SquiffSquiff

A lot of 'samurai swords' in media are really just machetes frankly. The linked article describes

Gus Lawrence admitted to using his feet to bend his brother’s “prized samurai sword” into an L-shape while trying to break it, according to a bail memo.

Yeah it's mall ninja kit.

It's a bit like 'the Beatles Pete Best'...

But the reality is this: they are the only company that has turned UNIX into a multi decade, multi platform success with no insight. They’ve adapted across three different processor architectures. No one in the Lennox community has come close. And those who take their inspiration from Apple design and Apple coating of philosophy would never admit it.

[Cough] Android [Cough] Chromebooks. It's also debatable if Apple produce an actual Unix (although also debatable how much that matters)

🥁

Would it make a difference if they did? Here in the UK every supermarket has a loyalty card scheme. I held out for a long time but eventually I simply couldn't afford to pay the effective 20% premium for not using it

The guy who left The Cure 36 years ago?

There's a large variety on Windows too, e.g. Temurin and Corretto are both available there

I'm missing the part where consumers are required to use their ISP DNS. I never do, in favour of CloudFlare DNS, Google DNS, etc

Bellend?

I wanted to leave Twitter too. I'm a professional engineer in tech and I found setting up in Mastodon to be... ...not straightforward, as did a whole load of other people. I eventually got set up. I couldn't find anyone or anything, the whole model being based around local instances rather than users or topics but.. I tried to make the best of it and I followed the other people who had left Twitter that I had followed there when they said where to find them on Mastodon. Then I found I had run into a 'silencing' drama where some other instance admins had taken issue with an admin for the instance I was signed up to and as a result everyone on my instance was essentially shadowbanned in a whole load of other places. It had been happening maybe a month before I even found out about this. I'm a grown up, I don't have time for school time drama. I found that I was using Mastodon less and less and so were the people I had been following. Then my BlueSky invite came through. I can find topics and I can find users. People post and people respond. I don't have to worry which of 100 identical usernames across different instances is the 'real' one or my instance being defederated or silenced.

The problem with Mastodon is it's basically a social network for people who are into Mastodon, and enjoy centering around their specific instance. It might work for Warcraft guilds but it doesn't work for me, or any of the people or topics I want to follow, ostly current affairs and tech. As opposed to BlueSky which is a social network for people who:

• Want to move on from twitter
• Are interested in finding and following people and or topics

No doubt at this point you will want to tell me how I'm all wrong, clearly tech illiterate and how Mastodon has at least as many users as BlueSky. Sure, whatevs. It's like Linux on the Desktop, not a viable mass-market proposition at this point (saying this with 25 years Linux desktop experience).

Mastodon as a mass market solution has failed. It's essentially irrelevant outside of a tiny niche

Sorry, only just seen this. I don't work in this sector I am afraid. Some things that might help you:

• There is no legal definition of a 'valid' address in the UK- If you post it then the Post Office will try to deliver it. If they can work it out from what is written, and they will try very hard, then that's 'an address'. This has been established in law.
• There is advice on how you should write an address . This is how e.g. a bank or utility will address mail, but see above. TBH at this point you could probably put a What3Words on the envelope and it could work.
• For most addresses in the UK you will want to correlate the postcode with the street address, as shown here. A street address is a number (or house name, or both) and a street name on one line, e.g. '29 Acacia Road'. Street address + Postcode is how people target e.g. a satnav to an address. A postcode generally relates to a group of addresses, but larger organisations, e.g. a hospital or council office will have a postcode just for them, e.g. 'Buckingham Palace'. Beware that whilst postcodes don't change, new ones are being added all the time and they aren't sequential.