That bloke

Astronomical fact of the day

Tue, 17 Feb 2026 22:25:51 GMT

You could to jump into space.

OK, that claim needs some backup, doesn't it? You can't jump that high on Earth. Big rockets are needed to get into space here. The moon isn't as big, so you could jump higher but you'd still come back down. We need to go somewhere smaller.

Mars has two moons, Phobos and Deimos, and they're quite small, particularly Deimos. Wikipedia says:

Escape velocity from Deimos is 5.6 m/s. This velocity could theoretically be achieved by a human performing a vertical jump.

On Deimos you could jump so high you'd never come down, and you'd be stuck out in space for ever. Scary, but then Deimos is named after the Greek god of fear.

Wait a minute - "theoretically" is a weasel word there. I bet most of us can't jump that well. Only elite athletes need worry.

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Things

Sat, 23 Aug 2025 14:52:57 GMT

We've got builders in doing a new kitchen after last year's leak, so we have many, many decisions to make, and we have to live with them all, good or bad, for many, many years.
EC was at a wedding today in St. Paul's cathedral - ok, only in a side chapel, but still!
YC is on his way to some remote location to produce sessions for a band for a week; no idea who they are.

My conclusion is that my kids have fancier lives than me, which is good.

Edit: there was one other thing today. On the way to the kitchen shop I had to drive through a demonstration against housing migrants in hotels. A man stood at the side of the road with a sign saying we should bring back Guy Fawkes and burn down parliament. I happened to have the window open because it was a hot day, and I had to pass him slowly, so I told him he was a fucking idiot.

I'm annoyed that the protesters draped themselves in flags. I'm as English as anyone could be, and nothing that they're saying represents me at all.

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How big can a horse get?

Fri, 09 May 2025 15:06:32 GMT

A work colleague asked a question about SQL queries, so I dug out an old post here about that. Problem solved.

But as one problem goes away, another pops up. I used some made up data in that post about animals, and asked:

Can a horse weigh a tonne? No idea.

As Me-From-Years-Ago had been so helpful, I thought Me-from-Today should return the favour. It seems the answer is yes, a horse can indeed weigh that much, and the largest on record is a tonne and a half. At least, according to Wikipedia.

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Painting

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 19:47:59 GMT

Two men came to decorate the bedroom that was (not very much) affected by the leak. I stuck a finger in a colour chart semi-randomly and picked a colour for the walls. It's a sort of red-brown, terracotta, but the name on the colour chart is "Roe Deer". They went and got some of that, and when they came back I overheard some of their conversation.

Bloke 1	Roe Deer
Bloke 2	What's the matter?
Bloke 1	Nothing. Why?
Bloke 2	You said "Oh dear".
Bloke 1	No, I said "Roe Deer".

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House update

Sat, 18 Jan 2025 22:44:00 GMT

We had a water leak. The pipe, which supplied the tank in the loft, was embedded in a wall. Stupid place for a pipe! Luckily there wasn't too much damage. We've had dehumidifers in, and we get some restoration work covered by insurance. First they're coming to decorate one room upstairs, so today I've been emptying everything out of there. I'm writing this sitting on the floor of an (almost) empty room. It seemed quite a small room with furniture in it. Not now.

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Hello, Dreamwidth!

Sat, 07 Dec 2024 13:02:07 GMT

I haven't posted here for ages. And I don't really have anything to say now. Let's brain-dump some Thumby stuff.

Thumby is a ridiculously small game console and it's not too hard to make a homebrew game. So I made six. I recently finished an escape room game which needed a bunch of artwork. That's not my natural thing, but it's easier because it's tiny and it's monochrome. Here's a couple that I thought came out OK.

Piggy bank - rattles when shaken

Stopped clock

The code wasn't hard, except it got so big it wouldn't load. I had to move the images to a separate file and only load one at a time.

Thumby dev is nice because it's do-able by one person in a reasonable time. You submit it and it goes on the Thumby arcade. The escape room game is still waiting approval.

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Mastodon without a particular glyph

Wed, 04 Oct 2023 23:02:15 GMT

I don't want a Mastodon account at oulipo.social for it would occupy too much of my day to avoid what is not said on that www host. Brain gymnastics ahoy! Discussion of things past is particularly tricky.

