Holiday recap
My holiday has come to an end. Back to the grind tomorrow. Pffft.
On the other hand, due to how the holiday days fell, we got a good long holiday this time. Some years the girls at back to work at around 5am on the 2nd of January, but due to taking a bridge day on Friday and then the weekend, we're off until the 5th.
As it is the quiet period now, now that the Christmas chaos is done, we're working a few at 5h30/day (so 9am-3pm for me) and then 6h/day (so 9am-3.30pm). By contrast, in September, October, and November it was 8h/day with alternate Saturdays. Not a surprise I was wiped out come December...
The first half of my holiday was pleasant enough. I got some stuff done.
The second half, not so great. It's been pretty cold in the dark hours so I stayed in bed under the heated blanket until, like, noon or so (I had no pressing reason to get up), but I eventually did get up because that long in bed does unpleasant things to my back. So now I'm sitting in the kitchen beside the oil-filled radiator with a small heated pad on my lap. My fingers are freezing and I'm still deciding if it's worth taking literally three steps to go over to the other side (in the shortest dimension) of the room to flip the level on the kettle. Hang on, I can reach the broom by the door and.... and.... did it!
[fx: click]
[fx: blub-blub-blub]
[fx: click]
Oh well, I guess I have to get up now.
Ah, that's better. ☺
Organic green tea with lemon/lime.
What? Were you expecting Tetley? A special cold-weather comfort is green tea with lemon/lime.
Precedent
It's almost sickening, the number of world leaders who are calling for de-escalation and saying that they are monitoring the situation.
The situation is quite simple. The United States attacked Venezuela and abducted the country's president.
Was Maduro a bad guy? Probably. But I can't help but think that - unless the citizens are calling out for international aid - it should be up to them to live with Maduro or get rid of him. It shouldn't be up to the United States, especially given that Trump also claimed effective control over the country's government and oil deposits. Funny that.
The problem is that this kind of thing sets a precedent for the future. Maybe Denmark should see it as a warning that if Trump decides he wants Greenland, he'll just take it.
On the other hand, if Trump decides to invent some reason to not hand over power when his term is up, he has also laid the way for Russian forces to drop a bomb in Washington and abduct Trump and his wife. After all, what's good for the goose...
Oh, and didn't Trump claim that he was all about not getting involved in conflicts? Dropping a bomb in Iran on Israel's request and now this, it all sounds a lot like getting involved in conflicts to me.
An AI generated image because this was too good an opportunity...
Sewing
I am not a good sewer - I mostly had to teach myself because back in the '80s sewing was a girl thing and I was already fighting a battle getting myself into cookery class because I felt that was more useful to me than woodwork.
Mom was going to dig out her sewing machine and teach me to use it, but, well, there was always a tomorrow until there wasn't.
I did get myself a pedal-power Singer sewing machine, but neither of us could get the tension right, it kept snapping the thread, though I suspect there was something else wrong.
Still, the basic premise is to push a thread back and forth through two pieces of fabric to join them. That much I can figure out.
So when the handle of my backpack broke...
...clearly I could not sew together a fix...
...or could I?
Fixed it!
I got myself a huge sewing needle, I think for leather or mattresses or something, and threaded a piece of twine through it. The needle has suffered some scrapes because I needed to grab it with a pair of pliers to force/pull it through all of the layers of the top of the backpack and the handle. This allowed me to fix where it had come away from the top, and also to join the two halves where the rubber had split as I figured that would be the next weak point.
While I was doing that, I patched up where the material was splitting around the zipper by layering the fabric and passing normal thread and needle back and forth to close it up. It isn't as finely stitched as a sewing machine would, because my patience only goes so far. But as long as it holds up then I can get some more life out of this backpack to take my meal and tea to work.
Fixed this too.
I still think sewing is a useful skill that people ought to be taught. People of both genders.
"Painting" by plastic dots
Friday afternoon was oddly warm, it went up to 8°C, so I opened the windows for some fresh air, and then decided to have a start at my "jewel" ghost picture. It is made by taking a nice picture (that sadly I wasn't able to get just as a picture) and overlaying a grid showing what colour plastic beads - called "jewels", I'm not sure if this is an overenthusiastic translation or because of the shape (flat on the bottom, angular-curved on top) - that should be picked up and placed. The number showing is what colour bead should be used.
Beads!
Clearly the finished picture will be a lot lower resolution as it is effectively being reduced to a colour for every... what is it, around 5mm²? This is why I got the bigger one, as a larger canvas size will have more fidelity.
The premise is pretty simple. Pick a colour and then tip a few of the beads into the carrier. Not too many, you want them to mostly fall the right way up when the carrier is gently shaken or tapped.
Then you poke the stylus into the putty. The putty has nothing to do with the picture, it is simply there to make the stylus slightly sticky so it can pick up the beads.
