EU diplomats are saying that Boris Johnson has no intention to negotiate and wants a no deal Brexit - the fact that the EU’s main plan was a hole in one single round negotiation, and since they have repeatedly said they will not renegotiate, it very much looks like it is they that had no intention of negotiating and were angling for a no deal Brexit, they have no incentive because even if the UK doesn’t pay the settlement they will claw it back with tariffs, had they said that was their plan all along the UK could have saved a lot of money, instead they have been dragged into every possible scenario testing every detail so that if ever another country decides to leave everything will be nice and smooth, and it’s all paid for by the UK and what’s more the EU will still say it’s them that are the ones hard done by - the danger of no deal is that it could result in s never ending trade war theguardian.com #

Saudi Arabia Says Women Can Travel Without Male Guardians - The timing of this is spectacular given my previous post, and also because today I opted for a falafel sandwich for lunch, which in my mind is quite arabic, so it feels a bit like a celebration - I've been to Saudi Arabia and it was a very pleasant place, with a unique identity, but I definitely had a feeling that women were treated quite differently, so I think this is a really great development nytimes.com #

How to check the character encoding of a string in bash - the reason I had to use this was because I encountered a weird bug where two different strings that looked the exact same were being treated completely differently by the shell - I had copied and pasted them from two different web pages that used different character encodings, it was so weird that I made some quicktime screen recordings of me figuring it out - what are the chances of that happening today? pretty close to zero - now do you believe in the unseen? stackoverflow.com #

The Congos - Don't Blame On I (Black Ark, Jamaica) (1977) - This tune was randomly selected by my ipod shuffle feature youtube.com #

Innocence lost - what did you do before the internet? - I'm not sure how I feel about this new fact, that my generation is the last of the people that grew up without the internet, it sort of reminds me of the 1st world war veterans, maybe when we are old we'll get some medals and get to attend parades, the floats will actually float in he air like hover boards theguardian.com #

Punpedia - The Online Encyclopedia of Puns - puns are simultaneously good and bad at the same time, I'm amazed at how using language in a way that wasn't intended is so comical, of course I had realized this before but there is something about seeing the shear volume of puns on this site that made me realize that my reaction to puns is very strong and almost automatic, like when a doctor hits your knee with a reflex hammer punpedia.org #