Toots for SK53@en.osm.town account

Written by SK53 on 2025-01-13 at 08:28

Interesting post by Owen Boswarva on the Office for National Statistics NSUL dataset. This is the best #opendata source we have for adding postcodes to #OpenStreetMap. I've used it myself. He feels there's a certain amount of fudging about the status of yhe postcode field in the data. https://www.owenboswarva.com/blog/post-addr10.htm

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Written by SK53 on 2025-01-06 at 17:23

I've seen 15-20 species of birds this year, a big come-down from 20 years ago when I saw as many as 80 on New Year's Day alone. Mainly, I'm not going looking for them: I can't spend from dawn to dusk anymore, can't lug a telescope & tripod about, plus try and use car as little as possible.

Seeing a Great White Egret when I came out of the coffee shop on Jubilee Campus was a big thrill. I've never seen one in the UK before & it's a neat bird to add to the campus list. #Birding #Nottingham

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Written by SK53 on 2025-01-06 at 12:04

Just before Christmas a friend's mum died aged 101. He's chosen her own account of her years working at Bletchley Park during WWII as a suitable insight as to what sort of person she was: https://www.funeralguide.co.uk/obituaries/129431

[#]BletchleyPark #NavalCiphers #WorldWarTwo

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Written by SK53 on 2025-01-03 at 16:48

@opencage ##fridaygeotrivia Never thought I'd be so frustrated by both the Caprivi Strip & the Wakhan Corridor. Late C19 imperialist making the game hard

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Written by SK53 on 2025-01-02 at 19:19

The #FinancialTimes has an article (maybe paywalled https://www.ft.com/content/563f9820-d9a6-4e97-99e6-9e6c97919ca3?accessToken=zwAAAZQocctUkc9WP5gg2aZOl9OZ5p5sl5Gcow.MEYCIQDXPTbt5NDelJFRlZYg5uGea6xZEN_u8-64-L44dJDoGAIhAPcO2cUCkN13kXUOrkrvoz3X_Gw0M9dv4earyldduUgU&segmentId=e95a9ae7-622c-6235-5f87-51e412b47e97&shareType=enterprise&shareId=ccf3a34d-0749-411e-9fa6-b1d0cc468196)

about how STEM degree places are declining in UK Universities, with several Chemistry departments under threat. One is Hull which pioneered research into chemicals used in LCDs.

Odd, as exactly the same was happening 20-odd years ago (the degree course my cousin was taking at the time was threatened): https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200405/cmselect/cmsctech/220/22007.htm

Even earlier, my father had been on a UGC panel which closed the Physics course at UEA.

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Written by SK53 on 2024-12-31 at 17:14

Good thread on blue-sky by @RayNewman of books he liked this year https://bsky.app/profile/raynewman.bsky.social/post/3lelhe5dtxk2y

Obscurely pleased that I've even read a few, but not the Alan Garner, although the description might hold for others of his books, such as Red Shift.

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Written by SK53 on 2024-12-30 at 20:51

We had a cannabis grow bust on our road a few weeks ago, but my favourite local bust of the year is of the "Mansfield Drone Gang" https://www.nottinghampost.com/news/nottingham-news/cannabis-grows-busted-nottinghamshire-2024-9732439

They used drones with infra-red cameras to locate likely grows, and then stole the produce.

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Written by SK53 on 2024-12-30 at 20:35

Reminded that my sister met Jimmy Carter, his family & numerous secret service agents when he visited the tourist site she ran. This was 1986, and she was only a few months in the job.

More on his visits to Wales here https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp9npjpp54eo.

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Written by SK53 on 2024-12-30 at 11:12

New #OpenStreetMap diary entry, exploring the absurdly rich set of free-format keys used to describe British pubs on #OpenStreetMap.

https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/SK53/diary/405893

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Written by SK53 on 2024-12-28 at 21:20

One for @opencage #WhyGeocodingIsHard. https://www.openstreetmap.org/note/86071.

Data originally sourced from City of Chicago & despite skilled investigations still no unit numbers can be assigned.

