Sean D. Sollé

@sd.solle.uk

563 Followers 830 Following

I write software and terrible, terrible jokes. (Thank you for putting alt-text on your images).

A wooden lolly stick with the single word "Rowntree's".
The new, Onion-owned Infowars logo: INFOWARS in an all-caps sans-serif font, "INFO" in bold, and "WARS" in an narrow style. The final stroke of the W runs diagonally bottom left to top right, perfectly parallel with the first stroke of the A, hinting at italic, but the final stroke of the A is vertical and parallel to the same in the R. Some clever hand-tweaking pushes the upper curves of the R and the S Together to form single glyph, with the upward curl of the S tucking neatly inside the left leg of the R. INFOWARS letters are in rainbow colours (red on the left, violet on the right), and the 'O' is — of course — the Onion logo.
A weathered wooden bench, with my feet (in sneakers) and a copy of "H is for Hawk" all resting on top of an earth-brown towel placed on its seat.
A photograph of "H is for Hawk" taken from an (unpictured) bench atop Sharpenhoe Clappers. In illustration of Mabel the goshawk stares from the cover. Behind her is English countryside as far as the eye can see, lit by shafts of sunlight breaking through thick clouds like daggers through a duvet.
A photograph white and ginger cat asleep in the grey foam insert of a packing box. He is occupying the largest of five holes. Alas, I have no idea who owns this cat, who took the photo, or what the box originally held ☹️
What my brain reasoned a nail brush was. In fact I was thinking of a thing for combing wool — aka a "flax hatchel": https://www.gleekrueger.com/store/p71/19th_c._Flax_Hatchel_Oak_&_Forged_Iron_Carding_Tool_Primitive_Hetchel_Hackle.html#/
Paul Simon, as featured on his 1975 "Gravy" album. He's standing on a metal fire escape with city buildings behind him, wearing a short-sleeved collared shirt, jeans, and a pork pie hat ready for the gravy.
Photo of my hand holding my Nokia 6150e GSM phone. Its bitmap LCD display reads "CELLNET" and it has full bars for battery and signal. The display shows "Menu" and "Names" at the bottom left and bottom respectively, above two dedicated physical buttons that straddle an up-down rocker. On the next row, a green "call" button and a red "hang up" button perch above the 1 & 3 keys of a standard three column, four row numeric keypad, with 1-9 as a 3x3 grid, and *0# on the bottom row. Despite receiving a signal from CELLNET (now O2), the phone is branded Orange (now EE), because I've unlocked it for any network.
Screenshot of iOS alarm app taken just now, showing an 0055 alarm for the Artemis 2 splashdown
A photo of Morris Dancers wearing rag jackets and hurling sticks back and forth between each other. https://www.priddyfolk.org/lineup/dancing/
Screenshot of section of an Oatmeal cartoon. It's mostly white text on a sort of deep browny purple background: The Sun A friend of mine and fellow ModelS owner recently had solar panels installed on his house. Even under grey Seattle skies he managed to reduce his energy bill by 80% What I find insanely wonderful about this is that technically my friend is now driving a car which is powered by the MOTHERFREAKIN SUN [An arrow points from the last two words to a cartoon of an electric vehicle with its charging cable plugged into the sun]. I love this idea. In a traditional gasoline automobile there's a combustive explosion happening in the engine block, which is located roughly 36 inches from my crotch. In my friend's case, this explosion is happening on the surface of the sun, which is located approximately 92 million miles from my crotch. [A hand-drawn graph, with Y axis labelled "LEVEL of HAPPINESS" and X axis labelled "DISTANCE OF CROTCH FROM EXPLOSIONS" at 3 feet, the level of happiness is zero, and annotated with a sad face. At 92 million miles, the level of happiness is almost off the scale, as indicated by a smiley face].
Screenshot of ConnectedKerb's iOS app, showing its 3.6kW charger delivering 3.63kWh in — erm — 34 minutes.
Screenshot of me replying to Quinn's post, with "Processing … " and a spinning daisy progress indicator.
Jyn Erso's line from an early cut of Rogue One. "This is a rebellion, isn't it?" is voiceover a fast cut montage of a hooded Jyn walking stealthily down an alleyway, then whacking seven bells out of stormtroopers with a stick, and finally firing a blaster before a huge explosions tosses stormtroopers around like rag dolls. We then cut to the situation room on Yavin for a head-and-shoulders shot of Jyn in front of a vector display as she continues "… I rebel".