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Decorating

Tue, 27 Jun 2023 14:21:01 GMT

We got a new carpet downstairs, so we had to decorate first. It took nearly five days to take everything upstairs and paint. Then there was one day back at work. Oh no - those two walls need another coat, and the carpet fitter's coming tomorrow, so there goes another evening. Elliot the carpet fitter was a nice bloke. The carpet is laid, and there's a big empty clean-looking space. Nothing in there but a sofa that's to big to remove.

Maybe some of the things we took upstairs can be got rid of instead of taking them back down? And now the rest of the house is looking tatty. We've started, so we'll have to finish. Gradually.

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Sticky info

Tue, 07 Feb 2023 21:19:00 GMT

I don't have much to stick, but this should verify my Mastodon account. We'll see. Edit: worked!

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Merry Christmas 🎄

Thu, 22 Dec 2022 12:59:21 GMT

I had a play with image editing after we decorated our Christmas tree

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Quote of the day - privacy edition

Thu, 08 Dec 2022 18:12:54 GMT

Some people say that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. I saw the best response: "I need privacy, not because my actions are questionable, but because your judgement and intentions are questionable."

Footnote: I made a "politics" tag because I couldn't find another suitable tag. I promise not to write about politics, except where it's actually interesting.

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Where's J?

Tue, 29 Nov 2022 16:17:59 GMT

I haven't been posting on here much lately. That's mostly because I was writing in my Gemini capsule, although looking at the feed from there (jbanana_gemlog_feed) I haven't been posting much there either. I have been trying out Mastodon (because Vivaldi made that easy for me). No idea if that will be a thing for me. My posts from there are also available here: jbanana_mastodon_feed. I notice the feed doesn't include photos (sad face because I just posted some).

I regularly read on DW (but I don't see private posts because I'm not logged in). Thank you to everyone who posts.

So what's happened to me lately? Nothing much. Life continues. So there's not much to post about. Ho hum.

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Overheard at work

Mon, 10 Oct 2022 11:00:44 GMT

Two men come out of a meeting room. One is speaking to the other in a very positive tone:

...and you can change the colour of the...
the...
little rabbit!

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Overheard at work

Mon, 12 Sep 2022 08:42:50 GMT

Passed two people discussing some issue. One said "This is going to be a pain in the rump."

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New Year resolutions

Sat, 01 Jan 2022 18:00:43 GMT

Happy new year!

Some people make resolutions for the new year. But they often fail to keep them, for a variety of reasons. If you're going to have resolutions that you probably won't keep, why not have randomly generated ones? Fortunately, I've fixed that for you:
Randomly generated resolutions for 2022

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Using jdb on something that requires user inpout

Sun, 17 Oct 2021 10:10:38 GMT

Java's no-frills debugger, jdb, takes debugging input from stdin. But if you're debugging something that gets user input from stdin, it won't ever get any input. So you start the thing you're debugging in another window, telling it to wait for the debugger, then attach the debugger. The incantation for this is verbose and I always have to look it up, so here it is to help me next time.

cmd /c start java -Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,address=5005,server=y,suspend=y SomeJavaClass
jdb -connect com.sun.jdi.SocketAttach:hostname=localhost,port=5005

I also have a regular set of stuff to put in jdb.ini to make jdb less painful.

stop at SomeJavaClass:57
exclude java.*,javax.*,sun.*,com.sun.*,junit.*,jdk.*
run
monitor locals
monitor list

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Setting an alias with BusyBox ash

Wed, 22 Sep 2021 20:10:33 GMT

I installed a VM with Alpine Linux. It uses BusyBox, including for the default shell, ash. How do I set an alias?

I tried startup scripts of various names. No joy. They were ignored. The internet suggested that if I put the name of the script in an environment variable called ENV, the named script would be run at shell startup. But where do I set *that*?

After poking around, all scripts in /etc/profile.d get run, so I added /etc/profile.d/setashrc.sh which just contains
export ENV=$HOME/.ashrc

Now I can set an alias in ~/.ashrc but I'm wondering why there isn't some sort of default?

Anyway, this post is mostly in case I ever need to do this again.

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Late night thought

Fri, 14 May 2021 08:55:05 GMT

I think my bedtime will be big news tonight. I'm expecting blanket coverage.