[#]OpenStreetMap #AddressConundrums

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Written by SK53 on 2024-12-26 at 16:15

6. Worrying out the missing answers. About 20 years ago this required access to Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men on the Bummel, by good chance, the friends I stayed with for Hogmanay had a copy.

In the past I'd involve family members: my father can recall vast amounts of poetry**, and a cousin reminded me of the little antelope called a DikDik once. 4/4

• • My father had trouble reading after a stroke I took him a book of poems. It fooled the therapist 'cos he could recite many from memory.

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Written by SK53 on 2024-12-26 at 16:10

4. Second book based reference pass. Now trying to answer questions without answers. Essential tomes: Brewer, Oxford Quotations, a gazeteer, atlases, biographical directory, etc. Perhaps 240/360.

5. Internet reference pass. This is difficult because IDIOTS post the answers & they get caught in searches. My solution is to mainly only use Wikipedia and #OpenStreetMap

...3/4

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Written by SK53 on 2024-12-26 at 16:02

1. A quick pass over questions I can answer immediately. I aim for 36/360. Takes 10-20 minutes, longer to write answers down.

2. A much longer pass without consulting any reference materials. Groups of 10 questions usually have a theme, it's often possible to spot them this way & that often unlocks answers. One can also try out possible answers against a theme (e.g., the two events this year & 100 years ago.

3. First reference pass. Mainly tidying up & checking existing answers. Book-based. 2/4

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Written by SK53 on 2024-12-26 at 15:56

Finally made a proper start on the 2024 King William's College Quiz. The Guardian published it very early, and I accidentally threw away the pages of the quiz, but anyway it's always been a Christmas pastime: https://www.theguardian.com/news/series/king-william-s-college-quiz

I must have been doing this for 50+ years, but my approach has got harder since widespread use of the Internet.

The quiz is hard, particularly unseen. Traditionally, 2 points for a correct answer, 1 for a partial one. I go over it several times ... 1/4

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Written by SK53 on 2024-12-25 at 09:44

@RayNewman Merry Christmas to you. Had forgotten that "Box of Delights" is a suitably Christmas story.

Don't know if you've tried his more adult fiction like "Sard Harker" and "OODTA"? Former was published by Penguin so might be found in secondhand shops. Not very spooky, but, as ever with Masefield, a hint of the supernatural.

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Written by SK53 on 2024-12-24 at 21:30

@IvanSanchez I've stayed at the Three Cocks at Three Cocks https://eigenmagic.net/@weirdestate/113705465317255219 (village named after the pub)

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Written by SK53 on 2024-12-24 at 18:54

Christmas Eve morning in 1988, my boss and I installed an Appletalk network (almost certainly running LocalTalk) in the roof void of our laboratory building. We only had 2-3 Macs which were mainly used for project admin. We could use them as dumb terminals talking to our VAXen via RS232 ports, so could also connect to our Sun 3 workstations too.

Easily the most productive thing I've done workwise on Xmas Eve.

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Written by SK53 on 2024-12-24 at 18:13

After a long hiatus book 1️⃣ 0️⃣ of 20 #CoversOfPersonallyInfluentialBooks because I couldn't find it & the thought that I might have lost it was not to be contemplated.

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Written by SK53 on 2024-12-24 at 16:45

There was another optical storage tech promoted by an American guy whose name was perhaps similar to "Drexler". We'd looked at this with a view to storing personal medical records (with suitable data protection) & Brian had helped me one evening after chatting in the pub by pulling out all the current specs from his filing cabinet.

There was a club for companies interested in this tech with a joining fee of $100,000s. We got told for free by a guy from Maxwell's BPCC that it was useless.

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Written by SK53 on 2024-12-24 at 16:38

Small coda to this.

The optical medium we had high hopes of was ICI's "digital paper". We weren't alone https://www.storagenewsletter.com/2019/07/24/history-1989-two-flexible-optical-drives-based-on-ici-digital-paper/.

However, in practice the samples we had did not look as if they'd last very long (e.g., delaminating in steamy conditions), and it didn't appear that ICI researchers had investigated these aspects properly. I didn't follow the story to the end because the research team broke up (suicide, redundancy, career change).

1/2

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