tomtaylor

I have a stupendous amount to do, find it hard to concentrate at the best of times, and I could really have done without Foursquare unexpectedly open sourcing their entire Places dataset today.

This is like an early Christmas. How am I supposed to think about anything else now.

https://location.foursquare.com/resources/blog/products/foursquare-open-source-places-a-new-foundational-dataset-for-the-geospatial-community/

Preview of next generation retirement communities https://lanparty.house

I have been asked to stop referring to LinkedIn as "Grindr for Business"

I hope this email finds you well and that you have harvested a large number of orders this month.

I have no intention of joining bluesky and @pluralistic explains exactly what I've been saying to people IRL about why:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/#tie-yourself-to-a-federated-mast

I did enable the bluesky bridgy fed, so if you're only over there, have at, but I'm not coming with you. https://fed.brid.gy/docs

If I were sending a spaceship on a mission to the Sun vital for the continued existence of humanity, I would simply not name it Icarus

Last summer, I got a couple of these little USB GNSS chips, a notch above the usual consumer quality but a notch (and $200) below the RTK-capable kind: https://mou.sr/4hrR4PY

This definitely catches my interest. https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/electric-dreams

I’ve wanted this to exist for over a decade!

ZenDesk, HelpScout, Front, Missive… they’re all too much software, and too expensive for small teams who don’t see email as just grinding through customer support tickets.

Finally, I got to build it with @goodenoughllc — a simple but powerful shared inbox for the rest of us.
https://mastodon.world/@goodenoughllc/113357626628130537

💫 Comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS.

Why has @dalevince spent a week lying about heat pumps?

He wants to make money from you. It wont work, it’s a silly idea, and his arguments are bad, but that won't stop people believing him.

#ukclimate #heatpumps

https://philsturgeon.com/why-is-dale-vince-lying-about-heat-pumps/

I'm in the opening episode of series 3 of this podcast talking about Turing, Oracle machines, ERNIE, and randomness: https://druidry.org/adventures-in-nutopia-podcast - there's also an upcoming one about intelligence with more from me, if you can stand it.

This is one of the best home automation hacks I've seen: getting the current status and current usage of your solar/battery home setup into your Mac's menubar so you know how your house is doing while you're working.

I can't imagine how much work went into making this operational, but it's fucking awesome. https://sixcolors.com/post/2024/10/putting-my-solar-system-in-my-menu-bar/

To its credit, Swarm appears not to pop up a congratulatory window when you check into a hospital, but the language on the check-in itself is still a bit 😬 Yay!

All of Your Sounds is a device that contains the sounds from every video in your cloud library. It edits and layers them, creating an infinitely changing mix of your memories. You turn the knob to listen in for a bit, and then you turn it down.

This video shows it running with 12 years worth of my own sounds. Let me know if you’re interested in one for your own memories.

This new post from @jomc is full of good links, including to her own look back on Neuromancer and a cool William Gibson recording from the internet archive.

https://filmmakermagazine.com/127295-joanne-mcneil-cyberpunk/

https://jomc.substack.com/p/new-cheat-codes

We're still planning to produce The LRUG Gazette - https://lrug.org/gazette/ - a physical newspaper of LRUG stuff. To bulk it out we need some help from you in the form of some micro-content:

* Top 10 gems
* TIL snippets of ruby
* Favourite LRUG talk

We've even put together a simple form for you to fill out to make it easy for you to submit this content: https://forms.gle/Vo9Bg8XeoNnNnUVd9

Looking forward to what you'll submit!