I drive through a new area near our home everyday (in UK). Some of the manhole covers make a loud “clonk” noise when I drive over them. I avoid them because it will otherwise annoy our new neighbours. I used to live off a main road into town. There was a loose manhole cover there which drove me crazy until I managed to get the council to fix it. Probably just had stones in it making it loose.

I remember WordPerfect when it was still a DOS program. The simplicity of “this format code affects all text after it” was elegant.

And then we got Word foisted on us, with “this format code (which you have no way of viewing) affects the block of text before it” so if you accidentally delete or move that format code then you screw up a seemingly random bunch of text. And here we are.

That was fantastic! 😊

That’s often the case, or for a smaller garage they will do (if you ask for it) a pre-inspection/service & then take it somewhere else to be tested. AFAIK It’s allowed to be driven on the road without a valid MOT if it’s on the way to or from an appointment at a testing centre, and a retest is free.

As others have said, if your VMs are Linux, set up unattended_updates and forget about it.

If your VMs are windows, then Action1 is free up to 200 clients, it does need an agent installed, but that auto updates too.

That’s only true if someone guessing your pass phrase knows that it’s made up of words and not random characters.

The idea behind pass phrases is that these things are easy for your human brain to remember, but long enough to be hard to guess by typing random characters (or even combinations of words) by an attacker or a computer (or even a LLM)

The nice thing about buying something like that is that you can modify it.

Computer doesn’t fit because this bit is in the way? Chop it out.

Need some more holes in the back? Drill more holes!

This vertical strut is in the way of that other thing & it only fits here because that’s where the mounting holes are? Make some new mounting holes.

The whole thing is 25 mm (1") too deep? Cut 25 mm (1") off the back.

I always loved reading Joel’s stuff, clear & well thought out. It was especially exciting when they were building Stack Overflow, but that’s kinda got buried now. Things come & things go…

Very nice! Well done 👍🏼

Been doing email since it began. Same frustrations.

Solutions (workarounds):

Email is structured with “executive summary” & “detail”. That way I can write all the words I want but people can only read the first paragraph.

Never ask questions. Tell them what I’m going to choose, & give them opportunity to disagree. That way if they don’t respond usefully I can take their “non-response” as a response & proceed anyway.

If I need to ask a question, use a phone call or go to their desk, or (shudder) make a meeting.