iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Rob Vaughan @coffee-cat.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

It's not seemingly very clever. Bought some Xmas presents last year for people with babies, so AZ says "likely has an infant"...

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Rob Vaughan @coffee-cat.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Yeah - that bit of repeatedly overfilling the departure lounge is not good

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Rob Vaughan @coffee-cat.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Went to see Othello at the Wanamaker playhouse in 24. It was set in modern day London and one character did say an abbreviated 'ks-sake at one point, which stuck out a bit

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Rob Vaughan @coffee-cat.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

It seems I can't count... 87, not 84!

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Rob Vaughan @coffee-cat.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

I imagine it varies hugely depending on sector etc? I've just passed 39yrs service and our grad starting salary is now approx 20% higher than mine was in 84 by the BoE calc. That's in aerospace engineering. Lots of UK public sector areas tho are very much worse now, for sure

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Rob Vaughan @coffee-cat.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

I'm very glad that my parents couldn't track me and thus see (back in the mid 80s) that I once fell asleep in the middle of a road, walking back from a party. Big thanks due to the concerned copper who woke me up

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Rob Vaughan @coffee-cat.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Bristol could be Danish (apart from the hills, obv)

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Rob Vaughan @coffee-cat.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

September Wednesdays are weird. One minute you're a fresh faced graduate starting out on a career, the next minute you've passed 39 years' service and the new grad intake looks rather young. Lucky that this gig is still a lot of fun after all this time 😁

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Rob Vaughan @coffee-cat.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Hhmmm.... Based on open source data the turbine entry temperature of the LM2500 looks hundreds of deg lower than the CF6 it's based on. Maybe these industrial GT blades are not crown jewels spec (relatively speaking)??? Still need to be reverse engineered tho!

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Rob Vaughan @coffee-cat.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

If you don't get that stuff right, you'll get premature blade failures and your GT won't be generating any electricity. These things have to just work, for thousands of hours without failure.

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Rob Vaughan @coffee-cat.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

In aero gas turbines the gas is hotter than the melting temperature of the metal. That technology is "crown jewels" for the OEMs. I don't know whether industrial GTs are similarly high performance, but certainly some of them are aero engine derived.

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Rob Vaughan @coffee-cat.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

I doubt GE etc al will readily hand over the IP for their turbine blades. So SPCX will have to reverse engineer them. You can measure the outside shape, the internal cooling holes might be trickier. But the material will be harder. Even if you identify the alloy, you also need the heat treatment

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Rob Vaughan @coffee-cat.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

In my first year hall of residence in the early 80s there was a local scrumpy that was 32p a pint. But you had to be really desperate to want to drink it.

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Rob Vaughan @coffee-cat.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

My understanding is ALM metal has properties rather like cast metal, so that sounds promising given that's how they usually make them isn't it? I don't work in automotive so it's not my bag.

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Rob Vaughan @coffee-cat.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

This is all starting to get hard to follow. It reminds me of a very old bootleg Billy Connolly tape I used to have where he riffed about making up new swear words so he could swear without getting in trouble, as nobody else knew what they meant.

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Rob Vaughan @coffee-cat.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

Sounds like "tell me you don't have a normal job without saying it directly"

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Rob Vaughan @coffee-cat.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

I'm about 90% confident that it was Welcome to the Pleasure Dome by FGTH. But I don't think I owned a CD player until probably mid-86

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Rob Vaughan @coffee-cat.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Also I'm on a blocklist for allegedly following right wing accounts. The list helpfully describes examples of proscribed types of right wing people which includes "Nazis", but also includes "Liberals"...

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Rob Vaughan @coffee-cat.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

For a while I was on a bsky blocklist called Followers of Carol Vorderman, which sounded to me like I was in some kind of weirdly niche cult

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Rob Vaughan @coffee-cat.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

I am not a lawyer, and TBF my job is very rarely stressful, and is very sedentary. But I've been sat at my desk in the office for a couple of hours only using mouse & keyboard, and my Fitbit occasionally says it's detected an aerobic workout, and exhorts me to keep up the good work!

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Rob Vaughan @coffee-cat.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Yes! - that would make a great pub quiz question, although I can only think of Waverley 😁 Having just come back from Interrailing last week I was reminded that Cologne Hbf has a quite impressive church next door, but I didn't notice any castles. Probably not in the right bit of Germany TBH.

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Rob Vaughan @coffee-cat.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Shot the eclipse. Not as sharp a pic as I managed with the smaller partial eclipse last year tho. Should have used my old manual focus 1970s Canon 300mm f/4 but its front element is HUGE compared to my 46mm filters.

