toucana

I follow the feeds of an Arabic speaking Vlogger called Anamero who is based in Alexandria Egypt. She regularly posts videos about the weather, sea states, and beachfront life along the Corniche in Alexandria. She has posted two videos within the last 24 hours - one yesterday showing a kilometres long line of closed beaches, and another one this morning showing a 3 metre swell coming ashore at the famous Stanley Bay bathing beach. So it’s a little bit more than ‘anecdotal’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wz9cl9j9dnU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SwLQcIOSyU Alexandria is famous for its persistent strong sea breezes - as described by writers like E.M Forster and Lawrence Durrell who lived there during WW1 and WW2 respectively. But this type of life-threatening heavy swell is unprecedented in summer months. It normally only occurs much later in the winter - which lends credence to suspicion that a significant climate change effect might be at work here. The fact that Egypt’s National Institute of Astronomical and Geophysical Research (NIAGR) recently denied reports from professional mariners that significant changes are occuring in south Mediterranean weather systems only adds to that suspicion. As to quite what might be causing this, some reports suggest that sea temperatures are increasing up to 20% faster than the global average in this area, making it a recognised "climate hotspot’ with increasingly frequent marine heatwaves, rising sea levels and increases in salinity - all of which contribute to more unstable weather patterns. https://www.unep.org/unepmap/resources/factsheets/climate-change

The Egyptian Authorities have ordered the emergency closure of all the tourist beaches in Alexandria, and issued a warning to shipping on their Mediterranean coast from Marsa Matruh in the west, to El-Alamein and Baltim in the east - a distance of some 419 Kilometres - following urgent warnings from the Egyptian Meteorological Authority. https://www.egyptindependent.com/alexandria-closes-all-beaches-on-tuesday-over-rough-waves The closure of all the beaches in Alexandria which is a popular seaside holiday destination for residents of Cairo comes at the peak-end of the summer holiday season, and represents a major disruption to the tourist industry. It is also quite unusual for this time of year. Such beach closures normally only occur later in the autumn and winter. The stated reason is said to be high onshore winds likely to create waves of up to 3.5 metres high. Only six weeks ago the head of Egypt’s National Institute of Astronomical and Geophysical Research (NIAGR), Taha Rabeh, dismissed warnings from a marine captain regarding unusual changes in the Mediterranean Sea. https://www.egyptindependent.com/egyptian-institute-dismisses-mediterranean-sea-anomaly-claims-as-unscientific Rabeh asserted that the captain’s claims are “Completely false, exaggerated, and lack any scientific basis” - emphasising that high winds are a natural phenomenon.

This problem was made even worse when engineers found they needed to raise the existing floor level of the Ryde tunnel to prevent flooding Although very small (just 55 miles of track in total), the Isle of Wight railway system in its prime was built by five different companies, and is chock-full of absurdities and eccentricities that offer a perfect microcosm of the challenges faced by Victorian railway engineers. The Shanklin-Ventnor extension on the IoWR line for example was held up for two years until 1866 because the landowner who was the Earl of Yarborough refused to allow a line to be built over his property. The company was forced go via Wroxall instead, and drive a vastly expensive 1,312 yard tunnel under St Boniface Down. Ventnor station itself then had to be built in a disused chalk pit on a ledge quarried into the hillside just beyond the tunnel mouth, some 294 feet above sea-level. A turntable was installed to reverse the locomotives. The IoWR persevered with this expense because Ventnor with its unique mico-climate was a popular location for sanitoriums catering for patients with pulmonary tuberculosis. Once the Ryde Esplanade tunnel was finished in 1880, the IoWR used to run a regular summer ‘Invalid Express’ service which enabled convalescents to step off a ferry steamer at Ryde Pier, and straight onto a train that whisked them down to Ventnor in 30m. When the IoWR decided to build a branch line from Sandown to Newport, they had to construct a substantial railway viaduct over the river Medina. Members of my mother’s family owned a critical plot of land needed for this viaduct, and made a handsome sum by selling it to the railway company who went bankrupt as a result. When the Medina viaduct was finished, it had to include a sliding section that could be opened to allow tall masted sailing ships to navigate down the river - which caused endless problems. Whippingham station on this line was built for the private use of Queen Victoria when residing at Osborne House. But Queen Victoria hated travelling by rail, and she returned the station to public use. As the only other facility in the area was a crematorium, the station remained largely unused. The final part of the Island network, the Newport-Freshwater branch line constructed in 1897 includes Watchingwell station which was buillt as a private facility for the landowner John Barrington Simeon MP for Southampton who refused to allow the railway line onto his land unless the company provided him with his own private station - complete with a semaphore signal to request trains to stop. This halt was only added into the public timetables in 1923 after Southern Rail took control.

