> A town, street name or postcode were omitted, but a highlighted note – presumably written by a postie – chirpily added ‘Royal Mail, we never fail!’ to the front of the letter.
I think the note was written by the sender because the handwriting looks the same as in the vague "woman in Cornwall shed" address.
My guess is that it was intended to motivate Royal Mail to figure it out by quoting what might have been their slogan at some point. Now the highlight could have been added by a post office worker as a way of saying "indeed we never fail". The sender's style of higlighting things seems rather to be adding asterisks.
Thanks for the information, I have observed this in some of those links before (others worked, I do not know what the diffference is) and it might be the case.
I am indeed outside the U.S.A.
The move to Singapore has been mentioned in several comments but he does address it in the linked piece:
> Some might say: “Hang on, it’s all very well James Dyson telling Britain to support doers and makers, but he took his company’s manufacturing to Malaysia in 2002 and then set up a global headquarters in Singapore in 2019.”
> The answer is worth exploring. In 2002 Dyson was expanding rapidly and urgently needed a new factory, but planning permission was refused. We were able to use empty factories in Singapore and Malaysia.
> However, Dyson now employs about 2,000 people in Britain, which is about twice the number we employed at the time of the move.
We had several Quickshot II's at home for our Commodore 64; each broke after a while and we had to get a new one.
It looked and felt fantastic and was cheap, but the garbage switch mechanism was a thin metal cross pushed down onto contacts on the board in such a way that it would inevitably snap and render the joystick useless.
I did what I could as a kid without proper materials or tools to repair them but nothing lasted.
I ended up building my own from scratch with steel and wood, reusing the cable of one of them, and could finally play without fear of breaking and leaving me high and dry.
From my experience with a previous product from Retro Games Ltd, The A500, I expect this one to be much better than the original.
> UK retailers are reporting a striking reversal in dairy consumption patterns. Waitrose searches for full-fat milk increased 417%, full-fat yogurt 233%, and block butter 280% in a single month, while skimmed milk and low-fat yogurt are being left on shelves. This shift represents more than a dietary preference change – it signals a fundamental breakdown in public trust regarding nutrition guidance and reveals profound frustration with decades of conflicting advice.
> This analysis examines the scientific evidence, economic factors, processing implications, and psychological dimensions driving this trend, with particular attention to how changing advice may have eroded consumer confidence in nutritional expertise itself.
That comment to which you replied, and the other thread of responses to it, are quotations of the malfunctioning and homicidal HAL computer from the movie “2001: a space oddisey”.
Around the time this website was made, I was building an application for a big company in Spain that was to run as a Java applet and required the code to be signed.
They did not yet have their own certificates so I had to make my own CA during testing and sign the code, and I wanted to make sure that they did not forget to switch to their certificates later, so instead of signing the code with my name which some bureaucrat might decide to not bother changing, the code was signed by Britney Spears.
They noticed it, got the joke and made sure to switch certificates for the release. Everything went well thanks to Britney.
A particularly interesting part that I did not expect from the title:
> Before the rats encountered the detour, the research team observed that their brains were already firing in patterns that seemed to "imagine" alternate unfamiliar mental routes while they slept. When the researchers compared these sleep patterns to the neural activity during the actual detour, some of them matched.
> “What was surprising was that the rats' brains were already prepared for this novel detour before they ever encountered it,”
> Overall, I don’t think the LLM saved me any time. I didn’t end up keeping the code it gave me. But it got me unstuck, and that meant I actually made progress.
I haven't tried LLMs yet but this sounds valuable.
In 1984 one of the developers of Xanadu at the time, Chip Morningstar, wrote a technical description to apply for funding.
In typical Xanadu fashion it was kept secret, protected by Dark Magick:
> He who transgresses against the propriety of the Information contained herein shall be Cursed! Woe unto all who reveal the Secrets contained herein for they shall be Hunted unto the Ends of the Universe. They shall be afflicted unto the Tenth Generation with Lawyers. Their Corporate Bodies shall be Broken and cast into the Pit. Their Corporate Veil shall be Pierced, and Liability shall attach to the Malefactors in personem. They shall suffer Ulcers and Migraines and Agonies Unimagined. Yea, Verily, for such shall come to pass against all who would Dare to Test the Powers of Xanadu unto their Doom.
It was believed to have been lost forever but in 2019 he found the only known remaining copy, a printout he had at home buried in old stuff, and posted it with OCR in his blog. He wrote:
> At the time, we regarded all the internal details of how Xanadu worked as deep and dark trade secrets, mostly because in that pre- open source era we were stupid about intellectual property. As a consequence of this foolish secretive stance, it was never widely circulated and subsequently disappeared into the archives, apparently lost for all time. Until today!
I took it and made a cleaned-up augmented HTML edition, with additions like Engelbart’s structural statement numbers which allow linking to individual paragraphs:
It includes a glossary of terms and detailed explanation of the content addressing “tumblers”, and is the best technical description of Xanadu that I know of.
That man, Rex Malik, participated in (among other things) the 1982 BBC series “The Computer Programme” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Computer_Programme), typically in a small section at the end on an episode but also as narrator in other parts and is credited as “Programme Adviser”:
Work:
[ my public key: https://keybase.io/albertogp; my proof: https://keybase.io/albertogp/sigs/FC3caIoRcNTC8tURVvHe_2MUkalyvcJ97B4QIkUp2Zo ]