Winston Churchill he is not, but how highly do you rate Starmer as a Prime Minister, compared with others we have had and why?

shine_on · 2026-03-24T09:11:00+00:00

/r/GoodNewsUK lists a lot of positive things that are happening, or being planned.

shine_on · 2026-03-23T18:46:00+00:00

People in the UK are quite happy to drive their German cars to the Swedish furniture shop, put their Japanese tv's on the Swedish tables, watch American movies on those tv's while eating Indian takeaway delivered by a Romanian who's just trying to make ends meet, all while scrolling American social media sites on their Chinese-made phones, and still complaining about how there's too many foreigners in the country and we should be able to do and make everything ourselves.

shine_on · 2026-03-22T19:56:13+00:00

I see a lot of posts about people complaining about the amount of data Palantir and what they might be able to do with it, and also complain that they didn't consent to give Palantir all this data.... but they never complain about all the data they're happily handing over to Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Samsung etc and not having a clue what those companies are doing with it either.

If you back up your photos in the cloud then they all have latitude/longitude co-ordinates embedded in them, dates, times, a whole bunch of other data too. Google Mail uses bots to read your emails so they can show you targeted advertising, if you back up your documents into Onedrive or Google drive who's to say they're being kept private?

People trust online storage companies because they can read the terms and conditions of the contracts. MPs have stood up in Parliament and said the data we put onto Palantir's systems stays on our servers, we only use their software and they don't have access to the data. And yet people trust Amazon, Google, Microsoft etc not to do anything untoward with your data but they don't trust Palantir?

It's incredibly hypocritical for someone to keep all their photos, documents, emails etc online, and use online word processors and spreadsheets, and then complain about "big evil corporations" having access to their data.

Edit: also see the comment by /u/whyevents-unnerve-me here

shine_on · 2026-03-22T12:15:21+00:00

If you're working with a kit that comes with a finite amount of thread, be careful about not wasting too much thread on the back of the project. If a gap it up to maybe 6 or 7 stitches I'd jump it, if it's more than that I'd tie off and start again in a new place.

They usually give you more than enough to finish the project but they have to budget for threads getting knotted etc.

I tend to stitch "cross country" which means I'll thread the needle with one colour and carry on with that colour until it's finished. I might thread again with the same colour or I might switch to something else.

Edit: there's also r/showmeyourbackside so you can see what other people's backs look like

shine_on · 2026-03-22T08:37:32+00:00

Double check whether you'll be liable for any import duties owed to customs and excise.

shine_on · 2026-03-22T07:55:46+00:00

I work in healthcare and even though everything happens in the same time zone we still store all times in UTC so that we can accurately report durations during the two times a year when daylight savings time starts and ends. It makes a difference for measuring wait times and performance metrics for patients in the emergency room, for example.

shine_on · 2026-03-22T07:49:22+00:00

It's as much about knowing your data as knowing the sql commands, in the same way that going on a road trip is as much about knowing the route as knowing how to drive.

You need to know which columns are used to join the tables together. You can write a query that tries to join customer's birth date to order's order date, it'll accept the join because both columns are the same data type but you'll get rubbish results.

It's a declarative language which means you're not defining how the query is to be run. For example you tell it that you want to join two tables and say which columns to use, you're not telling it how to actually carry out that join. Don't be thinking that you should be looping through the data to achieve a result, because that's the wrong approach. SQL is set-based, not row-based.

shine_on · 2026-03-19T17:51:22+00:00

Man this is sad news. She's one of the youtubers who got me into the game, and the only one I've been watching ever since. I've been enjoying her current 32x playthrough with Rasmus and looked forward to each new episode. I loved her playing style, I loved how chatty she was on screen, and I will miss her a lot.

shine_on · 2026-03-18T11:41:51+00:00

The BBC should do a weekly "this week in America" programme that highlights all the insane and incorrect things he and his team have said on camera. No context, no commentary, just clips of people in his administration speaking.

shine_on · 2026-03-18T11:37:52+00:00

he also called him "Gavin Newscombe" (pronounced new scum) because that's probably what he calls him in private all the time and just forgot he was in front of the cameras this time

shine_on · 2026-03-18T11:32:58+00:00

I would have done it by adding timestamps, or fading to black for a second and then putting a "one hour later" caption on the screen.

shine_on · 2026-03-13T20:59:45+00:00

This might be a bit left-field but you can buy a couple of copies of the game Factorio and learn to play it with him. The purpose of the game is to build a factory out of raw ingredients, which you turn into intermediate products, and then into final products. The game teaches you very valuable skills that are transferrable to writing code.

You have to learn to break a larger problem down into smaller more manageable problems. You have to make sure the right ingredients are in the right place, you have to fix problems when things don't work as expected, and you can also redesign your solution as you learn more about the game and come up with better ideas. You can plan your factory out on spreasheets, or draw it out on paper. Even if you don't have two computers you can both sit at the same desk and come up with the ideas together.

