Abram Kedge🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇨🇦

After 23 years in 🇨🇦 & 🇺🇸, living in Scotland. England hasn't got any better since I left, but Scotland feels like home.

Former embedded & webby SW, just doing it for fun now & to help friends with their business. Writes weird psychological SF, occasionally. Copies of my books in Dunfermline, Kirkcaldy, and ROC NY libraries.

Green/Leftie/Yes to Independence. Let your first instinct be to choose to be kind. Black Lives Matter, Trans Lives Matter, LGBTQIA friend and ally.

#NoBridge

Author web page: https://splinterton.com
Goal achieved: 2 years without a car
Annoyingly addictive game: https://ny5.us/blocks
Theme gallery and editor for annoying game: https://ny5.us/blocks/themes.html

Public Key

npub1ez5j6au8h36c9dywuqaz2c9veld6h0wpzjrtg6ue6ak76lkmpsfq59sd3a

NIP-05 Address

abramkedge_at_beige.party@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsv32fdw7rmcavzkj8wqw39vzkvlkathhq3fp45dwvawm0d0mdscysprpmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0d4hhxarj9ecxjmntqywhwumn8ghj7mn0wd68yttsw43zuam9d3kx7unyv4ezumn9wstvcudc

Publishing to

relay.momostr.pink

nostr-pub.wellorder.net

yabu.me

Author Public Key

npub1ez5j6au8h36c9dywuqaz2c9veld6h0wpzjrtg6ue6ak76lkmpsfq59sd3a

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Last Notes

2026-04-15 04:06:06 UTC

I received an email from Draft2Digital today that says it is no longer free to use; there will be a $20 activation fee for new accounts.
There is also an annual maintenance fee of $12 if your annual earnings (after Draft2Digital's commission) is less than $100.
This seems like a significant change that will probably push many authors back to Amazon.
I wonder what the disengagement process with Draft2Digital would be? It is entangled with at least a couple of dozen external accounts. If you close your Draft2Digital account, do they just keep all the future proceeds from your books on Apple, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and all the rest?
#Draft2Digital #writing #WritingCommunity

2026-04-03 12:45:33 UTC

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My son introduced me to Revolutions with Mike Duncan's fictional The Martian Revolution (excellent). I've just finished the English Revolution, and I'm about to start the American Revolution.
The English series includes an interesting snippet about St Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh, where last Saturday's Independence march started - the ladies of the congregation rioted in July 1637 over the imposition of the Anglican Book of Prayer, leading to an uprising, which required Charles I to raise taxes for an army to quell the rebellious Scots, leading to the English Civil War!
Charles was a local lad, born down the road from me. Had a shaky start in life, made good, messed up the actual Kinging bit. He, and his reign, got cut short.

2026-03-30 09:23:44 UTC

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ok, good to know! I still have a Google Fi sim in my phone because a bunch of my accounts need it for validation, but that's definitely worth exploring 👍

2026-03-30 09:06:14 UTC

I have to admit, I'm starting to regret renewing my contract with the Three phone service. The data coverage is extremely patchy much of the time - even in the middle of Edinburgh. It took ten minutes to get one of the photos from the march on Saturday to upload.
Here in my home, a couple of hundred yards from the centre of Dunfermline, the signal strength is -120dB. In less technical terms, that's the square root of sweet FA.

2026-02-23 10:15:41 UTC

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true, but it's a unit of money that reflects the social values of each society. Whatever you're buying with that money - and however it is earned - will be priced relative to the economy of that society.
I'd be fascinated to see a comparison of calories or whatever can be bought with (for example) $7.25 in large parts of the US vs £12.71 in England vs DKK110 (~€15) in Denmark and so on.
But I can see that's probably a distraction from a true generic unit.

2026-02-23 09:46:16 UTC

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how about calories per hour worked at minimum wage? Of course that makes it wildly regional.

2026-01-17 13:40:35 UTC

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I've been hearing a lot about Evri since I've been back in the UK, apparently they're a package hiding company? It's a specialist niche, frequently confused with a package delivery service.

2026-01-17 13:21:06 UTC

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well, there's a "hidden" US Priority Mail rate "Cubic Rate" that only makes sense for very dense packages (I was selling a multi-coloured laminated wood, that would sink if immersed in water), so that usually came out the cheapest, and most often selected.
However, some areas of the country had a very bad delivery rate from USPS, so UPS was frequently selected, with an order note something along the lines of "DO NOT SUBSTITUTE USPS!"
Fedex was rarely selected.
DFS was the most popular choice for International (I shipped to about 15 different countries). I mailed a package from NYS to Edinburgh on a Friday, it spent the weekend in Birmingham, visited Leipzig in time for breakfast on Monday, and was delivered in Edinburgh about 1pm the same day.

