If he was into Metallica, Lars would be by far his favourite member and the drums on St Anger a masterpiece

Anything to do with Warhammer 40k after being into it for decades, even playing competitively, going to the big info dump events, weekly gaming with friends, etc.

I still have all my models, tens of thousands of points in multiple armies, just lost all desire to play with the newer rulesets as they became too simplified and even more focused on buffing the latest new shiny models stats. Plus latest models are often very limited poses, sure the overall detail is up but the scope for personalization is way down without major work.

Then due to infighting the Horus Heresy line of rules and models got intentionally road blocked after Blighs death, which I had been relying on as a more crunchy outlet and to protect my investment in my models.

Oh, and they started the long road to sunset normal Marine models, which when you have over 50k points of marines you collected and painted over the past 35 years stings more than a little.

For the company its been an enormous success, sales are hugely up, so I don’t begrudge them too much after the mismanagement of Kirby post LotR.

Marinakis has always been a giant moron who with out any doubt is not a large scale drug dealer laundering his money through Forest.

Who sacks Nuno and replaces him with Postecoglou? The prosecution rests.

For all freeways are all asphalt? Thats not correct Cali for a start has been moving to concrete.

Concrete is used for the top layer for higher load areas were budget and the foundations can support it as its more inflexible. Asphalt is used as its cheaper (initially, it will need renewing more often) and it will support more movement for the foundations and worse weather.

We (UK) had part of the M25 done in the same style, but it was shit as we cut the budget and its lots of small joined sections due to complexities of using larger slabs. The foundation has since moved about and the gaps get bigger.

Arent the majority of your freeways concrete?

It amazes me that Trump has such a cult, at least with Hitler he was famed for his speeches being mesmerizing in a vaguely coherent fashion while appealing to the wildly racist and anti Semitic base, Trump just comes across as a rambling, racist Grandpa Simpson if he had a grade four concussion.

Using them as batteries was forced on the Wachowski Sisters by the Studio because the Studio didn’t think the audience would understand the orginal plan of using people as processing power.

I mean using us for batteries is pretty dumb, we hardly generate any electricity, the AI could have just cows, as they generate more electric current than humans, and their simulation would be a lot simpler to manage.

Only thing I don’t like with Photolab is that there is no Linux client. I ended up getting a Mac because I liked the latest version of Photolab so much for my workflow. Deepprime xd3 is just ridiculous at cleaning up my high ISO photos.

Are you using assisted culling in Lightroom for culling? As yeah, thats just missing from Darktable and you would have to use another (opensource) tool to do that.

However if you are still manual, I dont agree once you have learned the keyboard shortcuts, that’s as fast for me in both, or in my current tool of choice, photolab. Even just using 1 to 5 to do basic culling with auto advance is a game changer for manual review.

Editing really depends on your workflow, if you have a lot of similar shots you can just copy and paste a working set across everything thats similar and then manually tweak. Even if the shots aren’t the same just applying the usual set of modules with some sensible defaults across photos is very helpful. I used to keep one back from my last set as a template.

This is nothing to do with actual child abuse or real incest porn, and they know it, this is the next step in their war against VPNs and those circumventing their internet “age” real ID checks.

This will give them what will be an ever expanding big stick to clamp down on anybody they cant force to use their ID checking system, anybody using smaller providers (VPN or Porn) to avoid the checks will be suspect of criminal activity and will have equipment seized.

The first step was to push the larger providers to comply or get out, the next step is to start to tackle the smaller providers and consumers who at least want to try to stay legal.

Its never about 100% success with clamping down, its about getting the majority to comply and having useful tools to deal with those who do not, especially as they now stand out far more.

Jeff Jarret has let himself go

This is why its been announced now. With all the tracking Microsoft has in W11, including being able to track usage to an email account for most, they will have a good idea who has binned windows and who hasn’t.

Its this volume of switching that has them worried enough to actually pretend to fix things. I say pretend as its fairly obvious what they need to remove to reduce the bloat on RAM but their business it tied to it now, like concrete over boots on a mafia snitch.

