Peter Oliver @mavit@bergamot.social

@jamesh @pid_eins This. If you’re going to have to get some of your Emacs packages using Emacs’ built-in packaging system, you might as well get all of them that way. Hence, there’s little itch for potential packagers to scratch, here. It’s not like, say, Python, where you need to turn PyPI packages into RPMs because they’re dependencies of other applications.

@adrianfry @sil Poll clerking is a job you can apply for. It's paid about 200 quid a day. https://www.birmingham.gov.uk/info/20097/elections_and_voting/867/information_for_staff_assisting_at_elections

@wootube I think perhaps "the steps" aren't as important as we assume. An observer mostly sees style and attitude. You probably can't *really* learn to dance from one of those charts with the footprints and the arrows you used to see in old cartoons: how it feels is what counts.

As someone who also struggles with steps, I'm going to keep telling myself that, anyway.

@wootube Now I wonder, what did you think it was?

@sil I found it surprisingly hard, in the UK, to find a wallet tall enough to hold a twenty pound note. I managed to track one down just in time for:
a) The introduction of those new shorter plastic notes.
b) People looking at you funny if you try to pay for anything with cash.

@bigcalm Seems wrong? 2.7 kg of fat stores about 25,000 calories, which is ten times a male's suggested total daily intake.

@sil Nope, $VISUAL has been around so long that their idea of graphical was that your serial terminal had a screen rather than being a printer.

@jmtd @sil Indeed, we covered this ground last time Stuart switched editor: https://bergamot.social/web/@mavit/109788582473206984

@sil Fair point; it doesn't need to run on a TTY (assuming you have a windowing system available), but it does need to be blocking. I was mainly trying to joke that typing $EDITOR would be more convenient than remembering the name of your chosen editor, though.

@sil $EDITOR

@bigcalm I've preferred keyboards without numeric pads for many years now, starting with an old IBM PS/2 model intended for server cabinets. They're widely available these days, described as "tenkeyless". On the rare occasions I have to go into the office, I find myself bashing the mouse against the side of the keyboard where I expect the numeric pad not to be.

This class 730 has new train smell, which is like new car smell but with wider gangways and walk-through carriages.

@dracos I think this is new problem: I don't get a sensible error message if there's a typo or misspelling in a station name, e.g., https://traintimes.org.uk/bhm/borneville/15:45/today (I'm never certain how to spell Harbourn or Borneville)

Used the official National Rail Online Journey Planner today, while https://traintimes.org.uk/ briefly wasn't working. You'd think in the last two decades they might have caught up on ease of use, but nope.

@sil Are you organising a pub crawl this year, and will it be on Wednesday?