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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • It’s also disingenuous lies. This money is being spent over 11 years so is more in the realm of £750m a year.

    This is also a classic trick of the Conservative government and is why the NHS is also in a mess: they steal money from capital investment budgets and use it to spend on day-to-day operational stuff.

    In the NHS they took money from the capital budget and diverted it to day to day spending, claiming it as “new money”. It was an increase in day-to-day spending but it was not new money. Instead NHS trusts now have big backlogs of equipment and buildings needing replacement and being used beyond intended life cycle because the money was stolen.

    Pot hole repair is day-to-day road maintenance, not infrastructure or capital investment. HS2 was a new capital project. This is just more bullshit lies by the government and a huge issue here is how shit journalism is now. The BBC hasn’t questioned this spending pledge at all, instead it’s posted a bullshit superficial article on potholes.


  • Almost the whole of black Friday is a nonsense. The only things worth buying are things you would have bought anyway but know are on discount.

    Many items prices go up for a period before black Friday so they can then be discounted, and manufacturers even have cheaper versions of models of their products that they supply to discount chains and companies like Amazon for black Friday.

    The only things I’d buy on sale are items I’m watching via camelcamelcamel which have hit discount, or software on discount. There are a few specific items I need to buy that I might buy if they’re genuinely on discount but most of the stuff thrust in your face during the sales is cheap tat or lies.



  • Yes - because the future of gaming is probably VR spaces so games on a 2D screen will become nostalgic to an extent.

    The nostalgia may be loading up a space with a virtual pc and playing an old game on a mouse and keyboard or controller.

    VR headsets aren’t yet there but but when they’re light weight and high definition enough, it may make more sense to play a game on a virtual screen which can be 40 inches or room scale, than your desktop. If I could see my hands and the mouse and keyboard I’d probably already be doing it. It already works with virtual desktop and controller based games.



  • So, alternative take. If you have a home PC would you be better upgrading it and getting a cheaper laptop for more basic use?

    Basically do you really need a mobile work horse? If you’re doing video work then you may be better with a graphics card or CPU upgrade £ for £. Do you really want to be editing videos on your sofa or in bed? It doesn’t seem like the easiest or most productive way to work in that particular use.

    You can also stream any game from your PC to a low power laptop (or other devices) using Steam or other streaming tech. The pc can be on but with the sound and screen off, while you’re elsewhere streaming a game.

    So maybe a PC upgrade and a shared basic laptop for video and internet would be enough? The only downside is if you genuinely think you would want to do full on video work on the go - out of the home or abroad for example. Then it makes more sense. But a powerful laptop around the house when you have a PC that does the same seems a bit pointless. It also means work drifts away into the rest of your home, whereas now when you’re not at your PC you’re not working.

    But if this is more talking yourself into buying an expensive toy, there may be better toys to be had for far less. Like a steam deck - under £400 for a decent machine, play games anywhere in the home (on the device or streaming to the device), get a dock and plug it in to your telly.

    Edit: other way to think of it: do you really need the laptop? What could you spend that money on instead? There is an opportunity cost if you spend that money or take on debt for something you don’t really need. You could save that £42 a month and treat yourself to something else in 6 months or a year.


  • So big mistake here: NAC is not harmless. It does have side effects and it also has toxicity at high doses.

    It has not been studied in long term use orally or IV, it’s main use bomg short term use for paracetamol overdose treatment. Inhalation is more studied but it is not absorbed into the body in the same way.

    We think it is safe but we haven’t actually done human trials to be sure. What we have found in mice is that high doses can cause lung and heart damage and also when it comes to alcohol it is protective if taken before alcohol consumption BUT it amplifies the toxicity to the liver if about 4 hours taken after alcohol. All of this is summarised on the Wikipedia page which looks to be good quality.

    Overall it may be a useful drug but don’t take it off label or self medicating. Medicine is littered with unexpected effects of drugs that only came out once it was too late. Thalidomide is a good example - a “wonder drug” for nausea used in pregnancy that was not tested and caused horrific birth defects which only became evident when it was too late.

    Your body is not a lab, be careful experimenting with supposedly “safe” drugs.


  • So the way evolution works, the design we have works well enough that it doesn’t cause problems. It might be the best possible design or it might not, all that mattered is that whenever it arose in evolutionary history it was either an advantage over what camebefore in terms of survival so propagated or it was not detrimental and paired with something else genetically that propagated.