You should roll back a small section of the picture at a time, because the face of the picture is sticky - very sticky. That is how the beads stick in place, and leaving too much uncovered risks contamination from all the dust and junk in the air.
Then you simply pick up a bead, right way up, and place it, flat side down, in the correct place. You need to be fairly accurate as there is very little scope for nudging anything that is misplaced. If a bead is dropped or falls off the stylus, a pair of tweezers can rescue it, but a bead pressed into the wrong place is more difficult.
Accordingly, the way I did the section that I worked on was by colour - doing all of the main colour, and afterwards filling in the others.
Let's be honest, I've done a tiny bit of the corner.
The picture is roughtly 50×70. If each bead is half a centimetre, than this implies around 100×140 beads, or 14,000 in total.
It takes me around seven seconds to place a bead (some faster, some slower, I'm aiming for accuracy, not speed). This is 98,000 seconds. Let's round it up to a hundred thousand to make 1,667 minutes, or a little under twenty eight hours.
I might look at doing something with this again in the late winter when it warms up. The problem for me isn't the time so much as my back. I don't actually use the magnifying glass, I can get better accuracy by taking my glasses off and getting my head closer to the picture. But, well, it's not good posture. Thankfully my office chair does help, because I can let the gas pump right down to lower the chair as low as it can go, but still...
The cold continues
It got to -7.9°C last night. Still not quite as cold as February 2018, but we're now talking fractions of a degree between what it was last night, and the coldest it has been since I started keeping track at the end of March 2016.
It's every bit as cold as it looks.
It is supposed to be a "milder" -4°C tonight and tomorrow morning when I leave for work, followed by -5°C on Tuesday morning.
I have to visit the kiné on Tuesday after work, and if the battery doesn't seem happy tomorrow I'll cancel and make a later appointment.
After this, it is supposed to start warming up with rain, but I'm used to the "jam tomorrow" weather forecasts, so I'll believe it's 11°C when I get home and it's warm and wet. Apparently Thursday.
I put "milder" in scare quotes as I live in a dip, so it's often a degree or two below forecast temperatures. This part of France will have been given a -5°C forecast, my -7.9°C was due to the dip.
It is quite noticeable when going to work in the colder seasons as I leave home and everything is fine, I drive up the access lane, no problems. Then I head into the village and fwooosh! all the glass on my car condenses water in the air and I can't see anything. So unless the air is super-dry tomorrow, I'm going to have to run the heater a little in order to not have the windscreen fog up, which will take from the battery.
I may pop the fan heater into the car whilst getting ready for work to warm it up - maybe that may help?
I have also been putting grains out for the wild birds during this icy period.
Feeding the feathered ones.
Another Picard order
One of the mornings when I was lying in bed because it was too cold to want to get up, I popped over to the Picard site because when I went to the shop earlier in the week, I didn't see the raspberry tart, not the 'green' Buddha Bowl that I like.
Now, I have a history of liking things that suddenly cease existing, such as those lovely unsalted crisps, but really three things vanishing in a season would be a bit off, you know?
Well, it was listed on their site. It took a little longer to find the Buddha bowl as it has been given a make-over which makes it a lot smaller even though at 350g it is actually the same weight.
I also spotted that Chinese beef meal that wasn't in the shop either.
Before I knew it, I had around €45 of stuff, which with postage would be fifty euros. Should I? Should I not?
Estimated delivery, Saturday morning.
I probably shouldn't, but I did...
As was the last time, it was a large box (I'm guessing this is the only size box they have) which was not sealed in any way and the stuff just thrown into it. Well, maybe that took more care but with no padding it arrived looking like stuff had been thrown in.
Me? I'd not be sending out stuff in this state.
The order was rounded out with some other things, like a 900g Mac&Cheese meal that was actually about the same price as the Marie one that used be sold by my local supermarket but is no longer stocked because they got rid of a bunch of Marie products in order to stock their own products. I was not impressed.
So I got two.
And now, between this and the stuff that I got when I went to Bain, my freezer is mostly full of stuff from Picard.
In case you hadn't guessed, it's a frozen food store akin to Iceland for my British readers. I did look to see if there was an American equivalent, but all I could find is a mail-order place, or the frozen section of Walmart (etc). Is there a chain that only sells frozen stuff?
Here's my haul.
What I got.
And here's a picture of stuff in the freezer.
Now no excuse for not having something to eat.
Now let's look at the Buddha Bowl. You can see why I didn't spot it - the packaging has changed significantly.
What it looked like (left) and what it looks like (right).
The old packaging was a bowl, 18.5cm at the top and 11cm at the bottom, and 5.5cm deep.
