Not a replicant

Lots of restaurants and cafes pouring their waste cooking oil down the sink instead of paying a collection service.

And in “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” and in the “The Great Escape”

Larry Niven’s “Known Space” has quite a few machines, but they’re generally not the point of the story. There’s a lot more about how human and non-human species relate and interact, and how the machines affect their behaviour and choices.

The whole approach of Puppeteers (technically brilliant cowards) and Kzinti (foolishly rash but honourable risk-takers), taken against human approaches is well-written.

Of course, once you comprehend its size, the Ringworld itself overwhelms a lot of the rest of the stories 😲.

Niven’s attitude to women and sex haven’t aged well…

But the stories are pretty good. He knows how to set multiple threads on their way and bind them up together at the end, or at least leave a decent cliff-hanger for a sequel.

Flowers for Algernon is an extraordinary piece of storytelling, without relying too much on “the machines”

There’s a lot of music out there. Not all of it is available on Spotify.

And not all of us want Spotify applying algorithms to our listening choices. I like to be surprised at unexpected gems from artists I’ve never previously encountered.

I search www.live65.com for music in the genres I like. Blues, folk, world, deep breath adult contemporary (no, not the “decades” top 40s lists, more modern stuff)

I SHAVED MY BEARD FOR YOU, DEVIL WOMAN!

Pretty much anything in the “Known Space” series by Larry Niven (et al - there are works by some other authors in that space).

URLs like these:

http://edge1-b.exa.live365.net/a90706 and this https://cafedelmar.com/radio/

Syncthing

Firefox on my raspberry pi grinds the thing to a halt, so I created a shortcut:

systemd-run --scope -p MemoryLimit=500M -p CPUQuota=50% firefox-esr

You say it doesn’t top out on memory, so you don’t need the -p MemoryLimit=500M parameter. Set your compiler CPUQuota to maybe 80%, or whatever you can work out with trial and error.

A pint of guinness.

I really enjoyed various communities on usenet. But most of my favouites moved to FB and usenet is now a cesspit of spam. I learned a hell of lot from alt.solar.pv and alt.energy.renewable, and made some great connections via aus.motorcycles. But I wouldn’t bother going there today, even in one of the few remaining feeds.