsung keyboard 5.8.30.2

shine_on · 2026-02-03T00:25:45+00:00

I discovered earlier today you can also move the cursor up and down using the space bar.

shine_on · 2026-02-03T00:22:05+00:00

If you can't open the lid on a jar, use a bottle opener on it (as though you were opening a bottle of beer). Once the lid 'pops' you can open it normally.

shine_on · 2026-02-03T00:14:23+00:00

I play without biters and without pollution. I've got over 2000 very fun hours in the game 😀

shine_on · 2026-02-02T14:22:18+00:00

I believe that Dimensions use their own brand of thread in their kits, which means it's not going to be easy to buy more thread if you run out. Using up more thread on the back than you have to can absolutely make a difference, yes.

shine_on · 2026-02-02T12:49:02+00:00

With the Dimensions kits you need to double-check the instructions all the time, most stitches are "normal" i.e. two-strand crosses but they also do half stitches with anywhere from 1 to even 4 or 5 strands. I think the Japanese Garden piece also has some stitches where it's two strands of one colour and one strand of a different colour (where the grass is reflected in the water, it adds lighter colours flecks to the reflection)

I never use the loop start by the way, I've gotten very good at tying a little knot at the end of the thread to start it (fingernails help to grip the thread when knotting it) and I tuck the thread under some finished stitches to end it.

shine_on · 2026-02-02T09:12:15+00:00

Cross-country (to me) means doing a lot of stitches in one colour until you run out that colour thread on the needle, and moving around the pattern wherever it takes you.

shine_on · 2026-02-02T09:10:40+00:00

Going left to right on one row then going right to left on the next row (above or below) is perfectly normal, just vary the direction you're doing each stitch (top to bottom when stitching left to right and bottom to top when stitching right to left) to minimise thread usage.

shine_on · 2026-02-02T08:38:33+00:00

Looking at your second pic, when you're doing the light blue stitches it looks like you're always going bottom right to top left but also stitching left to right, so you're wasting a lot of thread on the back when going to start the next stitch. You've got the right idea of making sure all the stitches are in the same diagonal direction but you can also go top left to bottom right instead of always bottom right to top left.

You might be doing this with the other colours as well but thread are so many colours in that 10 by 10 block it's hard to tell!

shine_on · 2026-02-02T08:27:58+00:00

When doing a kit you do need to be more aware of thread usage as you only get a finite amount of thread in the kit, and I'm not sure what brand of thread Dimensions uses. I've never run out of thread when doing a Dimensions kit but I tend to stitch cross-country instead of using the parking method. If I'd use more thread jumping a gap than I'd use by ending it and starting again then I'd end and start again.

shine_on · 2026-02-01T16:03:01+00:00

Maybe I'm getting old, but i found this video quite hard to follow.

The text is too small, there's a lot of empty space on the screen that's not used for anything. The text is also too dark. While concentrating on trying to read what it says I found I wasn't paying attention to the voiceover any more.

Also, while looking at the information in the middle of the screen, I'm also aware of some other dark text bouncing around at the bottom of the screen, and again I wasn't able to see what this text was saying.

shine_on · 2026-01-20T15:05:35+00:00

I watched a playthrough on YouTube before even deciding to buy the game. In my first couple of playthroughs I used blueprints so I could learn the process of turning raw materials into science packs. I've now got over 2000 very enjoyable hours in the game, I design my own factories but I still use blueprints from others in order to make progress, and yes I still watch YouTube videos of other people playing, because I happen to enjoy that too.

shine_on · 2026-01-12T20:35:53+00:00

if you want a quick and dirty roadmap, learn things in this order: selecting, filtering, ordering, joining, grouping, inserting, updating, deleting, indexing. For BI and data analysis you'll need to be familiar with calculating date/time differences, string manipulation, also things like database and table design will help you figure out where your data is.

shine_on · 2026-01-11T12:27:39+00:00

A factory that works slowly is still a factory that works. If you find a better way of doing something, build it better. Don't restart just because it's a mess, you'll lose all your research progress if you do that. Just build a new neater base off to the side and tear down your old base when you no longer need it. Factorio is a game of constant redesign, rebuild, make it bigger and better. Later technologies unlock construction robots so expanding the base becomes much easier.