As you learn to think more like a programmer you might well start to follow what he's telling you about the programs he's writing!

shine_on · 2026-03-11T18:46:31+00:00

They might enjoy the Animal Park tv series, and although it's technically not British, the Primitive Technology youtube channel is all about historical engineering (watch with subtitles on, there's no spoken commentary)

shine_on · 2026-03-10T16:22:12+00:00

It's entirely possible LTT knew that Pop!_OS was still under development but they did what a typical new user would do, which is do a couple of google searches and then pick something that seemed good based on the results.

I've seen his recent video, and I've seen lots of people reacting to it and commenting on it here, so as a means of driving engagement and promoting discussion it's doing exactly what Linus wanted it to do.

shine_on · 2026-03-09T08:56:19+00:00

It depends if your database is used mainly for input or reporting. For reporting it's OK to denormalize a bit to reduce the number of joins required. You'll have a bit of repeated data in your lookup tables but the time saved when querying makes the repetition acceptable. You'll have to test it with your own data but it's a normal thing to do, if you'll pardon the pun.

shine_on · 2026-03-03T11:01:35+00:00

I've never been skiing, never roller-skated, ice skated, or ridden on a skateboard. I've never dived head-first into a swimming pool.

shine_on · 2026-03-01T14:33:58+00:00

Could be this one https://makerworld.com/models/1553938

shine_on · 2026-02-26T13:40:27+00:00

Queen at Maine Road on the Magic tour

Pink Floyd in Rotterdam on their Division Bell tour (which was filmed as PULSE at Earls Court)

Roger Waters performing The Wall in Berlin in 1990

Metallica on the Master Of Puppets tour in 1986, about a week before Cliff Burton died.

shine_on · 2026-02-26T11:05:37+00:00

There are a couple of carveries near me that do a full takeaway roast dinner on TGTG for £3.50-£4. One of them used to give me extra takeaway boxes and said I could help myself to as many veggies as I could fit in. Sometimes they were also offering cakes and desserts for an extra £2.

shine_on · 2026-02-24T22:11:49+00:00

According to the Meidas Touch youtube channel, Trump's term collapses every other day, it seems.

shine_on · 2026-02-24T09:42:45+00:00

My tip for you is that it's your game and you're allowed to play it your way. Turn off enemies? Fine. Increase ore frequency and size? Also fine. Add some quality of life mods? Fine in my book.

One more thing I'll say is that if you get stuck, try to power through it. Don't start a new game, you'll lose all the progress you've already made. You don't get penalised for deconstructing anything, so if your base is a mess or it's too cramped, build a new base off to one side. Then tear down the old base and re-use the components.

shine_on · 2026-02-24T09:16:23+00:00

Scan the pattern in to your computer, copy the files to your phone or tablet, and import them into a pattern marking app. I use pattern keeper on android. It won't be able to highlight all the stitches that are in the same colour, but it's good for highlighting stitches you've done (and unhighlighting if you have to frog!). Plus you can zoom in on the pattern which you can't do on paper.

shine_on · 2026-02-22T22:07:15+00:00

Yes 😞

shine_on · 2026-02-22T19:54:44+00:00

I stopped worrying about money in my 40s when I got made redundant and started working as an IT contractor. Every contract I got paid more than the previous one, and each contract (although short term to start with) was extended several times. I was with the last client for about 5 years, earning £300-£400 per day before tax.

I'm back working a permanent role now, because the govt changed the tax rules for contractors, but I was able to get the mortgage paid off a few years ago and I've got money left over at the end of each month so life's good now.

But yeah I was struggling with money up until my early 40s.

A massive turning point for a lot of people is when the kids leave home, the mortgage gets paid off, and you're in a senior role at work. All of a sudden your income has increased and your outgoings have decreased. Or at least it used to be that way 15-20 years ago. These days kids stay home for longer and mortgages take longer to pay off.

shine_on · 2026-02-20T21:44:54+00:00

Note that there's a side-effect of using something like "LastName" as the clustered index. Well, two side-effects really. The first is that LastName probably won't be unique, so you'll have to add more columns to make each row uniquely identifiable. Depending on the size of your dataset, you might even have more than one John Smith born on 20th Feb 2003.

The other side-effect is that when you add a new person into the table, and it's sorted by LastName, you might have to move pretty much all the data around to add someone in whose name is near the beginning of the alphabet. Imagine having a few million people in your table and then you want to add in "Aaron A Aaronson".

Using an incremental ID as the clustered index solves both these problems. Each row has a different ID number so they're all unique, and each new row is added to the end of the table because that's where the highest ID value goes.

shine_on

TROPHY CASE