My litmus test for this sort of thing is Excel - I think we all can agree that Excel is used for way more than it should be, and the most complicated, unhinged uses of it are done by non-technical folks looking to get a task done through desperation.

I've been trialling it for a little while and loving the whole experience so far.

I tried to come up with a spec for listing bookmarks in an easily handled format for both humans and machines, and just ended up with using .json files; here's mine for example: https://johnvidler.co.uk/webgraph.json which all follow a very loose specification. Because it just requires a single file to connect to others using the same system its really easy to implement.

I've been slowly pushing for folks I know to add to the sources that the search engine can idly spider, slowly building up a large searchable list of user-selected links.

Analogies aside, I’m not against anyone using Youtube (or any other platform) for distribution - just that it absolutely should not be also used for your actual archive. There are much, much safer and better systems for that.

Replicate to preserve!

I’m not sure why folks seem to think that Youtube is a good place to archive anything - sure its a good distribution system, but time and time again we see that a handful of malicious actors can shut down entire channels with relative ease.

I would hope that these videos are backed up somewhere else on any of the many bulk cloud storage providers out there B2, AWS, Google cloud storage, etc. etc. etc. and could, with some effort be made available elsewhere than Youtube, or restored to the platform after the current storm dies down.

Argh.

See https://github.com/lancaster-university/codal-microbit-v2 for the ecosystem, or https://github.com/lancaster-university/codal-core/tree/mast... for the relevant section of the API.

If you're interested do feel free to suggest stuff via feature suggetions and such on the issue trackers, and PR's welcome :)

I stay because I'd like to think I can improve things (I'm very active in management talks, where I can be) but as we're now at 6 (? Maybe 7) years of below-inflation pay adjustments, and with no progression possible at my grade unless I make the leap to lecturer or equivalent I'm just stuck here and its getting tiresome, and every year I look at my bank and go 'why am I doing this?'.

One day I'll stop asking why and leave, but I like what I do - its just not economical.

... and for the curious, I've made the case for promotion and applied for it a number of times, but as no-one ever retires in the industry (profs forever?) the next grade up is stupidly over-subscribed, so my chances are extremely low.

Cost is another - sure the dev boards are expensive as compared, but the chips used are easier to integrate with your own designs than building an rPi into them.

Just different use cases, in essence.

I've personally observed links through many buildings, over hills, and so forth that easily dwarf the range of the average 2.4Ghz link.

Also, I've been part of the group looking at LoRa at Lancaster University for some time, and am currently working on part of a commercial deployment too. Here are a few papers published on the topic by Dr. Martin Bor, and occasionally myself (all the top ones are LoRa): https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=WhN1gGwAAAAJ&hl=...

The documentation lags quite far behind the actual build (really need to update these pages...) but can be found at https://johnvidler.co.uk/mechanical-engineering/electric-mot... if you're interested.

If there was a digital fallback, it would absolutely have to have something to tell commuters that the information might be stale (as someone frantically types up flight updates in a back room somewhere)

I doubt I'll even be using the same architecture in 68 years, let alone the same laptop or browser!

One way is to allow some way of 'seeding' the PRNG such that the order of the numbers it produces is the same each time, as we return the random function back to a known state.

Or, by example, if I make 5 calls to the PRNG with seed value '0' and see the following: [5, 2, 9, 18, 4, ...] and that causes the agent I'm testing to do something utterly weird, so I want to re-run my agent to observe the effect in detail to debug it, and for that to happen, I need the same [5, 2, 9, 18, 4, ...] sequence, otherwise I'll be forced to run repeatedly until I observe the same glitch, so by re-seeding the PRNG to '0', it will then predictably return that sequence, rather than a new, random sequence.

The commercial chargers are all waterproof, with connectors rated IP67 or similar, usually with a drain outlet for any water that does somehow manage to get in the connector. The cables are similarly rated.

The lowest rated cable I own is the "home charge" kit, which takes a normal (UK) 3 pin wall socket and imitates a "proper" EVSE charger for the car with a J1772 connector at the car end. The wall plug bit I currently solved by fitting a waterproof outdoor socket and use that when I need to charge at home.

At some point I should take advantage of the government grants for fitting a proper home charger akin to the commercial ones...