Screenshot of Too Many Cooks, twenty seconds in. Morgan Burch sits at a desk covered in books in her bedroom. Her hair is in a ponytail, and she's looking over her glasses at us (the viewer). Her name is superimposed in a yellow serif font with a back drop shadow (it's the title sequence). There's a globe and a table lamp to her right, a busy noticeboard on the wall behind her, and to her left is
A BP Pulse "Tritium" DC charger with buggy CHAdeMO code that the support operative said "oh, yeah, we have no end of problems with those" on hearing I'd been foolish enough to plug a Nissan Leaf in.
Photo of an Osprey DC charger reporting that it's 1970, and it's fully charged my EV to 1%.
A screenshot of LeafSpy, showing the state of my EV'e battery. It's 72% charged (how full the tank is), and 91% healthy (compared to brand new).
A screenshot of the chess.com iPhone app, suggesting I play a match against a chessbot called "The Clown". The screenshot shows a green-and-white chessboard in its starting position, and a cartoonish illustration of a clown — riffing on the "Queen's Gambit" TV show promo image of the main character resting her chin in the her hands while propping her arms on the table. The clown appears to have a green pawn screwed into her head at a jaunty angle.
Screenshot of Bluesky showing that one person reposted my post, but that the post has had no reposts yet 🤣
Screenshot of my Repost Bots list — now empty!
Screenshot of ClearSky.app showing 60 million accounts, of which 39 million are active, and 21 million have been deleted.
Screenshot of BBC News coverage of the Artemis 2 mission which looks spookily like the black & white time tunnel title sequence of Dr Who in 1963
iPhone alarm at 23:15 going beep beep beep and reporting Artemis II Launch
Six boxes of 78mm halogen bulbs in transparent plastic ziplock bag, held in front of a cone-shaped wall-mounted ceramic halogen uplighter throwing a large pool of light up the white wall, and a smaller pool down below it.
eBay listing for a Baker Light. The photograph shows a ceramic socket and a plug made of Bakelite, an early plastic.
Screenshot of iOS Shazam app. It's mostly blue, with the Shazam logo's stylised "S" in white in the centre. Large white text reads "Tap to turn off" above the logo.
Photograph of small cable that lets you power an old-fashioned computer thing with a more modern computer thing from a popular online auction site. It is labelled "Pure copper core, high speed transmiss". High speed transmiss isn't really something you need for an item that runs at roughly 12 millionths of a hertz
An animation showing searching for Homo sapiens on the great tree of life. The picture starts showing the trunk of the tree, and zooms further and further in to reach the final leaf. https://www.onezoom.org/life/@Homo_sapiens=770315?otthome=%40%3D770311#x39,y415,w0.4857
A screenshot of a BlueSky post that reads like a Slashdot post from 20 years ago: I know l've said this before and recently, but I'm over the skeuomorphic UX of Bluesky that makes it look and feel like a 20 year old social media app. I'm ready for new experiences for this kind of media/data. This information architecture is played out. Let's try some new ideas with other clients.
A print of the now famous "I don't use AI, I'm not a fucking loser" art, atop my keyboard instead of in a frame where it should be.
Dolores from Westworld agreeing that the post doesn't look like anything to her.
A green printed circuit board (PCB) which once upon a time sported four USB A sockets, but is now sitting on a pine workbench next to two recently-removed USB A sockets.
Fairground photobooth scene from 1978's Grease, during the number "You're The One That I Want" — a painting of Fay Wray and King Kong with cutouts for folks to poke their heads through, to be photographed as if they were a hairy ape or damsel.
A photograph of a pine bench, with a Raspberry Pi Zero in its official raspberry-coloured case and an S-Tek four port USB 2.0 hub. One of the Pi's micro-USB sockets has a power cable plugged in. The other micro-USB socket has a micro-USB to USB A cable plugged in — the same cable you'd use to sync a phone, or a Kindle, or to flash a Pi Pico. Its USB A plug is plugged into the dongle I soldered up this afternoon, which connects it to the USB A plug on the hub! The hub has two other USB devices plugged into it — their cables disappear off-screen, but I can tell you they're a keyboard and mouse — which the Pi Zero happily detects!
