But what's that rubbish about traditional pencil sharpeners cutting perpendicular to the wood grain? Does he mean parallel?
I've been using the method with a plane this guy describes, but I've recently started a job where I have access to a belt sander - awesomely sharp pencils in seconds!
youtu.be/VWBzHk7Tlns?is=WrliU6uBMs36ji4v
(, Wed 14 Oct 2026, 22:11, Reply)
I don't think I've used a pencil in decades, certainly don't have one
(, Thu 15 Oct 2026, 0:26, Reply)
Then normal sharpeners do cut perpendicular (though at a slight angle) to the grain I would have thought
(, Thu 15 Oct 2026, 0:49, Reply)
I was thinking of the orientation of the cutting edge, not the direction of cut. Cheers!
(, Thu 15 Oct 2026, 6:25, Reply)
my experience is that it's most often the lead that fails rather than the wood when sharpening
(, Thu 15 Oct 2026, 11:30, Reply)
Browser version of the amazing and time destroying best game of all time*, Championship Manager 2, only with fully updated squads and teams to this 26/27 season.
*apart from Little Big Adventure
(, Tue 13 Oct 2026, 14:55, Reply)
might be browser related - works fine on Edge for me, including saves
(, Wed 14 Oct 2026, 8:51, Reply)
Reminds me, I haven't done a paperclips run through in a couple of months now.
(, Tue 13 Oct 2026, 20:45, Reply)
Always liked this song from 20 odd years back - but wondered how it would sound if the song just played the piano as it suggests it will at the intro : so I took away the instruments apart from the piano !
Tentative tick of 'IMT' cause I did the arrangement.
(, Tue 13 Oct 2026, 14:05, Reply)
Just put out something I've been planning for quite a while, an audio journey through the first world war using only contemporary recordings.
Download, stream, tracklist, blog are all under the link, and it's a lot more listenable and a lot less grim than you might imagine.
(, Tue 13 Oct 2026, 9:36, Reply)
Don't worry about it being 13 minutes, he gives the game away in the first ten seconds.
(, Tue 13 Oct 2026, 7:59, Reply)
Was also used in Joey Beltrums Energy Flash. Still a favourite of mine to this day.
Cor his ‘lectric bill must be in the 4digits with all his lovely kit.
(, Wed 14 Oct 2026, 20:26, Reply)
A perfect reason to play the first one again, although I’m definitely cheating at that minigame when I get to it.
(, Mon 12 Oct 2026, 20:39, Reply)
That’s made my afternoon :) I loved the first one, still the best thing Amanita’s ever done IMHO. Very ready for round two (just hope the trailer isn’t giving too much away).
(, Tue 13 Oct 2026, 17:23, Reply)
I usually like unorthodox synths, but in this case I can't get any obvious correlation between the input and output. I might be missing something!
(, Mon 12 Oct 2026, 22:20, Reply)
If you can make any sense of it I'd be interested to know how!
(, Tue 13 Oct 2026, 6:15, Reply)
in the forests of the night
what immortal hand or eye
could frame thy fearful.....AARRG SHIT!..... IT'S GOT ME LEG!
(, Sun 11 Oct 2026, 5:14, Reply)
Well no shit.
(, Sun 11 Oct 2026, 10:33, Reply)
The small animals enclosures seemed well designed to keep them happy, but then you get a polar bear which seemed utterly broken and which depresses me to this day.
If I was going to end it that way, I think I'd have given him a rare bit of fun instead.
(, Sun 11 Oct 2026, 17:21, Reply)
the big animals like the bears and the tigers looked like they'd been driven mental
now they don't have em, and the gorilla exhibit is so naturalistic you can't even see them.
part of me thinks it's a tragedy, but another part thinks, "well, finally something interesting in the tiger's daily grind"
(, Sun 11 Oct 2026, 21:47, Reply)
I'm a sucker for a bit of manual manipulation.
It's a bit of a pity the title gives the game away from the start though
(, Sat 10 Oct 2026, 23:26, Reply)
Hard to be sure with all the makeup kids are wearing these days, mind.
(, Mon 12 Oct 2026, 6:54, Reply)
(, Fri 9 Oct 2026, 23:19, Reply)
There's a lot of Buddy Merrill in this, and I never heard anything like that on Ceefax.