2026-01-17 11:48:21 UTC

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I actually did provide this feature, it worked very well. I put a call into the goshippo.com API, which returns prices for all the shippers that I could drop off to locally. I added the cost of packing materials, and put them all on the checkout form.
I had a very high percentage of repeat customers.
I think in larger companies there are too many silos. Everyone is concerned about performing well in their own little area, and the impact of maximising profit at the expense of customer satisfaction is lost - it's "somebody else's problem".

2026-01-08 06:48:54 UTC

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It does sound as if the game developers think England is full of 1930s Hobbits. Merryshire is inviting derision.
I'd have gone with something like Borset.

2026-01-05 15:01:42 UTC

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well, I appreciate their considered approach to quality-first development. I hope Cartes continues to evolve and expand.

2026-01-05 13:18:32 UTC

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one day, these map alternatives will have public transport route planning 😐

2025-12-12 23:33:09 UTC

#WritersCoffeeClub – 13 Dec. What have you written for another writer?
After proofreading the ARM System Developer's Guide twice - first draft and final edit, I was invited to contribute a short paragraph for the back cover blurb. I guess that's the first time I ever got my name on the cover of a book!

2025-12-10 10:21:25 UTC

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👍 signed up

2025-12-01 10:37:05 UTC

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yikes! At least The Shops one ended on Boxing Day! 😅
I didn't think I would be able to find this - I cancelled my Spotify subscription ages ago...
[EDIT] Bear in mind this is muzak the shoppers listen to while wandering around 200 little shops. They're going to be there a while...
This is a tweaked list that I listened to on a loop for two weeks just to make sure it wouldn't drive me insane - the jury's out on that one!
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5N9My5m64KG3MS45iTmX2A?si=fOIuHNcuTuGnN8pwE7dp4Q

2025-12-01 10:04:01 UTC

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about six years back they had the very worst Christmas playlist ever at the co-op mall where I had a shop.
As part of our rent, we had to work a couple of days per month per shop unit (mine was a double).
I rolled in on November 2nd - a very sunny 70F/21C day - to find they had started the Chrimbo songs. Oh my word... the most depressing dirges dragged up from the 40s and 50s. Full of very sad people cry-singing about baby Jesus.
90 minutes in. I was stabbing my arm with a nail pulled from the wall. Decided to take a sick day 😂
Had a word, sent in an alternative playlist suggestion, and a couple of weeks later the very music-savvy owner had set up a bright cheerful selection! A bit heavy on the Pentatonix and Lyndsey Stirling, but definitely survivable.

2025-11-14 16:13:58 UTC

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oh awesome! I went to the most amazing music festival in Den Bosch. We rolled up to the customer's house the evening before we were going to move her back to the UK, and she lent us her Volvo so we could go into town. Every square, every bar had live music. Good times! 😄

2025-11-14 09:24:30 UTC

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Are you there yet? How did it go?

2025-11-13 07:13:49 UTC

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charmed life, Jessie. Charmed life.

2025-11-13 06:57:05 UTC

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your day job sounds very cool! Well, you know exactly what you are in for!
Back in the 80s I spent five years in international moving, I was in Europe for a few weeks three or four times a year, regularly traveling on the Herald of Free Enterprise (and the sister ship, Spirit of FE). First thing I'd do on the way home, before we even left port was to take a shower in my cabin deep in the lower decks...
Jeez, I'm not helping here, am I? You'll be fine!

2025-11-13 06:38:22 UTC

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oh crikey... let me tell you about the time the 75 minute ferry crossing from Calais to Dover took 4 hours... (don't worry, I'll spare you the details 😂).
Wishing you the best for the trip!

2025-11-13 06:30:00 UTC

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Has to be soggy out there, I've been listening to the wind and rain all night. Safe travels!

2025-11-04 06:42:19 UTC

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along the same lines - why are refugees awaiting processing prevented from working? Let them work! It takes guts and determination to leave your country and seek a life elsewhere, these are people who have the capacity to make a real contribution. Instead they are corraled and forced to wait while living on a subsistence allowance.
Make it a positive thing; earning an income should be a factor that improves their chances of being allowed to remain, and reduces the time they are dependent on the State after being granted asylum.
Currently, they are being vilified for a "cost to society" that is entirely outside of their control.

