I'm not so sure - would you sit on the top of what amounts to a tank filled with 120 tons of high explosive, put together on the basis on the lowest of three tenders, and then set fire to it? :omg:

Thanks - I was searching for card index - clearly weak Googlefu! :doh: I shall check it out straight away.

Than, but I am extremely reluctant to have this information online. The security of a locked box next to my desk is hard to beat!

...so I'll need a Windows version to replace it. The current system is brilliant - real paper cards, colour coded for category and actual sticky-up tabs for a very short description. Simple, fast, and I've been using it for more years than I care to remember, but I've run out of blank cards, and the ones in use are seriously tatty. The real kicker - I started using it when the digital freebie with Windows 3 (3.1?) disappeared! Anybody out there know of anything that simple? Just colour coded cards and sticky-up tabs are the prime requirements, but my Google-fu hasn't found anything yet, and I really don't want to roll my own if I can help it. Pretty please! :-D

I have written several ephemerides over the years, the first being for an HP75C, using the 'Low-precision formulae for planetary positions' by van Flandern and Pulkkinen (Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, vol. 41, Nov. 1979, p. 391-411). The paper provides a good introduction to the general problems of ephemerides, and the stated accuracy of +/- one minute of arc is extremely conservative, and for the current era +/- six seconds of arc is realistic. This ephemeris also calculates the 'First point of Ares', enabling star positions to be computed. I used this method to navigate my small yacht by sextant from Southampton UK to Pireaus Greece, with my worst landfall being one third of a nautical mile out. That was in pre-GPS days. A more accurate methodology, but also much more compute intensive, is Pierre Bretagnon's VSOP82, subsequently developed and refined to VSOP87. The raw data tables which make the basis for the computations are out there on the web somewhere, I'm sure. When written into a program, it is spritely enough on a PC, but might tax all but top-end mobile devices. A very good source of foundational information is the US Navy's Nautical Almanac, particularly in the 'Explanatory Supplement', a separate publication. Any year will do. Also, get a thorough understanding of the 'equation of time', as it occurs in just about every ephemeris calculation. A couple of years ago I rewrote my original HP75C program to run on Android, and expanded it to cover not just the sun, moon, six navigational planets, fifty-eight navigational stars and Polaris, but included all ten thousand stars visible to the naked eye (given very good eyes and excellent viewing conditions :-\ ). Even on an old Android phone it runs fast enough to be useful, although the virtual graphical sextant 'scope view is distinctly laggardly when scanning the sky.

Not belated at all - the real New Year took place at 16:17 GMT on the fourth of January this year, when our home planet reached perihelion in its orbit around the sun, thus starting a new year! :-\ Contrary? Moi? :laugh: Anyway, happy new year :rose: to all those on CP, whenever you celebrate it.

My sympathy! I got vaccinated in January/February 2021, but that June I think I got a very mild case. I was up for the whole night with serious trouble breathing that was very much worse lying down. Eventually I fell asleep in my armchair, and in the morning I was fine - but, at first, food tasted a bit strange, and then it tasted of nothing. Now, a year and a half later, my sense of taste has just about returned. One thing I did notice is that cold foods, like salads and fruit, were much less affected than hot, cooked foods.

Weight loss is key - I was diagnosed as early type II diabetic. I crash-dieted down from 96kgs to 72kgs. It went away, and now I maintain my weight between 70 and 72kgs, with A1C between 5.4 and 5.9. As you say, carbs are the killer, and the more refined they are, the worse they are. I now bake my own 100% whole wheat bread, leavened and unleavened, as pretty much my only carb. As a side note, it is also the lowest carbon footprint carb you can eat, with rice as the highest.

When I was working in Bahrain, I bought myself a Rolex Oyster. When I came to live in Cyprus, the strap broke, so I took it to the local Rolex agent to get a new strap. They quoted Cy£200, or about $400. I told them to stuff it, and I would take that Cy£200 elsewhere and buy a better watch with it. The replacement was a Seiko Kinetic. This was in 1995, and I am still wearing that watch today. The strapless Rolex has sat in my bedside cabinet for 27 years. The only annoyance with the Seiko is that it gains about a second a month. :-\

Eddy Vluggen wrote:

your God

Extremely presumptuous and totally erroneous! I just happen to know where the oft quoted "three score years and ten" comes from. BTW, all the psalms were written by men, not Gods.

Since Psalms 90 was written, around 750 BC.

My Ma always said that once a cat had washed itself in a new place, it became home. Once in the new home she would put butter on the cat's paws, so it would lick it off, which, apparently, in cat speak, counts as washing. A few years after the war we moved three times, and we never lost a cat.

It is possible to construct a sentence following the ellipsis where 'pedants' is not the subject, but it would be a cumbersome construct.

Almost certainly not! :-\ The ellipsis after 'pedants' indicates this phrase is part of a sentence, in which case the subject would be 'pedants' and the previous pronoun would take the same form - as in "We the people...". The grammar pedant strikes again! :laugh:

The insensitivity is appalling, but what is worse is that it means the horrors perpetrated by Nazi Germany are fading from collective memory. Once forgotten, it could easily happen again.

Much the same - but also much worse when you come to clean up afterwards - as forgetting the paddle in a bread machine. At least you can just let the crud melt and tip it all away. What do you do with a solid biscuit welded to the sides of the pan?

Back in the early nineties I bought a WinZip perpetual, lifetime, free upgrades, all-you-can-eat licence. A few years later when I went to install an upgrade they did the same to me. I sent a copy of my licence to tech support and requested they honour the commitment I paid for, and got a reply in the vein of 'that was then and this is now' and 'that was them and this is us' reply from whoever had just bought it. They finished the email with the statement "We never said it would be free forever" which was precisely what they had promised. I got a good buddy in the corporate legal department (I had risen through the ranks of coder to MD of their Middle East subsidiary) to write a very-nasty-gram to the new owners stating that as they had bought the original owner of the product and not liquidated them and purchased the assets they were legally bound to accept all outstanding liabilities. Never got a reply I and I have used WinRAR ever since.

Thanks - I didn't realize e-ink displays had reached the phone market yet! Definitely worth checking out.

Nice idea - but well beyond my paygrade! :laugh:

It's certainly worth a try - I'll check out if one is available for my Cat phone.