When the IoWR opened their Ryde to Shanklin railway line in 1864, they were forced to build their main terminus at St Johns Road on the south side of the town, at an inconvenient distance from the Pier and Ryde Esplanade where all the summer visitors arrived on the pleasure steamers. IoWR had to rely on a horse-drawn tram link to get these passengers to the railway station. It took another 16 years of argument to obtain permission to build a rail tunnel to connect St Johns Road to Ryde Pier and Esplanade. As the wiki article explains:

You may be curious to learn that ex-London Underground electric rolling-stock has been in use on the Isle of Wight Railway line from Ryde to Shanklin since 1967. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isle_of_Wight_Railway This line first opened in stages; between Ryde and Shanklin in 1864, followed by an extension to Ventnor in 1866, a total length of around 12 miles. From the outset the company used steam traction, employing a fleet of Beyer Peacock 0-4-4T type tank engines which were said to be the only steam locomotives capable of working the very low Ryde tunnel in particular. In 1966 the Ventor extension was closed, and the line was truncated and electrified, now ending in Shanklin. Because of the low tunnel height clearance in Ryde, engineers found that the only available locomotives capable of operating on the newly electrified line were vintage 1925 era London Underground units. Around 43 of these were acquired from the Piccadilly and Northern Lines, shipped to the Island and modified to run on a 630VDC third rail system, using a running rail as the current return circuit. These 1925 era tube trains remained in service on the IOWRL until 1989, when they were upgraded - (if that is the word) - to 1938 vintage London Underground class 483 EMUs (electric multiple units). In a final major upgrade that took place in 2021, the vintage 1938 London Underground stock was replaced with newer Class 484 ex-London Underground carriages - this time from the 1980s. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jan/02/isle-of-wights-rattling-rolling-charming-ex-tube-trains-face-end-of-the-line

A solo piano performance of a piece called ‘Castaglia’ by Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto (1952-2023). He originally wrote it in 1979 for the album ‘Solid State Survivor’ by a Japanese synth-pop trio called Yellow Magic Orchestra which he co-founded. Ryuichi Sakamoto subsequently became a noted film score composer. His credits included “Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence” (1983) in which he also played an acting role as Captain Yonoi. “The Last Emperor” (1987), and “The Revenant” (2015) which was his final film score. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFDJzj12T7M&list=RDwFDJzj12T7M&start_radio=1

Quite a few of the trolls around at that time seemed to be refugees from Napster, a pirate MP3 music-sharing service that was bankrupted and shut down by the courts in 2002. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napster Many of those trolls were complete sociopaths - nazis, homophobes, and red-neck racists who thought they could simply migrate onto IRC and set up fservers there instead. They tried to take over channels, and basically bully and intimidate anyone who got in their way or stood up them - far worse than the usual blowins from EFnet. There were numerous confrontations with these people - some of them bot-herders running flood-nets, port scanners, netsplit cloners, and identity thieves. I never had any compunction about doxing or getting those trolls K-lined - one too many death threats.

Yep. Jarkko Oikarinen was an Electrical Engineering student at Oulu University in Finland who got a summer job in 1988 working as a Unix server admin at tolsun.oulu.fi. http://www.computer-timeline.com/timeline/jarkko-oikarinen/ He spent part of his summer internship stripping down and rebuilding a public access BBS (bulletin board system), and that software project then turned into IRC (internet relay chat). Originally there were just three IRC servers in the network - all in Finnish universities - at Oulu, Tampere and Helsinki. He got an account on the MIT university server the following year, and posted details of IRC which led to the first IRC servers outside of Scandinavia being set up in the US. Jarkko Oikarinen subsequently did significant research into medical imaging, telemedicine, and computed axial tomography.