2025-08-09 10:10:41 UTC

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I think in Scotland that could be done. I've lived in four countries, and this is the first one where it feels that natural justice, doing right by people is the predominant characteristic of a significant majority of the population.

2025-08-09 10:02:21 UTC

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my dad is wrong about many things politically (he's only now reluctantly agreeing that he's yet to see any benefit from Brexit), but I think he's right about one thing - in the past, people moved into politics after running businesses or going from the factory floor to working in a trade union. They had real world experience outside of politics.
Now, a majority study politics at University then work immediately in the political sphere. They treat people as abstract statistics en masse rather than as individuals with needs and struggles. A career in law does not seem to remove this attitude.
As Sir Terry put it, "Sin starts when you treat people as things."

2025-08-01 09:21:48 UTC

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How does that compare with the long hibernations and light speed time dilation used for stepping from age to age in The Three Body Problem trilogy?
I enjoy seeing how different writers see different possibilities for the same basic concept.

2025-07-27 19:04:59 UTC

So we had to take a little sit down at the top of Jacob's Ladder* in Edinburgh yesterday, which gave me a chance to take in this view of the tower on Carlton Hill.
*SO many narrow little steps and twisty slopes, tiring but kind of fun. Had a nice chat near the top with someone who was coming from the tangerine tyrant protest.
https://media.beige.party/media_attachments/files/114/926/741/774/226/558/original/4f0c753fa32a111d.jpg

2025-07-23 20:35:39 UTC

#ScribesAndMakers 7/23 Has someone created something for you? What was it?
My daughter made Pipecleaner Stanley for me about 18 years ago. He has ridden shotgun with me in every car I've owned since then. Now I don't have a car, I move him around the apartment every now and then so he doesn't get bored.
https://media.beige.party/media_attachments/files/114/904/445/151/266/101/original/7ebd04dab9c29a10.jpg
https://media.beige.party/media_attachments/files/114/904/445/255/156/771/original/8c10e0cdfcbfdaf9.jpg

2025-07-15 08:52:20 UTC

Rejected story idea: The crappiest Terminator sequel.
2026. Skynet is not self aware. It is kids feeding their parents' conspiracy theories into Grok, which amplifies them until they get picked up by Faux News.
The president tasks the military/ICE/NG with suppressing the imaginary threats.
The Terminators are tooled-up security personnel "just following orders" given by D-list celebs who didn't have the personality to make it on to a reality TV show.
There are no time travelers. The time to stop this was 2025. We didn't.

2025-06-20 11:35:21 UTC

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Reminds me of one of the most Australian things ever said - Richard Roxburgh in Rake, the episode when he's trying to buy painkillers for his hangover - "I just want to kill this BASTARD behind my eyes"

2025-06-18 15:54:03 UTC

#ScribesAndMakers June 18. Share pic(s) of something you've created. (Don't forget the alt text.)
Turned a mirror tile into a reproduction of Van Gogh's famous Cafe Terrace at Night With TARDIS.
I worked out how to turn an image into a set of colour masks using GIMP, burnt each in turn into the back of the mirror using a laser, and sprayed a colour. It took seven hours in total to etch and spray eight colours.
https://media.beige.party/media_attachments/files/114/705/123/801/585/602/original/cf282836fb76f59a.jpg

2025-06-03 18:14:50 UTC

Looks like there were two peregrine falcon chicks. I suspected there might be, but this is the first time I have seen them both together.
Last week they were white fluff-bundles, now they have almost full adult plumage!
https://media.beige.party/media_attachments/files/114/620/781/503/493/953/original/f03b4b64043bbc27.png

2025-05-16 16:24:33 UTC

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> Need by law to know where in the computer our raw data is
This is my biggest issue with Apple when I try to help Mrs Kedge with her Mac. It is infernally frustrating to have to go through the official app for a given file type to achieve anything, and for the files to be completely hidden away.
It didn't used to be this way. I switched to Linux in 2008, but used a Mac for four years before that, liked it a lot.
@npub17hc…6e3c

2025-03-22 09:35:52 UTC

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A cascade effect happened in the early 2000s that affected Canada and the US. I was in California at the time, but my family in Ontario was without power (and hence water) for two and a half days. Much of New York was affected too.
There was a lot of aggressive blame-throwing going on between the two countries. Eventually it turned out that the initial cause was a NY substation that was taken down when a raccoon electrocuted itself. The cascade of failures went into Ontario and continued round in a loop, coming back into another part of the US.
Realistically, the failure could have happened at any of those substations with a good chance of the same overall outage.