Its also an offense thats very hard to get enough proof that the CPS will take it forward for actual prosecution. While I am not saying it wont go to court for certain, if you had to pick an offense that was performative bollox, this would be a great one.

Soldered RAM is just about impossible to upgrade/replace, you have to desolder it and do a bunch of other tasks. I have only ever seen one person do it on a modern laptop and it looked horrendous: https://gregdavill.com/posts/dell-xps13-ram-upgrade/

I would just completely abandon any plans to upgrade a soldered RAM laptop unless you are extremely skilled.

Unsoldered RAM is just push fit sockets that have a release clip you need to pull if the socket is already populated. The RAM can only go in one way, its super super easy. Just make sure you double check the spec of RAM you buying against the laptop specs to make sure you buy the right sort.

They were told by the Studio that they needed to add a veteran actor to the cast for season two, Danny was one of the choices so obviously they picked him

https://www.looper.com/349130/the-real-reason-danny-devito-joined-the-cast-of-its-always-sunny/

The object selection tools in lightroom are pretty amazing, being able to choose select subject on the menu and it just selects the ducks or people or whatever pretty much perfectly each time to make your mask is pretty bonkers. It saves so much time over trying to select an object in dark table.

I really like dark table, I actually prefer the way it stacks modules vs. lightroom, and this is just for complex object selection, I can select the sky or background or whatever pretty simply in dark table.

Oh and dark table does not support DNG files. My workflow using PureRAW outputs compressed DNG files and Darktable will not support them currently. Sure I can go other routes for my export but the smaller size of a compressed DNG is very attractive when I can be working with about 100 * 40megapixel images.

PureRAW can sort of be duplicated by dark table, but again its not quite as good, doesnt quite have the same list of lens for correction/denoise capability. I shoot wildlife a lot and high ISO is a factor of life. Its not that dark table is bad at this its just PureRAW is very good at removing that noise and sharpening.

So lightroom and PureRAW forces me to have either windows or macos, and a shitty subscription for the former.

Latest hobby is photography, I had a camera for Christmas after not having a camera with interchangeable lenses in decades. I like that it gets me out the house as like nature/landscape/train photography.

Long standing hobbies are mechanical keyboards and coffee, espresso and pour over.

Keyboards I have really slowed down my purchases to just two or three new keyboards each year.

Coffee I have not purchased anything other than beans in a long time, but I still want to upgrade my espresso machine (marax) at some point.

The Aliens in Aliens are loosely based on Naked Mole Rat cultures and behaviours complete with hive mind that talks via chirps and trills, giant queen with extended baby area, specialized roles (this is more from the expanded universe), not liking other clans of Aliens, resistant to pain/acid etc. There are just so many parallels.

I say Aliens as the Alien in Alien was slightly different depending on if you consider the deleted scenes canon or not.

Most amateurs have signifcantly more time they can cut by training better and harder than spending thousands or tens of thousands on better components.

Its a very small list of amateurs who train to the same level as a pro who has a good chance of winning any of the big competitions.

Stick that under 30s pro on a cheap bike geared the same as a midlife crisis amater 45 year old gear head on an ultra expensive bike and guess who wins?

If you want to buy wins enter an amateur car racing event, those are mostly reflective of money spent given a base level of talent and training (which costs far more money per hour than training for cycling).

I did a large scale data rationalization and migration project for a company that is heavily regulated. They can be asked to prove they have this or that document from seven years ago, for no other reason than they should have it. Not having it means big fines and negative press.

Hundreds of Tbs of data got appropriately labelled and migrated, even more got left behind on the old system till it could be decommissioned safely after a period of parallel running.

As part of the decommissioning the data was backed up twice, and I wanted the backup properly tested with some random file restores. Not a full restore, just a few random restores just a proof of life test that the backups worked. I was told that wasn’t a reasonable request and it wasn’t needed as the architect in charge of backups trusted his backup team and he “designed pragmatic solutions”.

I still mean to call in to the regulator in a year or two to trigger a restore request, lets see if a pragmatic solution design is actually the same as performing some basic testing.