I first recall hearing about wireless audio bridges in a rather unusual and sombre context - the funeral of Diana Princess of Wales which took place on Saturday September 6th 1997. There were 2000 mourners inside Westminster Abbey, another 32 million watching on British TV, but there were also countless thousands of people lining the streets waiting to throw flowers on the hearse as it left the Abbey. The authorities wanted these people to be able to hear the funeral service as they waited patiently - but how ? You could hardly run speaker cables across busy London street intersections. According to a story the following week in Lighting & Sound International (the main trade magazine at the time), the office of the Queens’s Royal Chamberlain summoned the bosses of all the main London AV hire firms to a meeting at Buckingham Palace and gave them carte blanche - “Just make it happen and we will pick up the bill”. The chosen solution was to use wireless audio bridges on every major intersection on the route out of London. It was said that they emptied out the entire equipment inventory of all the AV hire firms in London doing it, but they made it happen, and at very short notice too. And the story has stuck in my mind ever since.

Such tools are not reliable. Your mileage may vary. On one occasion a few years ago on IRC we had an abusive troll causing trouble in a novice-friendly channel where I was an AOP. Rather than kick-banning the offender, we decided to have a little fun with him. We used the /whois <nick> command to check his host details , which not only gave us his IP address, but we also found that he had unwisely filled in the gecos field which provided us with his real name too. The reverse DNS look-up gave the location as a rural town in the mid-west. We then found a searchable online telephone directory for that township, and found an entry that matched the name in the gecos field. We then asked him in channel if his real name was XXXX XXXX, and cited his full postal address, zip-code and telephone number. Guy vanished like a ghost at dawn and never troubled us again ;-)

If it's a Rotel RX 403 then you have a pair of Monitor line-outs available as RCA phono sockets - on the bottom left of the backplate (see photo attached below). You could simply connect from those to a wireless audio bridge. I used to have a static public broadband IP address for almost 20 years until my ISP went out of business and I was forced to switch to EE whose public router IP addresses change every time the router reboots or gets a firmware update - a real pain in the neck which means I regularly have to use a look-up tool to check what my public IP currently is (EE call it a ’semi-static” public address) and then change the hard-coded value in my IRC client to match (you can’t use the ‘lookup server” method, because you will simply get the 192.168.x.x LAN address assigned under DHCP by your router which is unrouteable on the WAN side. In IRC you can simply run the command /whois <nick> and you will instantly get their full host and IP address details (unless they happen to be using a stealth mode cloaking system). You can then tell at a glance whether they are using IPv4, IPv6, or mobile, and if you are really curious you can run a traceoute and a reverse DNS look-up to get their location as well. In some cases we were able to tell that particular users were actually connected to IRC via WebTV service which was quite a novelty back then. Didn't realise that the thread had been split just before I made my last post. The backplate photo above belongs to the new thread about wiring Wharfdale Denton 2 speakers now over in Engineering :-)

Wharfedale Denton 2 speakers don’t require that much power - rated for 18-20 Watts but will run on 5-10 Watts according to this thread. https://www.reddit.com/r/BudgetAudiophile/comments/smfh24/opinions_on_wharfedale_denton_2s/ The buzz-words you need to google are something like “Wireless audio bridge for remote passive speakers”. They do exist in the form of transmitter/receiver pairs, and are used in pro-audio work where you don’t want to run wires across busy street intersections, or in promenade event spaces. https://www.klarkteknik.com/product.html?modelCode=0813-AAC Some people also use these wireless audio bridges to feed home cinema system surround sound speakers, although with passive speaker units you will need a local standalone stereo audio amp as well.

Guess I’ll just have to accept that I’m now an old-timer, bumbling around in the basement of the internet, fondly stroking archaic old relic equipment, and muttering to myself about how wonderful the sweet mating music of dial-up modems used to be :-) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpMrTxMV6E4

