I love all dutch swearing, as a microbiologist there is something particularly satisfying being able to tell somebody to ‘krijg de tyfus’ or to call somebody a ‘pleurislijer’

At least with kindle books bought from amazon you have to use their own software to transfer. They stopped the old app working which could download books to your computer so now they just have to check if the kindle it is connecting to is attached to your account and on a software version they support.

I love revanced so much…

My point was more that harmful chemicals in the sense of chromium salts etc. aren’t present in veg tan which, for the most part, is boiling it in a load of tree bark.

Since I adopted the mantra of ‘block early and often’ things have been much better and nothing of value has been lost.

I do hobby-level leatherworking and I’m all here for real non-animal leathers but yeah, basically all of them, cactus, mango, pineapple leaf etc. all just get put on a PU backing…

I got excited for cork leather at one point but turns out that is also either PU backed or fabric backed (which is better but doesn’t really work as a direct replacement for leather, especially structurally).

There are a few I’m more excited for and I would love to get hold of but they still seem either experimental or used directly by the makers for their own finished products. Most are fungus based, so one is SCOBY leather, basically the big blob of microorganisms used to make kombucha can be grown in big flat sheets, dried and treated to make a leathery material but I’ve not seen many applications of it yet…

But mushroom/mycelial leather is the one I’m most hopeful for. Not only do some of them look like real leather but the random ‘grain’ of the mycelium has the potential to ape the natural fibrous grain of leather that gives it its strength. That is the one I’m really excited for.

And veg tan? I try not to use chrome tan in stuff I make for both environmental reasons and the fact its a pain to work with but we have been veg tanning for thousands of years.

You would be shocked how fast objects get lost in even a small handbag… So many panic attacks thinking ive lost keys

I think so? I think ours used UniVerse whixh used UniBasic and UniQuery. I never had to use it in anger, I was mostly focused on supporting a different thing written in VB6…

I worked for a company that still supports a critical healthcare system that runs on Rocket U2 on AIX which is an evolution of PICK.

I dunno, referring to somebody as a “total weapon” is very valid here

Having agents.md is a silly criteria… One project I’m with is doing GSoC this year and another org recommended using agents.md to tell the AI that will inevitably be used that it needs to tell the person that AI copy paste will not be accepted and please don’t bother unless you can demonstrate understanding of what you are doing.

One of my greatest shames was making a full english breakfast pizza. I was being sent to Basildon for a whole week, week after week for and endless project I was doing and I think the project and the boredom of that Holiday Inn was making me insane. The hotel had one of those machines that make you a pancake. I ended up getting a few of those and assembling them into a pizza base, adding some tomatoes, bacon, sausage, scrambled egg, hash browns, mushrooms and black pudding to make it look like a pizza and then tucked in.

Honestly, it was fantastic, my colleagues never looked at me the same way again though.

I still have my Corsa C! Only about 50k miles but its still going strong.

Pretty sure its my Neopets, I set it up in my dad’s office before we even got internet at home

My mother thought the lyrics to Roberta Flack’s version of Killing Me Softly With His Song was “Strumming my face with his fingers” (not strumming my pain).