The new packaging, by contrast, is 15cm round and 6cm deep (but with a half centimetre fold at the bottom so it's 5.5cm deep as far as food goes).
The above photo, only disrobed.
As you can see, the contents are more stuffed into the smaller packaging. I wonder if this would affect how it cooks? The actual contents between the two bowls are in fact the same weight and the same proportions of ingredients (34.6% pasta (with 2.6% olive oil and 1.3% basil), 19.8% green lentil (with 0.08% coriander), 16.1% broccoli (with 0.3% olive oil and 0.2% lemon juice), and 14.1% soy bean (edamame), as well as salt, pepper, thyme, etc etc.
I think I would place this Buddha bowl and the raspberry tart as my favourite things from Picard. I mean, pasta and broccoli and edamame together, it's almost as if somebody mixed my favourite non-sweet foods together, threw in some lentils for texture and said "done".
I made an unboxing video... which I regretted because dealing with frozen things in a frozen world isn't much fun. But I need to man up here because some poor sod, likely on minimum wage, had to go into their warehouse freezer to pick and pack this stuff. I don't envy that job, but whoever you are - merci beaucoup!
Mamie v0.36L
Something that concerned me with Mamie was how the draw.c source was diverging. The individual modules draw their own parts (like ghosts, spiders, Lucy herself...) and draw deals with the rest - the screen title, the game tiles (background), the flash effect, etc. As I was developing the Linux version, some things were updated but without backporting these to identical code in the RISC OS version. As it turns out, there were numerous differences between the RISC OS and Linux incarnations, but it wasn't something that was totally alien (like the sound sample handling). So it was entirely possible to merge the sources and use #ifdef to select RISC OS or non-RISC OS behaviour.
The benefit to doing this is to make it easier to backport later versions of Mamie back to RISC OS. This isn't something that I have tried, yet, but "in theory" I should be able to copy the sources back and toss the MakeFile at amu to build them. I don't think I have screwed up my conditional compilation markers... well, only one way to find out. ☺
The code is a little bit messy/repetitive because it doesn't seem possible to do something like:
#ifdef DEVBUILD || LINUXDEVBUILD
for code that is common to both options. So they are done one after the other. GCC can use a construct like:
#if defined(DEVBUILD) || defined(LINUXDEVBUILD)
but I'm not sure if Norcroft/DDE can do this. If I remember, I'll try it if/when I backport the version with the chandeliers to RISC OS. But don't hold your breath on that...
Speaking of chandeliers, I omitted to check the final Y offset to see if it matched Lucy. This meant that a falling chandelier would kill her even if she was on the floor above. Ummm...duh!
I have also stopped her getting freaked out if it falls and she's above it.
And, at long last, I have sped up Lucy's walking animation when she is running. It looks better than having her perform the same animation but be moving faster.
Note that this is not a full install, it's only the executable. If you don't already have Mamie installed, grab the previous version from here and read the installation instructions. Then you can replace the mamie executable with the one here.
Fray Bentos
Looking through the stuff in my larder, I spotted a Fray Bentos "Just Chicken" that expired last March. The tin looks in good condition and since it is tinned, it'll be okay. I think I'll have that as an end-of-holiday meal with peas and carrots, with a big chunk of Battenberg for after. So I'll start preparing that and head back to my room to crawl under the heated blanket. Just a few more days and then it'll be warm again...
This is about to be dinner.
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| John, 4th January 2026, 19:43 |
I always thought that "gender" was a grammatical concept to do with agreement of adjectives with nouns, and only occasionally having a relationship with biological sex.
Such as in "personne" (f - invariate), "facteur/factrice" and so forth.
And then there's the neuter gender in some grammars.
So I think, as a generality, you meant people of both sexes - but we all know that's a bit simplistic as well. In real life people can be born with aspects of both sexes, and sometimes attributions are made which turn out to be just plain wrong.
BBC BASIC might just be a case-in-point!
Just sayin'. |
| Rick, 4th January 2026, 20:16 |
Gender: There's "male" and there's "female", and if we draw a line from one to the other, everybody is somewhere on that line. Some even get to pick where. |
| jgh, 6th January 2026, 17:12 |
What I do is identify the functionality, not the platform, and #define symbols for them and then #ifdef from those symbols. So, in the initial build "launcher" I might have something like:
#ifdef _WIN
#define CON_ANSI
#define KBD_BIOS
#endif
#ifdef _LINUX
#define CON_ANSI
#define KBD_ANSI
#endif
and then use #ifdef CON_ANSI not _WIN || _LINUX
|
| jgh, 6th January 2026, 17:14 |
"both" genders? BIGOT!!!!!!!!! Don't you know there's 372 genders!
|
(Felicity? Marte? Find out!)
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Last read at 18:18 on 2026/01/17.
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- entry 2026/01/04