    We can’t definitively answer your question but we can speculate on why it’s a good idea to separate urine and faecal matter. Urine is a reasonable medium for growing bacteria. That wouldn’t matter in the colon but would matter if bacteria from the colon could ascend into the kidneys and diarupt it’s function. Valves could help or a bladder that drains into the colon, but complete separation may just be better.

    It may also be that the acidic nature of urine would disrupt the helpful bacteria we rely on to colonise our guts to help digest foods.

    Another possibility is the constant flow of urine would mean our faecal matter would never dry out. It’d be like having diarrhoea all the time and we’d need to poop constantly. The colon retrieves enough water - but not all water - that’s why poop isn’t hard as rock. If it was flooded with fluid it may not need to retrieve fluid.

    The fluid might even be stuck in a cycle between the colon and the kidneys and make it harder for the body to keep homeostasis - as the kidneys excrete more fluid to try and regulate fluid volume the the colon could just resorb it. Basically the colon could end up working against the kidneys and cause even more work for thenl body. It may just be less efficient than discarding water as needed.

    Drier faecal matter in the colon and a reservoir of fluid in the bladder does also give us freedom to release when it is safe to do so, which may protect us from predators (having to stop to poop even a few times a day is dangerous compared to only going when you know it’s safe to as there are more opportunities to be attacked by a predator). It would also be very easy to track an animal that leaves a constant trail of poop and urine uncontrollably behind it.

    All or none of these may be reasons why we have separate urinary and alimentary tracts; it’s impossible to know and would always be speculation. But regardless these do seem like reasonable reasons why we may have separate tracts.




  • Its usefulness as a laptop replacement may be limited. Remember it’s a locked down read-only version of Linux. The steam deck uses an a/b model to update. Basically there are two separate versions of the OS on the machine - when it updates it replaces one copy and makes that the default, and uses the other as the backup. Next system update it replaces the other copy and switches to that. It switches back and forth that way, putting a stock image on with each update. So you’d probably want to go down the route of running your own OS on it.

    Without that it does limit a little in how useful it is as a laptop like device. It depends what you want to do on it of course, and your Flatpak apps and personal files will stay but any other customisation you do to the device will get wiped each time it does a major update. That would include any installed software outside the Flatpak route if you unlock Pacman.

    It seems like a capable machine though. I have mine hooked up to my TV at 4K when at home. I use it to stream 4K game content from my desktop to my living room, but I’ve also played with the desktop mode in 4k and it’s been good. It renders 4k video well, and we know it’s capable of playing video games at 720p directly which is still generally intensive.

    I can’t see why it wouldn’t be able to do basic graphics work, but no idea about more intensive work like 3D modelling and video encoding.

    Personally I’d get a dedicated device for work but if you can’t afford that or you dont want to carry more than one device around then I guess it’s worth a try?

    Just remember if you do use it for work that also entails setting it up to back up your personal data. Your game data is largely backed up by Steam but if you put your work stuff on there then you’ll need to be protecting yourself in case of damage or theft.




  • Are you sure it’s cats?

    Have you seen the cats pooping or just sniffing the poop?

    Depends where you are, but foxes would be a more likely bet. Fox poop stinks too - really foul stuff. Cat poop generally is quite inocuos once it drys out, although a lawn mowing bot slicing it up would make sense for making it worse.

    I have never heard of cats pooping in the middle of a lawn before. Normally they like private and safe spaces to poop as they’re vulnerable when pooping, and normally they’re fastidious about burying it where possible.

    iF it really is cats, then maybe get a gravel section next to your lawn that they might prefer to go in? A litter box essentially.


  • A mesh has others have said. I use Google WiFi as it’s cheaper and gets the job done. But it’s a potential compromise as the more expensive mesh systems offer better bandwidth.

    I tried Homeplug systems - they can work well on a well wired house, but mine was giving me about 10% of my bandwidth from the router downstairs to my home office upstairs.

    For comparison Google WiFi is giving me 100% of my 250mbs connection. If you’re looking at much higher bandwidths or users, you may need a more expensive system. Alot of mesh systems have a dedicated back channel separate to the user facing channels but Google WiFi does not - that makes it cheaper but could be a bottleneck if you you’re at the very high ends of internet speeds and home usage. For most home users though I suspect Google WiFi is more than enough.