Last night I was logged into a popular live-streaming board game website, and the stream host commented on the fact that their opponent had just disconnected from the game server and reconnected on a mobile phone (shown by an icon in their user ID), and wondered why they were doing so. I suggested in live chat they maybe had a flakey computer internet connection and had switched to a mobile phone, but I was immediately rebuked by several other viewers who said, “No - It would show up as the same device” - which is clearly and obviously completely wrong. A computer connects via a broadband ISP network, while a mobile phone connects via a 5G mobile data link. These are serviced by completely different carriers, so the two devices would have different network IPv6 addresses. They would also have unique browser fingerprints based on their operating system and screen resolutions, as well as unique ‘user agent’ strings - probably the first thing a website looks at. Even if you make use of a browser data syncing system between devices on a commmon wi-fi network, a website can always tell the difference between your computer and your mobile phone. The thing that intrigued me was “Why do I know this, and why don’t they?” After all I’m just a hobbyist, not a trained IT professional. The answer that dawned on me was that the Gen Z /TikTok generation of gamers simply have no conception of how the internet works under the hood. They may be experts at content/brand creation, or racking up top scores on GTA or Call of Duty, but have no knowledge of packet-switching, TCP protocol stacks, or DHCP on local router networks - Am I right ? My own experience of using the internet dates back to the mid-1990s when everything was a good deal clunkier to use - an experience sharpened by exploring IRC (internet relay chat) extensively - which tends to involve a crash-course in networking theory. If you have ever spent time getting DCC CHAT and NAT (network address translation) to work on IRC via DHCP (dynamic host configuration protocol) behind a local broadband router, then you will probably understand what I’m talking about ! The ‘Zoomers’ don’t it seems. They are the PnP generation who expect everything to work all by itself at the first time of asking, and get very puzzled when it doesn’t, because they have no idea how it works in the first place ;-) “Those who do not understand computers will be controlled by those who do” - (anon)

The invention of cheese is believed to predate recorded human history. Some early artefacts that resemble sieves have been found in eastern Europe which are thought to be cheese strainers at least 7000 years old. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_cheese The general assumption is that the craft of cheesemaking developed with the growth of dairy-herding which became widely established some 4000 years ago. One suggestion is that humans discovered cheese by accident when using the stomachs of ruminants to store and transport milk - and found that rennet in the stomachs curdled the milk. The use of salt in early cheesemaking varied according to climate. Hard salted cheeses developed in hotter areas, because it was the only viable method of storing milk products there for any length of time. Cooler European climates encouraged the use of less salt which in turn encouraged the presence of useful microbes and moulds that led to the development of blue cheeses. Cheesemaking is described in Sumerian cuneiform texts from the second millenium BC. Linear B tablets of the Minoan civilization in Crete in the late bronze age refer to it as well - the Minoan word for cheese Turo was borrowed into ancient Greek as τυρός . Thereafter cheesemaking is widely described in the Roman empire and in Homer’s Odyssey, and later on in the Arab world as well. One of the few major civilizations that doesn’t have a dairy-centric tradition of cheesemaking is central China. To this day, Han Chinese people are distinctly averse to cheese products - especially blue cheeses like Gorgonzola.

A new YT video published only yesterday offers a concise (8m) account of recent research into the origins of Yersinia pestis, the bacterium responsible for the Black Death which killed between 50-60% of the entire population of western Europe between 1346 and 1353. A joint study led by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig Germany has traced the genome of Yersinia pestis to a ‘ground-zero’ grave site near Lake Issyk Kul in Kyrgyzstan which was on the northern route of the Silk Road. https://www.mpg.de/18778852/0607-evan-origins-of-the-black-death-identified-150495-x The ancient grave site was part of a Nestorian Christian trading settlement first discovered by a Russian archaeological expedition in 1886 which excavated the site and brought skeletal remains back to St Petersburg. Grave-stone inscriptions indicated that 118 of the the graves dated 1338-9 were marked as victims of pestilence - almost 10 years before the first appearance of the plague in Europe. DNA analysis has confirmed that Yersinia pestis found in skeletal remains from the Lake Issyk Kul site is the ancestral mother strain of the four known mutations of the bacterium, one of which devastated Europe. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjLNxIf2lXk

I tend to stress-test Google Translate quite a lot when doing lessons in Duolingo. One problem which often arises in the non-European language courses, is that the word bank in Duolingo simply doesn’t offer the word or script form you expected or needed. The only remedy is to fire-up Google Translate, and copy-paste the glyphs you need from there back into Duolingo, which often leads to variant translation issues and warnings. The example below is from a Duolingo Chinese lesson this morning - (quite why anyone would move a dishwasher into a bathroom, or need to discuss the matter in Chinese I have no idea !) The problem was that the Duolingo word bank did not wish to give me the characters 洗碗机 xi wan ji for ‘dishwasher', and Google Translate wanted to use a different word 浴室 yùshi for a bathroom, rather than the one Duolingo expected —> 洗手间 xishǒujian - ‘washroom’ You simply copy and paste out of Google Translate and hope for the best, and most of the time it does seem to work - and does so in Japanese and Arabic as well.