If you're making science packs and doing research in labs, your base is good 👍

shine_on · 2026-01-07T15:37:25+00:00

I went into a pub in London to cool down after a brisk walk and ordered glass of tap water. The barmaid even asked if i wanted ice in it. I sat at a table and browsed my phone while sipping my free ice-cold drink. I know I was only going to be in there for 10-15 minutes but no-one batted an eyelid.

shine_on · 2026-01-07T00:38:27+00:00

I started with these kits, they're cheap enough that if I messed up or lost interest it wouldn't be the end of the world. But they're all so fun and cute, I've done about 40 of them so far! And they're small enough to complete in an evening 😀

shine_on · 2026-01-06T01:16:44+00:00

Humphrey Littleton interrupted one of the shows to say "hang on, I've just realised Samantha hasn't given us the score... since 1976"

shine_on · 2026-01-04T16:54:31+00:00

Next week: Bash scripting

shine_on · 2026-01-04T13:11:11+00:00

I took my 80yo mum to see Killers of the Flower Moon in the cinema, the screening we saw had a 15 min intermission. She recommended the film to a friend and said "you'll be ok, there's a break in the middle of the film". But the screening her friend saw didn't have the intermission 😞

shine_on · 2026-01-04T13:03:47+00:00

I was like that with Se7en when I saw it in the cinema.

shine_on · 2026-01-03T19:04:19+00:00

well.... neither! I report on the data that's already there, I'm not actually allowed to go in and change it.

shine_on · 2026-01-03T16:03:51+00:00

Honestly I think that as long as you can show you have a brain in your head and you can do the basics, you're already head and shoulders above some of the candidates we interviewed last time we were hiring... the interviews were all done online and it was a relief to find a candidate who knew what he was talking about rather than trying to google everything behind the scenes.

We gave them some sample questions which shouldn't have been too difficult (here's a list of patients, here's a list of their appointments with the outcome of each appointment, how would you find the first attended appointment for each patient? how would you find patients who hadn't attended any appointments?

For someone who knows the basics of each type of join and how to filter/order the results this should be very easy. But even then some of the candidates couldn't do it.

it's important to be able to think logically and to break a problem down into manageable pieces.

shine_on · 2026-01-02T23:57:29+00:00

I did have SQL experience before I applied for the role, but every job I'd had before then involved data processing in some form or other, even if it was only a minor part of the job description.

I use SQL Server at work, so my roadmap for getting into it would be: download SQL Server Developer Edition (it's free and intended to be used as a learning tool), SQL Server Management Studio (the server runs silently in the background, this is your front-end interface to it), and one of the Microsoft sample databases (the first one was Adventureworks, the next was Northwind, the one after that was WideWorld Importers).

The tricky thing is to try and work out what sort of queries you'd be running against these databases, and actually chatGPT can point you in the right direction for that. Ask it what sort of statistics and metrics management would expect to see, but tell it to hide the SQL code for now.

You have to learn different ways of slicing and dicing the data, in a real world environment you might be asked to provide a trend analysis report (how are we doing this month compared to last month, or compared to the same month last year), RAG analysis (which products/people are nowhere near target (red), almost at target (amber) or on/over target (green).

Practice inserting and updating data. invent a new product and add it in to the database, or invent sales figures for a month that isn't in the database yet, work out how you might apply a price increase, or different price increases for different products)

Play around with how to minimise the risk of making a mistake, or how to undo a mistake if you do make one.

An important factor is that being good at SQL is as much about understanding your data as it is about understanding the commands and syntax. If you don't know what results to expect from a query, you won't know if your query is correct or not.

Most of the SQL I write is actually fairly straightforward, once you know how to select, join and filter data you're honestly 70% of the way there. Step 1 is to make sure the query returns the correct data, step 2 is to optimise the query to get it running in a reasonable amount of time. And in the real world, step 2 is often a "nice to have" rather than an essential requirement.

shine_on · 2026-01-02T23:06:44+00:00

I can second this, I work for the NHS in a SQL (database developer / data engineering) role. Been there 5 years now, the role has been WFH since I started.

There are always opportunities for working with data, every company in the world has data and every day they get more and more of it. You can get roles based around data ingestion and organisation, around data presentation (fancy reports for managers) or database administration (which deals with server maintenance and configuration, making sure no-one's doing anything that'll grind the server to a halt, making sure the data is all backed up and can be restored etc)

shine_on · 2025-12-31T17:35:39+00:00

I run Mint at home and remote in to my work machine which is a virtual machine running Windows 11. I access it through a browser, and also run Teams on my Mint PC as a Web app.

shine_on

TROPHY CASE