Oooh, a new (to me) scam email

Jul. 7th, 2025 09:32 am
lovingboth: (Default)
[personal profile] lovingboth
This one invites me to join in a contract selling computers etc to Dubai. I was going to file it in the 'wrong Ian' folder when I look a bit further and see what the carrot they're dangling in front of me is:

Total Approved Over-Invoiced Amount: €24,923,362.00
Estimated Cost to Supply: €4,923,362.00.
Estimated Profit: €20,000,000.00

... with that profit split three ways.

I'm wondering if the invoice amount, exactly 20 million more than the supply cost, is a way to screen for gullible people. If it had been

Total Approved Over-Invoiced Amount: €25,000,000
Estimated Cost to Supply: €21,923,362
Estimated Profit: €3,076,638

... it'd still have been worthwhile joining in (a million Euro each!) and a lot more realistic.
tamaranth: me, in the sun (Default)
[personal profile] tamaranth
2025/103: Hemlock and Silver — T Kingfisher
I had just taken poison when the king arrived to inform me that he had murdered his wife. [opening line]

A new T Kingfisher novel is always a delight, and Hemlock and Silver -- a dark and occasionally horrific riff on 'Snow White' -- has brought me great joy, right from that opening line.

ExpandRead more... )

Nidhoggr mead

Jul. 6th, 2025 05:30 pm
dancefloorlandmine: (Drink)
[personal profile] dancefloorlandmine
The Ludoquist¹ has announced that it's started stocking mead, which may have the effect of testing my usual rule of not drinking while dicing. Has anyone out there tried Nidhoggr mead, and what opinions do you have on it? They do a range of flavours which remind me somewhat worryingly of 'ciders' like Old Mout.

¹ Croydon's rather fine boardgames café, which also hosts a regular RPG one-shot evening on Tuesdays.

Event-full

Jul. 6th, 2025 01:33 pm
vampwillow: Swift Alpine 4 (Caravan)
[personal profile] vampwillow
Still in Newark for UnityFest. It's very nice much a 'dyke' clientele rather than a lesbian or gay women one. Vast majority of attendees are couples, frequently wearing matching clothes and short greyish hair, but there are lots of interesting women too. I've been limited in what I could manage between the need to use my wheels and the need to breathe. Heavy rain so far today has trapped me in the van too.
Tomorrow I'm off to Sandringham for a week.
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[personal profile] tcpip
Yesterday was the aphelion when the Earth reached the furthest distance from the sun at 157 million km (the closest distance, the perihelion, is 146 million km). It seemed appropriate on that day to describe the relatively flat shape of the solar system and how "flat earthers" need to think bigger. Interestingly, the aphelion and perihelion change with some regularity measured as Milankovitch cycles, which is a driver of long-term climate change. On that topic, I had an interview this week concerning my doctoral progress and grades to date ("mention très bien", to use the Université de Paris system). The next part of my studies is "Climate Change Denialism", which I am sure will be absolutely fascinating, having missed out on doing climate change psychology at the University of Wellington. Speaking of which, I attended a University of Wellingto alumni event on during the week with a Professor of Statistics, Peter Smith, talking on "Fluids in your phones?", about the development of liquid antenna for the next generation of mobile devices. And, to continue the theme, I have been recently offered the role to coordinate alumni events for Murdoch University here in Melbourne.

The week has also witnessed some activities in the aesthetic dimension as well. With an early submission made for Midsumma Festival, I have officially become a producer with my inaugural effort being for Liza Dezfouli's comedy-cabaret "Binosaur". Also, I have ventured out locally with Kate R., twice with aesthetics in mind, once was for Lightscape at the Botanic Gardens, which was beautiful, but rather low numbers due to drizzle, and today for a visit to the National Gallery of Victoria. This evening, I attended the awards ceremony for the Melbourne Poet's Union International Poetry Competition, which featured a marvellous and insightful speech by the well-known anarchist poet, Pi O. Finally, last night I visited ACMI for millihertz producing a rather raw and politically challenging audio-visual production with the descriptive title "Cruise Missile Intersectionality".