Two USB "A" sockets soldered back to back — perfect if you ever wanted to plug a USB mouse into another USB mouse. The sockets are a shiny sliver metal, with white plastic slots to align whatever you're plugging in. They're joined by with four wires — red for +5V, black for 0V, and grey and white for data. They're sat on a pine workbench. Almost out of shot are a USB plug, a piece of twisted pair white/grey cable, and a blue-handled wire cutter.
Screenshot of a paragraph from https://docs.house.gov/meetings/AS/AS00/20150625/103669/HHRG-114-AS00-Wstate-WinnefeldJrUSNJ-20150625.pdf Russian military doctrine includes what some have called an "escalate to de-escalate" strategy - a strategy that purportedly seeks to deescalate a conventional conflict through coercive threats, including limited nuclear use. We think that this label is dangerously misleading. Anyone who thinks they can control escalation through the use of nuclear weapons is literally playing with fire. Escalation is escalation, and nuclear use would be the ultimate escalation.
Photograph of G. K. Hall & Co.'s Large Print Edition of The Bell Jar.
Spider-Man tells Stegron (an anthropomorphic pterodactyl riding a triceratops): "YOU CAN REWRITE DNA ON THE FLY, AND YOU'RE USING IT TO TURN PEOPLE INTO *DINOSAURS*? BUT WITH TECH LIKE THAT, YOU COULD CURE *CANCER*!" Stegron replies: "BUT I DON'T *WANT* TO CURE CANCER. I WANT TO TURN PEOPLE INTO DINOSAURS."
Screenshot of JustWatch suggesting I use a VPN to violate the terms of service of USA-based streaming services to watch Hudsucker Proxy from the UK …
Screenshot of the EXIF info in the first ever iPhone pic — IMG_0001 — I ever took. It's dated 11th July 2008, and is a 2MP 1200 x 1600 image — taken inside with no flash, so grainy as anything 🤣 At this point Apple didn't include lens info!
Screenshot of UK search results for "Tick Tick Boom". It's on Netflix, but not on Amazon — although you wouldn't know that from JustWatch's shitty search results.
A not at all weird Schramm Javelin Prototype - a single-seat aluminum body helicopter designed by B.J. Schramm, 1965 It's parked on a concrete airfield, looking distinctly like Luke Skywalker's landspeeder, except purple. A man in a grey suit sits at the controls, clearly overwhelmed by the instrument panel. A woman wearing a classic sixties orange and yellow outfit and sporting a highly appropriate beehive hairdo stands beside the cockpit. She laughs politely as the man says "there are so many dials!" for the third time. "Yes", she says, "but you've had your photo taken, and now I need to get to my birthday party, so out you hop".
AI slop of a cartoon hamster wearing a Godzilla costume holding a peanut, standing in a city.
A swan swimming in a cup of coffee. It's crudely sketched on a phone notes app, so its neck is too short, and you can't see its feet paddling furiously. It's unclear whether the swan is tiny or the mug is huge.
Screenshot of now-deleted tweet from James Colley (@JamColley there, @colley.bsky.social here): "Garfield is a cat and doesn't have a job. The only ostensible difference between Monday and any other day is that Jon suddenly isn't around after having been home all weekend. Garfield doesn't hate Mondays, he loves Jon and is too proud to say it." 9:05 PM • Feb 17, 2018
A screenshot of the awesome disk imaging tool "Rufus", showing it almost halfway through burning a disk image that lives in a zip file. Rufus: https://rufus.ie/en/ Old Raspbian image: https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspbian/images/raspbian-2016-11-29/2016-11-25-raspbian-jessie.zip
A photograph of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang on barely gravel path leading from arches beneath a very low bridge, proving there's no limit how far I'll stoop in service of making a terrible terrible pun.
Abbopt and Costello stare at a baseball scoreboard. https://www.abbottandcostello.co.uk/the-timeless-genius-of-abbott-and-costellos-whos-on-first/
The scene from Watchmen. Ozymandias: "*Do* with it?" "Chris, I'm not a Republic Serial villain. Do you seriously think I'd explain my master stroke if I thought there remained the slightest chance of you affecting its outcome?" "I did it 35 minutes ago" Chris and Rorschach stare in horror at the terminal output: "flashrom 1.4.0 on Linux 6.12.47+rpt-rpi-v6 (armv6l) flashrom is free software, get the source code at https://flashrom.org Found Micron/Numonyx/ST flash chip "M25P05-A" (64 kB, SPI) on linux_spi."
