Supergrunch

If Game of Thrones is a documentary, I want to be Tyrion. Anyway, I think we should all just give up on there being much good TV and go and rewatch The Wire.

It's there... mostly! N-Europe, under user created.

I thought it was time for a round of N-E's beautifully outdated national* game, i-sketch. Join here, and go to the N-Europe room that I've created. Do so now! For those that don't know, iSketch is basically a pc version of Draw Something, only significantly older... *Yes, N-E is a nation.

As others have said, eggs are fine out of the fridge. When it comes to poaching eggs, there are various different schools of thought. Some people just use egg poachers, which I think is cheating, others (like my mum and apparently Moogle) add vinegar, which in my experience doesn't seem to do much other than make the outside of the egg a bit funny in colour and sometimes taste. Then there's the view that you should create a whirlpool in your pan when adding the egg, and drop it in gently so that the whites furl neatly around the yolk. I've experimented a lot with this method, putting the egg both in the middle and the side of the whirlpool, and this occasionally seems to do something, but often just fails. What seems instead to be the midst important factor is how fresh the egg is, as in fresher eggs most ogre the white is much more glutinous and clings to the yolk far more readily. If the egg is fresh enough then, you can just gently drop it in water and it'll form a nice little poachlet without any extra techniques, and can then be cooked. So I only poach fresh eggs, and save older ones for things like scrambling (which doesn't taste quite as nice, but doesn't cause any problems) and hard boiling (with older eggs being easier to shell, but again are not as nice). There's actually an easy and scientifically supported folk method of determining the freshness of eggs by floating them in water - essentially the more they sink, the fresher they are. One final issue is how long to poach eggs for, but it seems to me that this values so much depending on your apparatus that it's not really worth giving guidelines, with experimentation working better. Under one approach you heat the water to boiling then put the heat down to lowest, and poach the egg like this for a single minute then take the pan off the heat and leave it to stand for another few minutes. Presumably the goal is a hard white and a soft yolk - this seems to take 5-10 minutes of resting time. As you can see, my eggs are serious business.

I think the current Google Doodle classes as awesome stuff. It's a finite state machine game in honour of Turing!

I was looking forward to calling out your thievery on this. I guess this topic were inspired by the AskReddit thread? But yeah, I don't think that's a particularly satisfying ending as it just recreates the opening for an "oh, cool," sort of effect, and doesn't really do much else. I'm not sure what a good ending would be though...

Well, I started learning how to use linux shell commands from here, and they're very cool.

I have a Steam key for Bastion, which I've already played, should anyone fancy it - I guess that counts as good stuff. PM me if you're interested.

Congrats to both of you!

Doctors get massively overpaid in my opinion, and these salary cuts are a good thing. The system is designed to place them in a top tier with e.g. lawyers and business jobs (albeit towards the bottom end of it), but the problem is that these are funded by the private sector, whereas NHS doctors are essentially civil servants and so should get paid less. I'm not saying these salaries should be extremely low, as it's a high-stress professional position that requires extensive training and is fundamental to society, but then so is teaching, and teachers really get the short straw here. Yes, there isn't quite as much training involved, and perhaps teachers don't deserve as much money, but the current state is completely unbalanced. That said, the free marketeer in me wants to say private doctors should earn whatever there's a market for people to pay, but that does sound kind of dangerous...

So I got mine today! I imaged a 32gb sd card with the recommended Debian image, and had a bit of fun fiddling around with things, but haven't really done all that much yet, will have to try some more when I get a free moment. It's cool though, and smaller and lighter than I was expecting! I'll post some pictures later.

Sure, I'll play again.

They generally use a more efficient algorithm which tries to "guess" what the mixing pixels are, so the whole thing is smoothed, often with anti-aliasing pixels being added and so on. Different programs use different algorithms - for instance I'm pretty sure paint uses a much crappier algorithm, as I think I can see the difference. And as M_rock pointed out, some programs have a setting that will apply Charlie's algorithm, but in most cases the more sophisticated algorithms are what you want. Edit: Let's assume we have a 14x14 image that looks like this when zoomed in: If we enlarged it to 500x500 in exactly the way Charlie suggests, it would come out looking exactly as above - which is great, until we realise that it's not the pixels we want to retain, but what the pixels represent, which is a circle in this case. So the photoshop algorithm tries to guess what things "really" look like, which comes out like this: Now, this doesn't look great, because 14x14 to 500x500 is such a difficult task, but it is sort of getting there in that the circle is somewhat smoothed. If we use a real case instead, the superiority of the Photoshop algorithm is clearer. Let's say we start with this little image: We can resize it using Charlie's method, which comes out all pixelly like this: Or we can use a better algorithm, which makes things look smoother: Of course, any resizing is going to look bad in some way, as what we're doing is trying to reconstruct information that isn't there. But if we want to get more than just a bunch of pixels, a more complex algorithm is called for.

A hard drive that uses flash memory, so it has no moving parts and is a bit like one big USB stick (it stands for solid-state drive).

Nice! And Yvonne's picture is amazing, of course. (you missed off my writing bit from the end of game 1).

That's already the case I believe. They still join and post all the same, although they get banned before anyone can actually see their invisible links...

And now all finished!

Mine is half-done, I'm busy for most of today but should be able to finish it off tomorrow.

New DLC! They've added the community-made chambers and the level editor - I had a brief look at it and it all looks good so far.

Thanks guys. From IRC I thought this post would be what Mangus who wrote, but there you go.

Note to modmins: this appears to be badly executed copypasta from here, which has also been done under the same username here and elsewhere for sig-spamming, so ban.

This may be a slighty weird/badly placed request, but I'm trying to create a simple 3D animation involving an axb table, which rotates through 90 degrees, leading to a ax1 table, which in turn then extrudes in the new dimension to produce an axc table. My main problem, then, is that I want text labels in each cell, and these need to remain front-facing throughout the process. Plus, this should ideally be embedable in a powerpoint or similar presentation, and I'd like to avoid using too much complex software if possible. Is there any simple way of doing this, or would it require a proper 3D animation package?

This sounds pretty awesome, so I'm up for it.