Picture of the partial solar eclipse taken in SW England on 12th Aug 2026. Used stack of ND8, ND1000 and circular polariser filters, held on camera with cardboard and sellotape. Olympus O-MD E-M10ii, 286mm, f22, 1/1600, ISO 200

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Rob Vaughan @coffee-cat.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

I picked up a relative from the carpark of that railway station a few days ago. Never been there before.

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Rob Vaughan @coffee-cat.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

One day last week I found myself standing at Hannover station, because Deutsche Bahn had cancelled our booked train. We were not expecting to even go through here, let alone get off. But we had to replan on different trains to get from A to B. Fun times 😁

View of railway tracks, overhead cable etc looking Ng off the end of a platform at Hannover station in Germany.

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Rob Vaughan @coffee-cat.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

TFW you get home from 2 weeks Interrailing after frequently complaining that you have to empty your (borrowed) rucksack to find stuff at the bottom... and discover it has a zip to open a flap at the bottom 🤣

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Rob Vaughan @coffee-cat.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

Repeatedly telling "those stories" at work, which always start with "...when I first worked here..." Eg. People smoked at their desks, we all had to book a slot on shared mainframe terminals, went to the pub Friday lunchtimes, yada yada

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Rob Vaughan @coffee-cat.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

My employer was working on two competing programs. My small specialist team had to literally send ourselves an RFI to use info from one program on the other one, which took about 2 months after it had gone there and back through all the higher levels of companies we were subcontracted to.

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Rob Vaughan @coffee-cat.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Great. Then they can do "piloting airliners" where fatal accidents happen maybe once per 1E7 flying hours, and rates have pretty much continuously fallen over time. Should be great 😂

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Rob Vaughan @coffee-cat.bsky.social · 27/06/2026

I remember enjoying Alster Wasser in Hamburg about a million years ago. That was basically shandy as I recall

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Rob Vaughan @coffee-cat.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

I could be wrong but hasn't the Daily Heil gone the opposite way?

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Reposted by Rob Vaughan

Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

"So ... so I said ... why not sign your treaty here, at Versailles?"

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Rob Vaughan @coffee-cat.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

Today I bought an Interrail pass. Last time I did that was 1991. I wonder if train travel on the continent will seem much different... Sadly no overnight sleeper trains this time

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Rob Vaughan @coffee-cat.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

This is a classic Father Ted scene: "small.... Far away...."

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Rob Vaughan @coffee-cat.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

I was once told (40 years ago) that Bristol Uni's pool had the same problem. No idea if true tho

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Rob Vaughan @coffee-cat.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

Glad I deleted that app long ago

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Rob Vaughan @coffee-cat.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

Apparently the latest Apple Intelligence models won't run on anything less than an M3 with 12GB RAM. So that's me safe from that threat 😁

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Rob Vaughan @coffee-cat.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

Your examples are all repurposed engines. I don't think anyone these days would spend billions developing an engine without an initial application. Nearest example is USA, but even then, XA100 & 101 were aimed at F35, and XA102/3 were aimed at F47.

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Rob Vaughan @coffee-cat.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

I was intercepted 50m down the road from my local Co-op v recently by the security guard chasing me and shouting. He said I hadn't paid for the punnet of raspberries I went in for. So I very politely showed him the receipt and then he said "Oh, sorry I mistook you for someone else". Weird really

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Rob Vaughan @coffee-cat.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

This isn't obvious things like Strava, it's via ads from almost any app or webpage. You download (say) a calculator app, it asks for stuff like location and its ads track you. Like this story from 2024. The Wired original link seems broken gizmodo.com/a-data-broke...

gizmodo.com

A Data Broker Reportedly Tracked Visitors to Jeffrey Epstein’s Island

Many wealthy and influential people visited the infamous sex offender's secret island. A new report claims their mobile data gave them away.

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Rob Vaughan @coffee-cat.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

Car Service+MoT today. So I dropped it off and came into work by bus. Services are really good if you commute from nowhere near where I live😂 It was a nicer journey than yesterday's tropical cycle ride...

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Rob Vaughan @coffee-cat.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

I bought sensors made by SwitchBot to monitor the fridge and freezer, but they came in packs of 3! It's pretty good, one battery (aaaa iirc), talks to a base station via Bluetooth which works in the freezer OK. I think they are weather proof and OK to use outdoors, but i put my spare indoors

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Rob Vaughan @coffee-cat.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

Bonkers. The dew point inside my house in SW England peaked at over 19C around midnight last night, which is a level of water content in the air that (thankfully) we rarely get to. Really don't like it humid!

Graph of dew point Vs time from recent days in May, peaking at 19.2 degrees C

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Rob Vaughan @coffee-cat.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

Love Bollington. Stayed in a cottage there once in mid-December, and the local brass band were going door to door doing Xmas carol requests. Absolutely brilliant.

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