Screenshot of a terminal session using the cool utility "pinctrl" ... https://github.com/raspberrypi/utils/blob/master/pinctrl/README.md ... to waggle general purpose input/output (GPIO) pins on a Raspberry Pi. In the window behind, Saleae's utterly brilliant "Logic 2" ... https://www.saleae.com/downloads ... shows the pin outputs waggling.
Screenshot of a post from a legacy social media site. It's from the official account of a British political party, and reads: "Winston Churchill is a hero. He's earned his place on our Five Pound Note. He must not be replaced with an Otter."
Page 80 of my yellowed copy of SLATFATF. (Spoilers after this text). Arthur's heart went boom boom churn churn as she scribbled seven figures in pencil on a scrap of paper and handed it to him. 'Now we can relax', she said with a slow smile which filled Arthur till he thought he would burst. Fenchurch, he said, enjoying the name as he said it. 'I-' 'A box, said a trailing voice, 'of cherry liqueurs, and also, and I know you'll like this, a gramophone record of Scottish bagpipe music...' 'Yes thank you, very nice, insisted Arthur. 'I just thought I'd let you have a look at them', said the permed woman, 'as you're down from London...' She was holding them out proudly for Arthur to see. He could see that they were indeed a box of cherry brandy liqueurs and a record of bagpipe music. That was what they were. 'I'll let you have your drink in peace now', she said, patting Arthur lightly on his seething shoulder, 'but l knew you'd like to see.' Arthur re-engaged his eyes with Fenchurch's once again, and suddenly was at a loss for something to say. A moment had come and gone between the two of them, but the whole rhythm of it had been wrecked by that stupid, blasted woman. "Don't worry, said Fenchurch, looking at him steadily from over the top of her glass, 'we will tak again'. She took a sip. 'Perhaps,' she added, 'it wouldn't have gone so well if it wasn't for her'. She gave a wry smile and dropped her hair forward over her face again: It was perfectly true. He had to admit it was perfectly true. ========== SPOILERS!! ========= The "scrap of paper" with Fenchurch's number is the winning ticket. Arthur doesn't realise this until he's back home and tries to call her. He phones the pub, and then visits it in person, and despite rummaging through their bins, never finds the ticket. He's lost Fenchurch forever …
A photograph of page 79 of my personal copy of "So Long And Thanks For All The Fish". The page is yellowed with age (42 years, as it happens). The text reads: 'I'm going to have to go in a minute or two, said Fenchurch, 'and you haven't begun to tell me whatever this terrifically extraordinary thing is that you were so keen to get off your chest.' 'Why don't you let me drive you to London?' said Arthur. 'It's Saturday, I've got nothing particular to do, l'd... 'No, said Fenchurch, 'thank you, it's sweet of you, but no. I need to be by myself for a couple of days.' She smiled and shrugged. 'But.. 'You can tell me another time. I'll give you my number.' 79
A screenshot of a bar chart showing days on the X axis, and hours on the Y axis. The chart starts on Tuesday 5th March, and shows between four and six hours each day until yesterday (11th March), which shows 8hrs 3mins. Today shows nothing.
[FEN "7k/p2r2pp/np3pr1/3N4/3PN3/8/PP5P/1K2R3 w - - 0 1"] 1. Ng5 Rd8 2. Nf7+ Kg8 3. Nxd8 {*}
Photograph of the Saturn V rocket, lying on its side, taken by Cdr Michael G. Brattland USN-Ret | Mar 10, 2020 The poor thing is fenced in — the enclosure is far too small for it, and tiny people walk around the outside of the fence gawking. https://www.nhahistoricalsociety.org/apollo-8-mission-and-recovery/attachment/saturn-v-rocket-horizontal/
Photograph of my DVD copy of "The Dish". An astronaut on the surface of the moon with the Earth in the sky above stares at a reflection of a kangaroo and a gigantic radio telescope back on Earth. (Note the that this is for comedic effect — the kangaroo is not actually on the moon. Don't @ me). The DVD was photographed on my rainbow blanket.