To finish the alliterative headings, I will conclude with some reflections on "athletics". Last week, I posted an announcement and a couple of photos of my significant weight loss over the past year (117 to 82 kgs), along with a descriptive essay on how I achieved it. I will point out that I'm not planning to lose anymore, although body composition still has room to change. I've had to hunt through my high school records - four decades in the past - to find when I had a similar weight and, in the process, have discovered my athletic records of the time, which were "quite good". I was among the best in the school for medium and long-distance running, plus I played cricket, rugby, football, and volleyball at an interschool level. But ultimately, I couldn't stand the aggressive competitiveness and the yobbish fans, and dropped out of all those activities. I hope that I can avoid all that in this rejuvenated period of my life.
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[personal profile] liam_on_linux
Apple macOS is a UNIX™. It's the best-selling commercial Unix of all time. I wonder if how many old-school Unix folks consider all Mac users in the 21st century to be their brothers-in-arms? Not many, I'd guess.

When it happened, many Unix folks don't consider it a _real_ Unix. Even thought just a few years later, and AIUI after spending a _lot_ on the exercise, Apple got the UNIX™ branding.
 
Now, by contrast:
 
I've spent proper time trying to get some rough estimates on Linux distro usage. Ubuntu is cagey but claims ITRO low double-digit millions of machines fetching updates. Let's say circa 20M users.
 
Apparently, over 95% on LTS and the vast majority on the default GNOME edition. (Poor sods.)
 
The others are cagier still, but Statistica and others have vaguely replicable numbers.
 
My estimates are:
 
~2x as many Ubuntu as Debian users
 
Between them they are about 2/3 of Linux users
 
All Red Hat/CentOS/Fedora derivatives are about 10% of the market.
 
Comparing them to Steam client numbers, Arch is much of the rest: the gap between ~75% Debian family and ~10% RH family.
 
In China, the government has been pushing Linux *hard* for 8-9 years. Uniontech (Deepin) is one of the biggest and last November boasted 3M paid users. 
 
Is that all? 
 
Kylin is also big but let's guess it's #2.  
 
So, if, optimistically, 10% pay, then that's only 20-30M, comparable to Ubuntu in ROTW.
 
Maybe Kylin (also a Debian BTW, they both are) brings it to 50M. 
 
ChromeOS is a Linux. It's Gentoo underneath. Google sells hundreds of millions. Estimated user base is 200-300M and probably a lot more.
 
Chromebooks outsold Macs (by $ not units, so 10x over) in the US by 2017 and worldwide by 2020.
 
Which means there are, ballpark, order of magnitude scale, 10x as many ChromeOS users as all other Linuxes put together.
 
The year of Linux came 5-6 years ago.
 
But it's the _wrong kind_ of Linux so the Penguinisti didn't even notice. 
tamaranth: me, in the sun (Default)
[personal profile] tamaranth
2025/102: When Women Were Dragons — Kelly Barnhill
[Author's Note] I thought I was writing a story about rage. I wasn’t. There is certainly rage in this novel, but it is about more than that. In its heart, this is a story about memory, and trauma. It’s about the damage we do to ourselves and our community when we refuse to talk about the past. It’s about the memories that we don’t understand, and can’t put into context, until we learn more about the world. [p. 366]

Reread for Lockdown bookclub: original review here. I liked it even more the second time around, though I found myself focussing more on the silences, absences and unspoken truths of Alex's childhood than on the natural history of dragons. Interestingly, it felt a lot more hopeful when I read it in 2022 than now, nearly three years later.

Discussed with book club. Reactions were mixed. We wanted more about knots, and whether they were actually magic.

And breathe...

Jul. 4th, 2025 04:26 pm
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[personal profile] wildeabandon
Oh look, once again it's been forever since I posted. Since my last update I got hit by another rather tough challenge, albeit this time largely self-inflicted, when my application for Belgian residency got turned down because I was a bit late with some of the paperwork. This led to a certain amount of panic, but fortunately I had just enough visa free days left in the EU after my provisional residency card expired that by returning to London and missing the last week of lectures (most of which were fortunately recorded and made available online), and shifting some of my exams around so they were all the same week, I was able to take them all.

I got my results on Wednesday. No perfect 20s this time, but two 19s, two 18s, and four 17s, which gives me almost exactly the same 89% average as the first semester's rather wider spread. The highest accolade available at KU Leuven (summa cum laude, with the congratulations of the examination committee) kicks in at 90%, so I need to slightly up my game next year, but now that I've got a much clearer idea of what's expected of me I think that it should be achievable, especially if I don't have quite so many curveballs to deal with as I did this semester.

