Blog
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Found GCBBVQN Magic of Lapland
It's the final morning of my short visit to Sirkka. Having 90 minutes until I need to set off for the airport, I decided to come out for a quick geocaching expedition first. This was the first cache on my list, and I was so glad to choose it. A truly beautiful and well-maintained cache in a wonderful spot. FP awarded. TFTC!
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Second "surprising Finnish confectionary" is Vihreät Kuulat Jaffa Cakes. I ran vihreät kuulat through a translation tool and apparently it means "green balls", which doesn't tell me much.
Knowing it was neither lime nor apple (which were also available in the supermarket I visited) I had to try them, but I couldn't place the flavour. They were tasty, though. We finished eating them before I looked it up.
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A box of Vihreät Kuulat Jaffa Cakes. The cross-section cutaway shows a green jelly within the biscuit, and alongside are pictures of spherical green jellies.
Turns out it's pear flavour, which apparently I have a blind spot for (back in 2013 at an "eat mystery food in the dark" restaurant I failed to identify that I was eating poached pears for dessert).
Now I need to be on the lookout for actual green balls.
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Buying a bag of Haribo in Finland, I shouldn't have been surprised (given the country's love of salmiakki) that the black ones were liquorice flavoured.
And yet somehow, when I chucked a handful onto my mouth, I was.
(Not in a bad way. But definitely in a surprised way.)
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A bag of Haribo ClickMix, opened, held on a white hand.
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Found GCAC54Z Aquarium
QEF for the elder child and I while on holiday. TFTC, and greetings from Oxfordshire, UK!
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Layitout! Terra is a CSS-only implementation of a customisable Transport Tycoon-like terrain generator, and it's left me impressed and confused!
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Good morning Lapland!
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You've got mail
Jo of Dead.Garden wrote a poem, seemingly inspired by a particular variety of spam email, that I really enjoyed.
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The Reason I Have 12 Birthdays
The ever-excellent Blackle Mori posted this about 18 months ago but I don't think it got the level of attention it deserves. If if you've never experienced birthday inflammation or known anybody who has, it's an eye-opening experience to hear a first-hand account of this unusual and definitely-real condition.
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AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time
The BBC and EBU did some research and discovered that AI assistants tasked with bringing you news get it right only slightly more-often than they get it wrong, and they get it catastrophically wrong about one time in five. This should be a surprise to nobody.
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Feels a little They Live in the alley down the back of Witney Co-Op!
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Brick building stencilled with SP£ND in two places.
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I reimplemented Al Sweigart's "Pipe Swap" scrolling-ASCII-art in plain-text-over-HTTP by exploiting the HTTP
Refreshheader:https://textplain.blog/scroll-art-viewer/pipe-swap
This was a stupid idea, but it was about the level of code sophistication that my illness-brainfog can handle today.
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Today, I can overhear the two guys who are digging a trench through my garden.
Guy 1: Does this look like a gas pipe to you?
Guy 2: Dunno. But we can't dig round it soo...😬
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Best Viewed at: Your Resolution!
As the latest in a series of stupid things I've done on or for the Web, I've made a website that dynamically generates 'best viewed at' buttons... for exactly the Web visitor's current screen resolution...
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It Is A War Out There - Take Control of Your Supply Lines with HtDTY
Andrew Stephens reminds us to HtDTY (Host the Damn Thing Yourself) to reduce the risk of supply chain attacks and improve privacy. But I think the argument goes further than this.
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The Scroll Art Museum
The Scroll Art Museum demonstrates a surprisingly cool way of generating animation using ASCII art in a scroll buffer and... look, it's just cool, okay? And it inspired me to dust off a copy of QBASIC for a moment, too...