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🔗 Weird Medieval Guys: How birds got human names
Magpies were originally known simply as “pies” until the nickname “Mag”, short for Maggie, short for Margaret was added to the front sometime in the Middle Ages. Before it began to be treated as a single word, it was rendered as “Mag Pie”, a sort of fanciful full name for the creature.
Fascinating. This is, shall we say, the “money” quote of the linked post, but the rest is still quite an interesting read.
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2025 Song of the Year
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Dec 23rd — Baking
Ahhh! When I ordered this, I didn’t think it would be a whole loaf. It’s a little much for one person. #12days
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TIL that you can make a call to someone, put them on hold, then start a second call to that same person, and the POTS network supports this without any issues. You can even merge the two calls, resulting in two active calls to the one recipient.
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The place I’m staying in has a drip-coffee machine. Normally I shun such contraptions (I’m a Melburnian with Italian herritage, damnit!) but ultimately, I don’t mind using them. In fact, I prefer them over the pod-coffee machines: the coffee is better and there’s less waste.
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Dec 22 - Grinch
Got really lucky with this one. If this place I grabbed a coffee didn’t have this, I wouldn’t have had an entry for today. #12days
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In my last post I mentioned that I heard AI music in the past. I’ve tried a service to generate this music a couple of times, but I’ve never really liked what it produced. It all sounds vapid. It’s got the surface criteria of a music: it’s chromatically correct, there what appears to be build up of tension. Yet, it all sounds like fluff to my ears.
My theory is that good music needs to have repetative elements, but enough variation to avoid it sounding boring. It could be variations to one or more theme; could be lyrics (chorus as verses); could also be the orchestration, where instructions come and go. AI music has none of this: none of the music has a central theme one can use as a hook, nor is there any variation to the instrumentation. I’ve only tried generating instrumentation songs so maybe music with lyrics sound better. But nah, not for me.
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Current day renditions of classic and modern Christmas songs are really bad. I don’t know what compels artists, which I assume are contemporary, to release this rubbish. Honestly, I’d rather listen to AI generated music, and I’ve heard AI generated music.
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Trying out MB Manager by @timapple. Not bad. I like how snappy everything is. I also like the option for a serif font. Quite a unique way of reading Micro.blog.
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Found another 20 cent coin from Singapore in my washing the other day. I now think they did come from my 2023 trip to Singapore, as I checked my cash box to see if it was the same coin as last time and I found a $1 SGD coin in there too.
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🦆 Dialogue
Good Banter Not Found
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If anyone out there finds me at the gym rocking my new ATP T-shirt, yes I am interested in a job. 😛
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Some Caution on Using ROWIDs for Primary Keys in Sqlite 3
Relying on ROWIDs in SQLite can lead to reused IDs, causing issues with foreign key cascading deletes, which can be mitigated by using the
autoincrementfeature despite its overhead. Continue reading → -
I just got an email to view my LinkedIn Year In Review.
Why is that a thing....No one wants that.
Got curious and took a look at my LinkedIn “Year In Review”. Well okay, I opened it. But when I found out it featured an animated slide show (is this how Instagram Stories work?) that I couldn’t quickly swipe through, I closed it again. Didn’t help that the first slide was “you joined LinkedIn in 2011”.
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Whenever I think about the obsticals to progress, such as whether there’s enough material to build the solar panels necessary to decarbonise, I cast my mind back to what experts say about the speed at which we’d get a Covid-19 vaccine. In early 2020, the estimate was 2 years to get a vaccine developed, tested, and distributed: those eggs need to come from somewhere. And what happened? We ended up getting the fastest vaccine ever made. Necessity always breeds innovation. You just need to find that necessity.
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Dec 17 - Firelight
A lucky encounter that someone had a bonfire going when I was out walking a couple of days ago. #12days
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The results are in. Final tally of my work Obsidian vault:
- Total notes in vault: 838
- Daily notes for 2025: 226
- Vault size: 74 MB
Vault storage is up 850% from last year, mainly because I’ve started adding attachments.
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Halfway through my last day of the year, and quite frankly, I’m already checked out. Will try to get one more thing finished then I think I’ll call it.