My wife who is a proof-reader picked up on many amusing typos over the years. One was in an advertisement for a legal firm of solicitors due to be inserted into the copy for a theatre programme which read - “If you haven’t tried suing us before, why not start now !”

An undisputed masterpiece of this type is O novo guia da conversação em portuguez e inglez or ““The New Guide of The Conversation in Portugese and English”, first printed in 1855, and later republished under the title “English as She Is Spoke” in 1883. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_as_She_Is_Spoke It is attributed to a pair of Portugese authors called Pedro Carolino and Jose Da Fonseca, neither of whom were overburdened with any great knowledge of English. Pedro Carolino in particular who did much of the translation was said to have possessed no grasp of English whatsoever, and dragged his idiomatic phrases through a pair of Portugese-French, and French-English dictionaries, with entertaining results: The English idiom “A rolling stone gathers no moss” was mangled into “The stones as roll not heap up foam” The Portugese idiom “Chover a canataro" was rendered as “Raining in jars” - as opposed to “Raining in buckets”. Items of proverbial advice included: - Dress your hairs. - This hat go well. - Undress you to. - Exculpate me by your brother’s. - She make the prude. - Do you out the hairs? - He has tost his all good. Mark Twain who wrote the introduction to the 1883 edition said of English as She Is Spoke "Nobody can add to the absurdity of this book, nobody can imitate it successfully, nobody can hope to produce its fellow; it is perfect."

That is what it says in the BBC press release: Although buried away in the text, it also says that: The Met Office website has a blog page about its newest supercomputing service that came online in May, and which is said to be a Microsoft Azure cloud based system. https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/about-us/who-we-are/innovation/supercomputer

The BBC has announced that it will revert to using the UK government Met Office as the data source of all its weather forecasting and climate update services. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crm4z8mple3o The BBC had previously terminated a near century old relationship with the Met Office eight years ago in 2017 in favour of a Dutch provider called the MeteoGroup citing a need to obtain “best value for license payers money”. The MeteoGroup was subsequently taken over by a private American firm called DTN based in Minnesota. In October 2024 a technical fault affecting the supplying of data to the United Kingdom's BBC Weather service caused the latter's website and app to incorrectly forecast wind speeds of over 15,000 mph (24,000 km/h) and air temperatures exceeding 400 °C (750 °F). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DTN_(company)

Suffice to say, it's not a compliment. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/videos/international/trump-go-home-scotland-erupts-in-rage-u-s-consulate-stormed-over-support-to-israel-on-gaza/videoshow/122932742.cms

Researchers at the University of Cambridge in UK have determined that a medieval scribal error triggered centuries of confusion and misunderstanding over a long-lost saga. https://edition.cnn.com/2025/07/18/science/medieval-saga-chaucer-mystery-error The saga in question is a little-known text in Middle-English called The Song of Wade, twice mentioned by Chaucer, but largely forgotten nowadays. Researchers now believe that a transcription error changed a ‘W’ to a ‘Y’, transforming ‘Wolves’ into ‘Elves’. Another word in the excerpt, translated as “sprites,” should instead be “sea snakes,” moving the story even farther away from the realm of the supernatural, the researchers reported July 15 in The Review of English Studies. https://academic.oup.com/res/advance-article/doi/10.1093/res/hgaf038/8198901?login=false Magic:The Gathering will never be the same ! ;-)

New reporting in the WSJ suggests that investigators now believe it was the Captain who turned the fuel switches off, while the junior First Officer was flying the plane in the RH seat on takeoff. https://www.wsj.com/world/asia/air-india-crash-senior-pilot-eab72db5?mod=hp_lista_pos4 The report is apparently based on sources within the US federal NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board) agency.

The Chinese subsequently took this type of social projection very much further. By the the time of the medieval Ming dynasty (1368-1644), the Chinese imagination had populated their model of heaven with a vast celestial bureaucracy of local magistrates, prefects, provincial governors, and imperial censors, which exactly mirrored the intricate and labyrinthine civil service system found on earth in China at that time - complete with literary examinations which had to be passed to obtain promotions. This motif can be found in several major Chinese collections of ghost stories dating from 1378 in the early Ming dynasty, and most especially in another large collection of supernatural ghost stories called the Liaozhai ( 聊齋 ) written by Pu Songling during the following Qing dynasty, over a 40 year period from around 1670 onwards. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Tales_from_a_Chinese_Studio The Liaozhai was first translated into English by Herbert Giles in 1880 under the title ‘Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio’.