tallpaul @lemm.ee Semi-retired Internet geek living with my wife and dog in Nairn, Scotland. When I'm well enough I'm trying to make the world a better place through the application of technology but I'm also the SNP councillor for Nairn & Cawdor which is taking up most of most of my time.
IME "path repairs" too often means making steps which are more difficult to descend than the path that was there before unless you have exactly the same agility as the (generally young and fit) path builders.
Depressing how often this happens. The path down off Cairngorm towards the cafe is a prime example.
I bet she flew to Bonn...
Not every country has elections either.
Scotland: we have such a massive hangover on New Year's Day that we need the day after off too.
Rest of the UK: heh, OK, so you can work on Easter Monday instead
They offered it to me. I've not been on reddit since the API issue kicked off.
Upvote for "Cautionary Tales". Just discovered that and loving it.
This is what puts me off.
Runar Bjørhovde, an analyst at Canalys, said return rates of foldables are 5-10 percent, far higher than traditional smartphones and a deterrent to repeat purchases.
A phone costing me four digits with that high a return rate. Nope.
And not a word on the dualling of the A96 from Inverness to Nairn. Sigh.
Anti-abortion, anti-GRR, anti-independence. The SNP is well shot of her.
SNP councillor, not minister.
lemm.ee (where I also couldn't see my own post until you commented on it...)
'North Lanarkshire Council to close libraries, pools and sports centres'
North Lanarkshire Council will close 39 community facilities to try to find £64m in savings.
[I think I saw this posted earlier but it seems to have disappeared.]
I have to say my view, speaking as a councillor on Highland Council, is that the more I think about this it's gesture politics as the council presumably own most of these facilities so closing them still leaves them with significant revenue budget costs.
Plus "No dates have been given for the closures and affected staff are likely to be offered redeployment" which smells of something not well thought out - a big chunk of the cost of these premises is payroll so redeploying doesn't save money ... and then making people redundant is expensive too, as HC learned to its cost the last time it was "saving" money.
So I think this is a Labour led council just trying to embarrass the SNP/Green government into coughing up some more money.
Last Scottish auction was a great success. Go figure.
Avril Rennie's comments are a joke: 'She says the new licensing regime and costs make the future of her business "very uncertain".'
As the article says we're talking about, on average, £514 every three years, so that's £171.33 a year. If her business is really that precarious that it can't cope with that level of additional cost then it's doomed anyway.
I am being a little unfair: there are additional costs on first application, mainly the need to do various safety checks e.g. electrical, but if a landlord is saying they're happy to rent out potentially unsafe accommodation then I don't have a lot of sympathy.
For background I'm a councillor on the Licensing Committee of Highland Council and we've had about 2,500 STL licence applications so far. Officers guestimated we'd had about 10,000. It's not clear whether they overestimated the total, that landlords have stopped letting out properties, or that landlords are just keeping their heads down and hoping it will either go away or that the Council won't notice. My suspicion is that it's some combination of all of these factors.
Interesting times.
Not really. The big planning issue is how well hidden they are from (relatively) distant viewers and they're going to be viewing them pretty much horizontally ... just like low flying aircraft.
In the daytime they're often less obvious than at night (if they have to have a light). As a result it's not unusual for applications to be scaled back a bit to get below 150m.
But yeah, it's a funny business. Some people hate them but some communities welcome them, as they get quite a lot of money off them (Culloden for example has well over £100,000 burning a hole in their pockets at the moment and the payments keep coming).
Largely new friends. Interestingly those who had children later seemed to cope better with the balancing act between parenthood and socialising.
Now in my sixties and still CF. In my thirties the only real down side was the loss (largely) of friends who had chosen to have children so could now no longer come out to play.
But life was good, on the whole.
And still is.
That would have been Slackware, which in those days came on a stack of 3.5" floppy disks. So early 90's (and hence I was in my mid-30s) but I was still mainly using Windows 3.1 and Trumpet Winsock to connect to the Internet.
I think the first time I really took it seriously was in the mid 90's with Debian, a copy of which was posted to me, on CD-ROM I think, by Ian Murdock himself (back in the days when he was still with Debra 😏).
We update it a lot. We also have a product (for walkers in the British Isles) called WayMaps (used by a variety of walking web sites in the UK and also our own demo site https://waymaps.the-hug.net/) which uses the geodata from OSM and other Open Data to produce our own map tiles. We love OSM.