(, Sat 10 Oct 2026, 15:21, Reply)
Bonus vid at the end with a little on how it was made.
(, Fri 9 Oct 2026, 18:49, Reply)
Oh, time dilation, yeah.
The AI voices are unbearable and the script is shite, but interesting visuals nonetheless.
(, Fri 9 Oct 2026, 18:57, Reply)
*adverts not included, they're an unskippable compilation of those adverts you repeatedly skip featuring those where you tap at the screen hoping for a skip button
(, Sat 10 Oct 2026, 9:38, Reply)
The reason the video is not 0s long is that there is an acceleration phase, and the ship never quite reaches "c", and then a deceleration phase.
If you were to PoV a photon's perspective, the journey would be instant.
(, Sat 10 Oct 2026, 9:54, Reply)
From the perspective of the traveller actually doing "c" though, birth to death is instant as long as they are always at "c", regardless of distance travelled, regardless of any outside observed metrics.
Effectively, we always "move" at "c", but in "space-time". At true rest, we move at "c" through time only (theoretical only, we cannot be at rest in reality). As we move in 3D space, we trade from time to space, taking a fraction from "c" in time, to a fraction in 3D space. The two speeds must always add up to "c", so moving through 3D space at "c" makes time=0. This is why "c" is a hard limit, because you can't make time negative.
(, Sat 10 Oct 2026, 11:12, Reply)
ACKCHERLY... The term is "geek". People are ignorant to this, and it's very silly. "Nerds" are the "fandoms" of fictional shit, like Star Trek etc or those little pieces of candy... They know every little detail about that sort of nonsense. Geeks are more technical, engineers and such, and know real things that matter that are often beyond the comprehension of the average Joe.
HTH!
(, Tue 13 Oct 2026, 10:59, Reply)
Yes, thanks for that Einstein. I was of course ignoring the time dilation for comedic effect.
(, Sat 10 Oct 2026, 11:34, Reply)
That they're probably wrong. It's the easiest way to still be right all the time.
(, Sun 11 Oct 2026, 23:39, Reply)
einstein defined time as only relative to local frames of reference, they can only be synchronised relatively between two clocks, and a clock is really just ordinal events, be it microseconds or hours. therefore the photonic excitation of the energy field is an event whose location can be referenced in spacetime relative to measuring events in another location in spacetime (for example, the start of a second on a clock). they all exist in space time, the clock, the photon, the observer. none of them experience time. the observer just deterimines the various events ordinal spacetime position, the observer themselves are merely an ordinal sequence of events. "experience" is just a label for that cascading causal sequence of events emergent from the complexity of evolved brains. one event causes a single synapse to fire reinforcing a calcium potassium ion channel as a causal event in ordinal sequence and we call this "experience". there is no real time, there is no real experience. our brains "experience" the arrow of time as forwards because that's what "experience" is, it's a tautology, what emerges when you run that tape forward on the brain. But you could also say we "experience" time backwards, it's just that when you play the tape backwards "experience" could describe a process where reinforcement triggers a reverse firing of the synapse back to the potential state. Both could describe reality, as could not playing the tape at all. Reality is a tapestry, relative events in space time where past, present and future all exist at once. "experience" and "time" are just labels our brains have made, rather than reality.
the photon doesnt experience time, nor does anything.
(, Tue 13 Oct 2026, 12:24, Reply)
I made a complicated variant of sudoku that nearly broke the current Times cryptic crossword champion. I didn't think it was that that tricky for a former member of the UK's world sudoku championship team, but the number of times he wonders if the puzzle is even possible to finish makes me rethink that assessment.
You can try it yourself here: sudokupad.app/e7kgnmlm76 if you dare. Or just watch Mark having a bad time for over an hour in the video.
(, Fri 9 Oct 2026, 13:13, Reply)
What is the difference between water and island if both are represented by numbers 1-9?
(, Fri 9 Oct 2026, 14:52, Reply)
Yeah, if this is your first exposure to weird-rules sudoku then you're being thrown in at the deep end somewhat.
You need to work out where the islands are and how big they are in order to figure out where some of the numbers are - or aren't. For instance, because numbers can't repeat on an island, if you don't know which cells the islands occupy then you can't work out which numbers need to be excluded from them. Also, if you don't know how big the islands are then you can't get the numbers in the circles.
