Christopher Phin

A little reminder that your iPhone can tell you how much mobile data you’ve used and since when, in Settings ▸ Mobile Service, which can be handy for knowing if your mobile contract is appropriate.

(Me, I’m on about 35GB mobile data a month. That average is definitely on the rise since I switched to a 70GB/month allowance…)

Picked up this little book from 1902 in a charity shop. It’s a list of multiplication tables for pre-decimalised British currency, which was hard to calculate in your head. So for example, in the close-up we see, 31 × 8 shillings and 6 pence is £13, 3 shillings and sixpence.

Lookup tables like this always interest me. Research the history of ENIAC to see the moment history started to pivot away from the requirement for these to exist and to be manually calculated by ‘computers’ — women, often.

RE: @thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io

Additionally to this excellent point, I had a moment of clarity when I read someone making that point that the better, more detailed, least ‘Sorcer’s Apprentice’ your prompt is to get an AI to generate code, the closer it is to… code. Like, code is yes, technical, but it’s also just a kind of precise prompt to [instruct a compiler to] trick rocks into thinking. It’s not that dissimilar to a precise-enough AI prompt.

Found an old Ladybird Book of British Railway Locomotives in a charity shop and nabbed it for a friend’s kid. Scanned in the illustration on the cover so I could also add it to the mailing label, so here, internet, have a pretty thing – as the original scan and a quickly cleaned-up 1-bit version.

#railways #trains #locomotives #BritishRail

A kinda silly special effect photo, but it has a charm. I was struck by the halo of light created by the guy power-washing his car on the street, and I used Dehaze (along with tweaking Highlights and Shadows) to push the tree almost all the way to silhouette, then added a linear fade to drop the saturation out of the top half of the photo. Although it’s a bit schlocky, I like how a monochrome and a colour photo can kinda coexist in the same shot, without you probably noticing.

For Various Reasons, finally have a VPN. I went with Nord; referral link: https://refer-nordvpn.com/MpPriBVTToR

My 2019 Intel MacBook Pro (which is in a semi-retired state) has been struggling for a long time, with the fans always running and performance apparently being thermally throttled. “So clean the fans, Phin?” Yes. I couldn’t see any dust at the hinge vents, though; tried blowing in some compressed air, but it made no difference.

Admitted that I’ve lost my P5 Pentalobe screwdriver, bought a new @iFixit@mastodon.social set, and, um, it’s running much better now…

(Should have done this years ago. Don’t be me…)