One of favourite modules this semester was Syriac II, where instead of an exam we had to produce a portfolio, the largest part of which was a translation of a portion of a text chosen in consultation with the professor. I did a part of the "Syriac History of Joseph", which retells the story of Genesis 37-39 with various additions. I enjoyed doing this sufficiently that, having done the first three pages for my portfolio, I am going to try and do the remaining 16 over the summer. The same professor is teaching Coptic next year, which is not a language I realised I was interested in learning (nor, for that matter, was Syriac), but he's such a great teacher that I'm really looking forward to it.

I'm now back in London for the whole summer, which hadn't been the original plan, but I am enjoying seeing more of [personal profile] obandsoller and looking forward to doing so even more when he emerges from the pile of marking and admin that accompanies the end of term for the teachers, when we students have finished our exams and are enjoying sitting on our laurels...

podcast friday

Jul. 4th, 2025 08:58 am
sabotabby: (doom doom doom)
[personal profile] sabotabby
 Hi I am very tired.

Give a listen to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff's entire last few weeks, which has been about the alter-globalization movement, but especially to this week's episodes, "Bread and Puppet: The Dawn of Giant Protest Puppets." (Part I | Part II). This is one of my special interests, stemming from how I used to teach at a puppetry camp, and I've actually been lucky enough to visit Bread and Puppet in Vermont on a road trip, albeit not quite lucky enough to see one of their shows. I am always in favour of more theatricality in activism and these episodes trace the evolution of one particular brand of theatricality that I'm especially a fan of.

I bet you will be surprised to learn that the personal stories of the two founders of the theatre are also especially interesting. Also, since Jamie Loftus is the guest, there is a tragic hot dog connection.

Photo cross-post

Jul. 4th, 2025 02:49 am
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[personal profile] andrewducker


Got halfway to the bus stop to go to the pool and realised I didn't have my shoulder bag. Sprinted home, got it, and made it to the bus.

Got off the bus at the other end, realised Sophia's bag didn't have her swimming costume in it. Got a bus home, grabbed it, now in a taxi.

Fingers crossed that nothing else comes between me and drop-off and work!
Original is here on Pixelfed.scot.

Reading Wednesday

Jul. 2nd, 2025 08:25 am
sabotabby: (books!)
[personal profile] sabotabby
 Just finished: Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Yeah, I think this is my Hugo best novel pick. It was really good, really timely, fucking gross, and gave me nightmares. It's very much a confluence all of Tchaikovsky's quirks—rather darkly funny narrator, alien minds, and the particular type of resolution he goes for. All of those things happen to work for me quite a bit. This one reminded me quite a bit of Jeff Vandermeer but less nihilistic and I liked the characters more.

Currently reading: The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett. This was the only novel on the Hugo list where I'd never heard of the author or the book. I'm loving it so far though. It's a murder mystery set in a city where only engineered seawalls stop the things from Attack on Titan from demolishing the place every wet season. A noble is murdered in a mansion (not his mansion) via a tree growing through his body. The person charged with investigating the murder is an old autistic woman who doesn't leave her house so she gets a young man to be her eyes and ears. The murder mystery structure makes it rather different from not just this batch of nominees but the other award lists in general, which is also intriguing.

Time marches on

Jul. 2nd, 2025 10:20 am
andrewducker: (Default)
[personal profile] andrewducker
As of this morning (2nd of July), we are now closer to 2050 than 2000.
tamaranth: me, in the sun (Default)
[personal profile] tamaranth
2025/101: The Silence of the Girls — Pat Barker
I was no longer the outward and visible sign of Agamemnon’s power and Achilles’ humiliation. No, I’d become something altogether more sinister: I was the girl who’d caused the quarrel. Oh, yes, I’d caused it – in much the same way, I suppose, as a bone is responsible for a dogfight. [loc. 1596]

This is the story of Briseis, a princess of Lyrnessus who was captured when the Achaeans sacked the city. Her husband and brothers were slaughtered, and she was given to Achilles as a prize. Later, Agamemnon's prize Chryseis was returned to her father, a priest of Apollo: plague had broken out and Apollo, the god of plague, needed to be appeased. Agamemnon complained about the loss of his property: Briseis was taken from Achilles and given to Agamemnon to replace Chryseis, and Achilles then sulked in his tent and refused to fight.

Of course the story is quite different from Briseis' point of view.ExpandRead more... )

June books

Jul. 1st, 2025 09:07 pm
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[personal profile] silentq

Books:

17 The Blacktongue Thief, Christopher Buehlman.ExpandRead more... )

18 A Drop of Corruption, Robert Jackson Bennet.ExpandRead more... )

19 how to: absurd scientific advice for common real-world problems, Randall Munroe.ExpandRead more... )