great video about perceptions of british food (Tor’s Cabinet of Curiosities, 48 min)

I have never heard it referred to as toad in a hole, but fried bread with an egg in the middle is pretty good. Just pan fry with a bit of butter and salt appropriately

I was about to say this same fact on another comment above, but then I read the wikipedia article again

apparently it isn’t like an ‘official’ national dish, I guess it comes from Foreign Secretary Robin Cook referring to it as “a true british national dish” in a speech

Chicken Tikka Massala is now a true British national dish, not only because it is the most popular, but because it is a perfect illustration of the way Britain absorbs and adapts external influences. Chicken Tikka is an Indian dish. The Massala sauce was added to satisfy the desire of British people to have their meat served in gravy. (full speech) (wikipedia)

chicken tikka masala was invented in England

It’s more competitive at the high end, but this website has some comparisons of avif and jxl: https://svt-av1-psy.com/avif/

(this project was later incorporated into other encoders as tune=iq, and is now default)

That being said, I think the jxl bitstream does have a fair amount of potential that current encoders don’t exploit due to lack of manpower. I’ve been following development fairly closely over the past couple years on the jxl discord, I think all active jxl devs are there

Which websites don’t?

nowadays, for practical use, generally avif is best for lossy images (make sure you’re using a recent encoder so you get the new tune=iq, which is default in libavif since this March) and webp is best for lossless.

for lossless, if you don’t care about wide support, jpeg xl lossless is usually best, outside of some niche high-speed focused codecs with even less support (like https://github.com/a1024/L1codec).

for lossy, av2 is probably the best, though it’s currently extremely slow to encode and supported by nothing, but that will probably change relatively soon. It looks like av2 will use the same avif container and file extension for images.

there are also proprietary and/or patented codecs that I’m not as knowledgeable about (including x265 and x266, which are covered by many patents but have open-source encoders and decoders). My understanding is that x265 is roughly equivalent to av1 quality (or maybe a bit below) and x266 is roughly equivalent to av2. x266 might be able to compress a bit more than av2, but it seems like it might not be feasible to get encoding to be reasonably fast, as that doesn’t seem to have happened over the past 6 years it’s been out. The only devices I know of with hardware decoding support for x266 are Intel xe2 or xe3 GPUs (b60, b580, b390, etc)

yeah you can just ffmpeg -i video.mkv -c:v copy video.avif and it will copy over the av1 stream without reencoding

https://copyparty.adrian.place/u/tower.avif (1.5 mb animated avif)

interestingly you can’t do this with webp even though that is also built on a video codec, webp only supports intra frames so it can’t take advantage of the similarities between multiple frames of a video the way avif can

av2 also came out recently, it’s a fair amount better but there isn’t really a usable encoder yet (the encoder they made to test the codec, avm, is unusably slow, but they designed the codec for fast software and hardware encoders to be possible)

Practically x265 can be treated as another name for hevc. Apparently apple includes a software decoder for x265 and not av1, so av1 can only be used on newer devices (iphone 15 pro and newer) but x265 can be used on almost anything. The vlc media player app might work, idk. They do have a software decoder for avif included tho, which is kinda funny as apparently it supports animated avif as well. You can literally just copy an av1 video into an animated avif and it will play perfectly fine

It’s supported on basically every browser

Yeah, git repositories get hit much more heavily than most websites by scrapers, as they usually go into every subdirectory/file iirc and also scrape pretty frequently

Eh, the military isn’t anything like it was 170 years ago. Currently Trump and his allies control the military, and I suspect they would ally with the south. I don’t know, I feel like the country actually separating like that would be impossible anyways. During the civil war there would be people who still remembered the US being a loose collection of largely independent states. The US also didn’t have a standing army back then. Of course communication and travel are also much easier nowadays and probably state politicians feel more allegiance to the national political parties. If it did happen, for there to be any lasting fight at all, the military bases would probably have to choose their allegiance based on their location. Which feels kinda unlikely to me, idk.

I have never in my life tied and untied shoes every time I put them on, even though all of my shoes have laces. It takes a lot of force, but I slide into tight-ish dress shoes as well. With my hiking boots, I just pull the string over the clips. I have also known how to tie shoes decently quickly for as long as I can remember.

Did they write that post with ChatGPT???

Or I did hear that some “chatgpt-isms” might be becoming more a part of language due to people reading lots of generated text.

Blender seems like a decent fit for this project, as the geometry is fairly simple and there shouldn’t need to be a ton of precision anywhere. Anything where geometry doesn’t need to match any already existing hardware particularly well, it is usually much faster to prototype in Blender in my experience. For certain things though, especially when you get curved surfaces involved, blender becomes the much harder option. Parametric obviously has many other advantages, but the stuff you can do with curved surfaces, booleans, and bevels in CAD tools is often extremely difficult to recreate in Blender.

Well yea, this one came out in 2014

Probably would look relatively similar to this camera when using a regular amount of zoom?

I’m sure there are a lot of earlier ones as well tho

well, i measured that on windows (since I still run windows on my main PC) but I assumed it would be similar on linux lol

will cost probably a lot more but if you find a good deal on a superzoom camera those are neat because at the max zoom range you can get some shots that not many other cameras can take (and certainly not phones)

I got a used sx60 hs for like $200 a couple years ago, compared to my phone (oneplus 12) it’s decent at macro, great at high zoom, but worse at basically anything else. of course if you want that look then it’s good for that too lol.

Also keep in mind that those all have pretty small sensor sizes (actually apparently the sx60 hs has exactly the same sensor size as this camera) so you need the area to be pretty bright for max zoom to be usable, and fast subjects are pretty hard.

curated photo dump:

TV

captive birds

wild birds (i really don’t know why that hawk let us get so close to it…)

full zoom

macro (it can actually focus on the lens, if you ever want to do that)

top of the london eye

random helicopter

can get some nice bokeh

full zoom range across the thames

steam is like 500 MB of ram by itself at least for me rn, so add any game or os stuff on top and it rounds up to a gigabyte