Unfortunately the LibreOffice Impress is pretty bad. PowerPoint is what keeps me using Office. LibreOffice formatting looks bad on the screen (it resizes bitmaps to make the fuzzy) and the user interface for constructing slides is both clunky, slow and buggy. I don't understand how the UI can be this slow in 2025 on a fast PC. Basic functionality, like resizing an equation, just doesn't work.

That's not right. I'm an astronomer, and I often look at colour images and colleagues do, too. For example, the galaxies in a cluster of galaxies follow a relation of colours - brightness (the "red sequence"), which can be used to detect the cluster. The eye is also quite good at helping confirm a cluster by spotting the galaxies following this sequence. I also use colour images to help identify spectral changes that change across an image, in my case in the X-ray waveband.

Most astronomers look at the red sequence on a scatterplot, with each point being based on the measured fluxes of one galaxy. Very few astronomers are literally looking at color images to eyeball these measurements.

There are edge cases in which astronomers will load up images at multiple wavelengths and overlay them, but this is not the normal case. By and large, they're looking at a single channel at a time. Even more commonly than that, they're working with catalogs automatically generated from images.

You are plainly wrong. I know several astronomers who look at colour images to check that the software is working properly.

"Several" out of how many? This just isn't common in astronomy, outside of public outreach.

What's the advantage of this over HEALPix projection? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HEALPix

The base platonic solid that Healpix is based on is the octahedron (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octahedron), which A5 uses the dodecahedron(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_dodecahedron).

The octahedron has a much higher angular defect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_defect) than the dodecahedron, and thus when it is projected onto the sphere the cells are warped a lot. So while their areas may be the same, the shapes vary.

This article explains the geometric construction, and how it leads to the cells being a similar size and shape: https://a5geo.org/docs/technical/platonic-solids

Also from a data visualization point of view, the rectangular cells of Healpix (like S2) are arguably less pleasing to look at than hexagons/pentagons: https://h3geo.org/docs/comparisons/s2#visualization

Not sure I understand—healpix starts from the rhombic dodecahedron and then bisects the generalizations of the 12 squares each time. Where do octahedra come into play?

My mistake, you are correct. The base solid is indeed the rhombic dodecahedron. I believe the point about the angular defect is still valid though.

I'm not sure about A5, but I do know that HEALPix cell boundaries are not geodesics, whereas S2 cells are always bounded by four geodesics.

A5 cell boundaries are geodesics. One more difference that I thought of is that HEALPix is generally not aligned with the continents (makes sense as it is mostly used for astrophysics), whereas the hilbert curve used to index A5 is aligned with the continental land masses: https://a5geo.org/examples/globe

As a result, when A5 is used as a spatial index, it will generally not have jumps in the cell index values when querying nearby locations on land

I believe many Atari ST models had their graphical OS (TOS/GEM) on ROM. The Archimedes with RISC OS felt revolutionary at the time, however. Several of the graphical desktop programs were written in BBC Basic and you could look at the source.

It's entirely Zoom for my branch of academia.

Free bank transfers are not mandatory in the EU. The bank just has to charge the same for a national transfer as an EU transfer: https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/financial-pr...

I think the free here related to payments within the country. I now understand and it sounds like X payments wouldn't be relevant to me.

I have Django code which creates a tar file on the fly from a list of requested files and works well. It doesn't use intermediate storage. The tar format can be pretty simple. I got most of the way into implementing a uncompressed zip version, but then I realised that tar was good enough for my site.

I've never tried Factorio, but I found Satisfactory very boring after a few hours. It was initially fun to do some exploring and make some initial manufacturing lines. However, when I realised that to scale up the manufacturing, then I would have to place all these components by hand hundreds of times, it just felt like boring make-work, and I never turned it on again. Maybe I would have continued if there was some way of automating the building, such as some sort of 2D viewer.

Looks like you tried the game a long time ago. There is totally a way to automate building with the Blueprint Designer which basically allows you save blueprints of full buildings (or building parts or whatever you want) and to build them in one click.

Excellent work. I wanted to do this recently, but it was surprisingly hard to find code to calculate an approximation. I've bookmarked it for when I next need a quick approximation for a function.

Thanks for the kind words. I also found it surprisingly hard to find working Chebyshev approximation code. Hopefully this project will change that :)

It would be nice to see the idle power numbers, including the motherboard. A lot of the time I'm using my home PC for light tasks (browsing, listening to music, etc). The idle power is likely to dominate unless doing heavy processing tasks or gaming.

Also would be great if a Linux-focused outlet would mention whether the power saving features of the platform work at all. The difference between the idle power of a platform that reaches deep package sleep states and one that doesn't is very large.