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Gemlog feed

Fri, 14 May 2021 07:58:42 GMT

I've blathered about Gemini. I started gemlog and set up a feed so it's available here: jbanana_gemlog_feed

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Bird news

Wed, 05 May 2021 10:48:57 GMT

Baby birds have appeared on the lakes where we go lockdown walking. There seem to be lots more ducklings this year. The mothers are very hungry, probably because they at the top, and fewer people go up there. One duck had 11 ducklings, as far as I could count (they wouldn't keep still). Most of them have three or four but another had just one.

We didn't see the coot babies when they were tiny. I suppose we're not going as often as last year. So we missed the "tiny ball of fluff with a red face" stage. The Egyptian geese had one gosling but it was gone next time we saw them. A swan's been sitting on a nest for ages. The swan population is ridiculous. I lost count at 40. A Canada goose also sat on a nest for a long time, but apparently without result. First for this year: great crested grebe nest. I mean, first time for us. The grebes presumably did this before.

The herons have disappeared. The cormorants only turn up very occasionally. The gulls come and go, but it's strangely like being at the seaside when they're there. And the moorhens are always there but very scared of humans.

Other common birds are often hanging around: crows, robins, pigeons, wagtails, sparrows, blackbirds. The crows often stand on the edge of the lake. It's like they want to get in the water but don't dare. One time we saw a dead crow in the water. Perhaps its curiosity was too much and it tried a swim.

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Fixing email?

Tue, 04 May 2021 10:21:45 GMT

I just had an idea. When you get unsolicited email then it might get spam filtered, or you might delete it without even reading. But what if you could request that the email bounces? It should work exactly as if the sender go the address wrong, so it would appear that you don't exist.

No idea if that would be hard to implement, or break email in some unexpected way. And the down side is that a lot of the dross won't have a sensible return address, but the marketing drones who send me stuff at work do have a return address. And I hate them.

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Jemi progress, part 11

Mon, 03 May 2021 22:35:43 GMT

I added drag/drop to open a local file; fixed gopher search; added copying a link URL; allowed user to accept expired/changed certificates; fixed a bunch of little bugs.

I find that I'm reading the news more because I can get it without all the bloat of the web.

I've also found that web browsers now have "reader view" that gets you a Gemini aesthetic: clear fonts, plain text, and no distractions. I recommend that if you haven't tried it. Firefox, Safari and Vivaldi have it built in. Chrome and Edge have extensions that will do it.

Feature possibilities: visited link colour; tabs; feed subscription; persistent history; public release (!)

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Jemi progress, part 10

Sun, 25 Apr 2021 00:45:39 GMT

I said...

I'll try to stop tinkering with it now.

...which didn't go as planned.

I fixed a bunch of bugs with socket timeouts, certificate names and URL handling. I added "find in page" and "search geminispace". I allowed a URL parameter at start up. And I figured how to make gemini:// links work from a browser (icky registry hack).

And I set up a gemini capsule at gemini://freeshell.de/ (I can click that link!)

Bug list: [tumbleweed]
Feature requests: visited link colour; tabs?

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Weird protection

Wed, 21 Apr 2021 22:59:05 GMT

The man who killed George Floyd is a murderer. How could it be otherwise? Imagine if the roles were reversed, and a member of the public had knelt on police officer's neck until they died. But if you're on the official side, the rules don't usually apply. The police in the US kill about a thousand people a year. How many even lose their jobs, never mind get convicted of anything? But I suppose that one conviction is a small step in the right direction.

In the UK, a minister is out of government because he wanted to protect soldiers against prosecution for things that happened in Northern Ireland. It seems that even though he's gone, they're going to give the protection anyway. Again, imagine if the roles were reversed. No one would be campaigning for civilians who killed soldiers to avoid prosecution. Why should someone be exempt from the law because they're wearing a uniform?

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Wrong bottle

Wed, 21 Apr 2021 22:10:46 GMT

I was organising some science activities with kids, and one involved a bottle of cola. If you remove a little cola from the bottle and replace it with milk, you might think that you get slightly milky cola. In fact, the fat in the milk reacts with the acid in the cola, coagulates, and settles out at the bottom, taking the brown colour of the cola with it, and leaving most of the bottle holding only cloudy water.

So I told the parents that their kids would need, among other things, a bottle of cola. I got an email from a parent.

[Kid's name] is hoping to take part tonight. She went shopping for cola and unfortunately was too short to reach the cola so she came back with Fanta fizzy blackcurrant. Will this be a problem?

I reassured her. But as I didn't run that particular session, so I can't report what happens if you put milk in Fanta blackcurrant.

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