2025-03-13 10:43:16 UTC

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a primary problem is that the regulations are deliberately vague, and individual officers are given full rein to decide how to apply them.
I used to regularly fly from the UK to teach four day classes with no problem, but as soon as I moved to Canada I had to allow time for an hour's interrogation by US immigration in Toronto airport where I had to detail my entire business operations. Twice I was turned back, and had to hire a lawyer who met me at the border in Buffalo. There, the border supervisor agreed that teaching "alien technology" was perfectly legal.
The last time I was turned back in Toronto, the officer screamed at me that if I attempted to cross via bridge again, I would be arrested, jailed, and my car would be forfeit.
I went to Buffalo again. The supervisor had everything struck off of my record and added something. I didn't know what it was, but when I went to the US consulate for a visa, the clerk raised their eyebrows and said "wow, you have a friend in Buffalo!"
It was harrowing, but I was stubborn (and orbital levels of reckless), also male, white, and able to afford a lawyer. I wouldn't wish this process on anyone.

2025-03-11 23:30:21 UTC

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we're new to the area and to looking at vintage buses, but Mrs Kedge and I really enjoyed visiting the Scottish Vintage Bus Museum on the Open Weekend last August. We don't have a car, so it was a real treat to take advantage of the free vintage bus shuttle from Dunfermline. Looking forward to going again this year.
https://media.beige.party/media_attachments/files/114/146/380/527/585/297/original/bc978a66303f1419.jpg

2025-02-14 21:00:44 UTC

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oh...I loved my Beeb. Mine got me my first job in software! I was selling gas detectors, but the six week delay to get special alarm level instruments was killing me. I showed the SW manager my assembly language 3D graphics code and asked if I could try to make the custom firmware versions, "after all, it's only numbers, right?".
Yeah, a week of evenings later, I had learnt 8048 assembler, saw what a bad idea it was to hardcode time weighted average constants all over the stack, and cleared most of the backlog. The next week, I started working in Research & Development. My sales manager was not a happy bunny 😆

2025-02-14 20:50:13 UTC

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I was trying to remember the name Quantel yesterday, it was crazy advanced for the time.

2025-02-06 11:25:20 UTC

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Boosting because let's face it - we need more good news toots in the timeline!

2025-01-26 11:37:52 UTC

When there is so little difference between Reform, Tory, and - for Pete's sake - LABOUR, is anyone else feeling that they will never be represented by a Westminster government?

2024-12-26 15:46:10 UTC

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just throwing out a wild idea... I read in Food For Free that up to about 150 years ago there used to be huge harvests of wild mushrooms, sometimes they would turn a whole field white. Mushrooms do not stay fresh for long, so I imagine there was a need to harvest and dry most of the crop. If this is what the structures are for, they would be located close to where there were regular large crops, perhaps?

2024-12-26 15:30:25 UTC

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could they have been used to store caches of food or dry wood for travellers or hunters?
For comparison, I'm thinking of the caches that the Arctic/Antarctic expeditions set up so they would have supplies for the return journey without carrying them all the way to the pole and back.

2024-12-26 14:56:25 UTC

Step 1: establish cryptocurrency as a thing with value based only on an algorithmic scarcity. ✅
Step 2: convince governments - local and national - to invest in a cryptocurrency. ✅
Step 3: reveal an unexpected flaw that allows the cryptocurrency to be faked.
Step 4: economic collapse.
Step 5: Dominion, Mr Bond
https://media.beige.party/media_attachments/files/113/719/704/106/202/729/original/cfa7e709d981f63a.mp4

2024-12-07 16:54:53 UTC

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I travel the LNER between Edinburgh and Kings Cross several times a year, I'm thinking of printing bingo cards for delays and inconveniences. A trip this time last year had a bunch:
* Train trapped in depot due to another train derailed inside the shed.
* No reserved seat in the next train (of course), stood from Peterborough to Newcastle.
* This is a good one - sitting on the floor, had a great chat with a guy on his way back home to Newcastle from Malta. He was able to advise me how to bypass the next problem...
* Two fatalities closed the line between Newcastle and Edinburgh 😔
* Two hours extra traveling, diverting via Carlisle.
All the while I was thinking "7 times less CO2 than flying" 😄 Overall I was four hours late, but hey, at least I didn't have to drive.