It's knowing that the circled numbers denote the size of the islands, in conjunction with what numbers it's possible to use in the black dot doubling relationships that should give you your first digit in the puzzle. It's really useful to have the colouring option that the app gives you to keep track of water/island cells. Something you can't really do for a pen and paper puzzle.
(, Fri 9 Oct 2026, 15:21, Reply)
but not to worry, sudoku is not my bag anyway.
(, Fri 9 Oct 2026, 18:18, Reply)
I'm stuck having got the first 9 numbers. Not watched Mark yet though
(, Sat 10 Oct 2026, 15:33, Reply)
I often find an easy break in can lull you into a false sense of how tough it can be, and it definitely has some tricky bits. Figuring out where to look for the next step can be the most challenging part. It ends up having the more difficult logic on the right of the grid and easier parts on the left.
(, Sat 10 Oct 2026, 16:12, Reply)
Yeah - doesn't help that I'm losing my marbles :-)
If you ever think to write a blog post on how you go about creating these things in general, I'd be fascinated to read it
(, Sat 10 Oct 2026, 20:15, Reply)
Once I have bit more experience I might do that and I'll share it here. This is the first sudoku puzzle I've made though, so I've still got a lot to learn myself.
(, Sun 11 Oct 2026, 14:08, Reply)
Took me the best part of an hour and a half of solving, got properly stuck at the end and had to sleep on it. Woke up, saw the reduction of r6c6 and that was it. Thanks.
(, Sun 11 Oct 2026, 7:51, Reply)
Glad you got there in the end.
I've had the same experience, where taking a break from a puzzle that has become intransigent helps. Coming back to it with fresh eyes and somehow my mind is now ready to see things it refused to before.
(, Sun 11 Oct 2026, 14:16, Reply)
Ended up watching it all the way through. Fascinating to see his thinking process. Just about held on
(, Mon 12 Oct 2026, 13:19, Reply)
Quite beautiful, and helpful too.
(, Fri 9 Oct 2026, 6:34, Reply)
that are showing as rotating-optics, but I was sure they were static...
So now I have to go take a look when it gets dark tonight!
(, Fri 9 Oct 2026, 12:49, Reply)
If I was a sea captain I worry that I'd get so mesmerized by lighthouses I'd run around anyway.
(, Sat 10 Oct 2026, 6:18, Reply)
Remember when the only people live streaming executions was fucking ISIS?
(, Fri 9 Oct 2026, 8:58, Reply)
Even they didn't have the cheek to monetise it. Which will certainly happen this time. Probably.
I wonder if it will be arranged so that half the squad shoots him in the legs and arms, and then there's a pause for a Tylenol ad before the final act?
(, Fri 9 Oct 2026, 10:28, Reply)
The viewership will be way, way beyond what the White House would have the capacity to self-host, so they'll almost certainly have to rely on a third-party CDN. And that CDN provider will likely need an awful lot of financial incentive to host a public execution.
Even if the stream is limited to the US, you're still talking about 135 Million households potentially signing up for the festivities.
(, Fri 9 Oct 2026, 10:43, Reply)
and there will be a "remix in Grok" button next to it.
(, Fri 9 Oct 2026, 23:07, Reply)
(, Fri 9 Oct 2026, 10:55, Reply)
Precedent set.
Next!
(, Fri 9 Oct 2026, 10:56, Reply)
(, Fri 9 Oct 2026, 10:59, Reply)
Remember, lynching postcards were sold widely in the US.
(, Fri 9 Oct 2026, 17:30, Reply)
Andy Reinheld manages to play along to Martha Reeves.
(, Thu 8 Oct 2026, 17:18, Reply)
His dad smirked all the way through the christening.
Here's another one:-
dawnhardwick.com/about/
(, Thu 8 Oct 2026, 13:46, Reply)
wait for it
sadly no page in wikipedia but you can search for pages that include the name
(, Thu 8 Oct 2026, 21:12, Reply)
This is just silly, but the build is pretty good and the road trip montage is better
(, Thu 8 Oct 2026, 8:19, Reply)
they've put far more effort into the fit/finish than is required for the joke
(, Thu 8 Oct 2026, 11:04, Reply)
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