Solved the puzzle a while ago (well, I had a spreadsheet do the heavy lifting because, as a computer programmer, I’m fundamentally lazy and won’t do anything that I can make a computer
do for me), but only today found the excuse to zip out to the GZ on a lunch break and log the cache. The cache is getting damp and I think the culprit might be a drip right above where
I found it: to help keep it dry I’ve moved it about 10cm away from the “corner”, where it should get dripped on a little less. TFTC!
Surprisingly busy out here tonight with lots of walkers, cyclists, boaters and even a swimmer or two! Very easy find, I’d describe this as D1.5/T1.5! TFTC.
Don’t know what previous DNFs are on about, this was an easy find in the second place I looked. Log too wet to write on, so I’ve taken one of the (many) spare logbook pages and made it
into the shape of a letter D for Dan (pictured), then returned it to the cache, to show that I was here! Lovely spot. TFTC.
A late journey home and a slight diversion brought me up the wonderful Thames Path through Binsey and up to here to find this brilliant cache. It took into the final 150m from the GZ
that I realised that really: a bike was NOT the right mode of transportation for this one (see if you can spot my route in the attached photo)! Still I pressed on and got to within 50m
of the GZ before having to leave my vehicle behind and brave the nettles, fence, and boggy ground.
Cache in bad condition: missing log and writing implement, mild damage to container. If it’s true that it’s been abandoned I’d be happy to adopt it to keep this great location and cache
alive! I’m moderately local (my commute isn’t far away and I’m sometimes caught drinking at the Trout) and I have the perfect replacement container just sitting in my shed ready to go,
so I’ll contact the CO.
TFTC. FP awarded. I’m so bored of yet-another-magnetic-nano or city-centre-puzzle that it was genuinely a treat to see a cache that ticks all the boxes of things I love best about the
sport.
You are at a party and overhear a conversation between Lucy and her friend.
In the conversation, Lucy mentions she has a secret number that is less than 100.
She also confesses the following information:
“The number is uniquely describable by the answers to the following four questions:”
Q1) Is the number divisible by two?
Q2) Is the number divisible by three?
Q3) Is the number divisible by five?
Q4) Is the number divisible by seven?
…
I loved this puzzle. I first solved it a brute-force way, with Excel. Then I found increasingly elegant and logical solutions. Then I shared it with some friends: I love it! Go read the whole thing.
A quick and easy find on a diversion from my morning cycle commute. A man parked in a van nearby made me think I’d need to use my stealth skills, but he turned out to be asleep. Not
sure how this cache will stand up against the winter weather, but for now this is a great spot and I was glad of the excuse to visit. TFTC!
Took an unusual route to work this morning and as it put me in the vicinity of this cache I decided it was high time I braved the brambles and the risk of damp feet (it’s a bit boggy
here right now!) to find this cache. TNLN, TFTC!
Third time lucky! After striking out twice I spent some time thinking about possible hiding places before returning for this third, successful, visit. TFTC!
Today, just about all monitors and screens are digital (typically using an LCD or Plasma technology), but a decade or two ago, computer displays were based on the analog technology
inherited from TV sets.
These analog displays were constructed around Cathode Rays Tubes (commonly referred to as CRTs).
Analog TV has a fascinating history from when broadcasts were first started (in Black and White), through to the adoption of color TV (using a totally backwards-compatible system with
the earlier monochrome standard), through to cable, and now digital.
Analog TV transmissions and their display technology really were clever inventions (and the addition of colour is another inspiring innovation). It’s worth taking a look about how
these devices work, and how they were designed, using the technology of the day.
After a couple of false starts, an analog colour TV system, that was backwards compatible with black and white, became standard in 1953, and remained unchanged until the take-over by
digital TV broadcasts in the early 2000’s.
I’ve come to believe that the goal of any good framework should be to make itself unnecessary.
Brian said it explicitly of his PhoneGap project:
The ultimate purpose of PhoneGap is to cease to exist.
That makes total sense, especially if your code is a polyfill—those solutions are temporary by d…
As well as publishers creating AMP versions of their pages in order to appease Google, perhaps they will start to ask “Why can’t our regular pages be this fast?” By showing that
there is life beyond big bloated invasive web pages, perhaps the AMP project will work as a demo of what the whole web could be.
Alas, as time has passed, that hope shows no signs of being fulfilled. If anything, I’ve noticed publishers using the existence of their AMP pages as a justification for just letting
their “regular” pages put on weight.
In fact, AMP’s evolution has made it a viable solution to build entire websites.
On an episode of the Dev Mode podcast a while back, AMP was a hotly-debated topic. But even
those defending AMP were doing so on the understanding that it was more a proof-of-concept than a long-term solution (and also that AMP is just for news stories—something else that
Google are keen to change).
But now it’s clear that the Google AMP Project is being marketed more like a framework for the future: a collection of web components that prioritise performance
…
You all know my feelings on AMP already, I’m sure. As Jeremy points out, our optimistic ideas that these problems might go away as AMP “made itself
redundant” are turning out not to be true, and Google continues to abuse its monopoly on search to push its walled-garden further into the mainstream. Read his full article…
Nowadays, fraudulent online stock-trading schemes are common. But even before the first electric telegraph, two bankers committed the equivalent of modern-day Internet stock fraud.
Nowadays, fraudulent online stock-trading schemes are common. But even before the first electric telegraph, two bankers committed the equivalent of modern-day Internet stock fraud.
…
Fabulous article from 1999 about how two bankers in 1837 hacked additional data into the fledgling telegraph system to surreptitiously (and illicitly) send messages to give
them an edge at the stock exchange. Their innovative approach is similar to modern steganographic systems that hide information in headers, metadata, or within the encoding of invisible characters.
