I was thinking the other day how much cooler flap displays at stations and airports were compared to modern displays.

Such a nice interface between computer control and a purely mechanical display. Watching them update, flipping through all the variables to land on the right one, and then clearing was so cool.

I miss the noise they made too. Haven’t seen one for like 20 years now.

Lisa needs braces

Brighton

I like to think that he forgets, keeps trying and then makes a new post about it

Instead of making me think about space, the solar system or the universe… this just gives me an existential crisis, visualising how few weeks are actually in a year and how brief a lifetime actually is.

Then I try to think about space instead.

• The Simpsons: From seeing Season 2 episodes someone had recorded from Sky TV on VHS before it was on terrestrial TV, through to Season 9 when it stopped being good many years later. It was on all the time and we never got bored of it.
• Red Dwarf: The first TV show I was allowed to stay up “late” for, when it broadcast at 9pm. Felt like I’d entered a new stage in my life watching a late-night comedy show.
• The X Files: Similar to the above, this was the first serious, “grown-up” TV show I watched, and I was hooked. I thought anything with a paranormal tinge was awesome at that younger age (I guess I still do, although through an admittedly far more sceptical scientific lens these days).

Ghostbusters, Back To The Future trilogy, Terminator 2, Beetlejuice, The Matrix, OG Star Wars Trilogy, Pulp Fiction, The Shawshank Redemption, Blade Runner, Goodfellas, Jacob’s Ladder, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, Boogie Nights

Ed Balls

I find it insane that people somehow think they have to make that noise when they sneeze. It’s totally a learned and unnecessary behaviour. People who are born deaf don’t ever make that noise when they sneeze.

There Goes My Gun in my ass

All my friends and I used to have Yahoo! email addresses. But for some reason around 2010 almost everyone’s accounts seemed to be getting compromised and sending weird messages around to their contacts… and now I don’t know anyone with a Yahoo!

I never figured out what was going on and why Yahoo in particular seemed so affected by it.

The tiny thumbnail for this looked like a belly button on my phone, had no idea what I was tapping on at first

Clipper

No, I was still being cheaper with phones at that stage.

I remember my friend getting an N95 and how that was a big deal back then haha.

After looking through an extremely long list of Nokia phones on Wikipedia, it might have been a 6120 classic.

My last ever Nokia phone, a half way house between old Nokias and smartphones circa 2008.

No touch screen, but could play music, videos, had a calendar etc.

Absolute piece of garbage. Got super hot at times doing who-knows what, and had a software bug where the audio would completely stop working until you rebooted it… which meant that multiple times my morning alarm went off completely silently and I was late for work.

Bought an iPhone 3GS as soon as my 1 year contract was up, Nokia were never relevant again after that era.

Contrary to most advice, if you find something that’s compatible with a Wayland session (basically Gnome or Plasma) you might be pleasantly surprised.

I found that to be by far the closest I got to a macOS-like experience with Linux on a retina Mac, in terms of fluidity, trackpad scrolling and responsiveness.

If the Mac has a Retina display then I actually found XFCE runs worst of the various DEs at native resolution. Not in terms of resources but very choppy scrolling, video playback etc. Gnome and KDE Plasma actually ran better than XFCE for me on my 15” 2012 retina.

Presume it’s some kind of graphics acceleration thing, not 100% sure.