I’m just one random nerdy trans girl. …Oh come on, you’ve been around fediverse, surely you’ve seen us around?
Mastodon: @umbraroze@tech.lgbt
I keep Character Map™ at hand in Windows® just for random punctuation and stuff ©. gucharmap or something similar in Linux.
In word processors I’ve set up automatic formatting so that double minus (–) turns to en dash (–) and triple minus (—) turns to em dash (—).
For me, soulslikes are pretty weird. I’ve loved the art direction and gameplay of Dark Souls and especially Elden Ring, and I get why people like them and I appreciate what they’re trying to do, but something in them doesn’t click the addiction button. It’s not even the core gameplay that is the problem - I get flattened by some enemy and I’m like “oh I’ll get you one day”. But I booted up Elden Ring last time months ago. I’ll be done with the game in 10 years I guess. It’ll happen though!
Off the top of my mind, stuff that I’ve used and still have lying around:
Funny thing is, I think I have no extra SATA hard drives and modern SSDs lying around, because most of the computers I have that use them are still in operation.
Antarctica
Data unavailable
Why am I reminded of one old comic? It went like this:
(Scientists on an Antarctic base)
Scientist 1: (Finishes talking about something normal)
Scientist 2: (Disheveled and visibly unhinged) “Well none of that shit matters. Do you know what happened to my stack of Playboy magazines?”
Scientist 1: (Now also suddenly disheveled and visibly unhinged, whips out a knife) “They’re mine now!”
Scientist 2: (Also whips out a knife) “Oh yeah?”
Scientist 1: “Yeah! What are you gonna do about it?”
(Altercation ensues)
Oh yeah, they have a plan all right.
Now, the plan isn’t any good and everyone gets screwed, even them.
But it is, technically speaking, a plan!
On the other hand, I think safe-harbour laws are very much necessary if we want the Internet to work for the positive good of the world. We want the companies to take reasonable precautions and act on problematic stuff if it crops up, but that’s probably enough.
But on the other hand, jeez, have you seen what kind of discussion shitholes Facebook and Twitter have cultivated? If your company is being described as an accessory to genocide, maybe something has already gone horribly wrong.
“No HTML club” is kinda going too far on the Web. If you go there you might as well start a No HTTP Club and serve stuff over Gopher and FTP.
But we definitely need an HTML 2.0 Club.
Hmm, maybe just use some variation of DIN connector? It’s a circle, but keyed to one position, and fairly effortless to plug in the right way without seeing. Also full size DIN connectors are robust as hell and can be easily replaced and rewired.
Hell, my Commodore 64 IEC bus cables still work after decades, and I can’t say the same about many USB cables these days.
Dang, I really should write a programming portfolio page about all of the weird hacks I’ve made over the years. Other people link to their GitHub profiles in job applications and gesture non-specifically. I’d just point to my portfolio of weird hacks about weird problems I tried to solve weirdly. Anyway…
An ancient one I made back in the day:
I was listening to music while trying to sleep. I controlled the music player with infrared remote. Some mystery song starts playing and I have no idea what it’s called. Obviously, the monitor was far away and turned off so I couldn’t read.
So I was like, dammit, why can’t I just push a button on the remote and have the computer say the name of the song?
My previous project actually helped with that - I had previously made an extension for XMMS that allows other programs to read the song information via a named pipe. So I just whipped up a script that reads the song name and feeds it to Festival TTS, and hooked that up to the infrared daemon. And that was at like 3 AM, so I quickly got back to trying to sleep
Some more recent ones:
Long ago, I was using Adobe Photoshop Elements Organizer to import my photos from SD cards (etc) to my NAS. It was horrible. It sucked. So much that when I finally snapped and switched over to better software (read: stable version of digiKam for Windows came out), I never trusted the photo organiser to get this thing right. So for a while I used random hacks and a bunch of weird scriptery. Then I decided to turn it into a PowerShell script. That started to kinda suck, so I now have a massive overengineered Python script to import my photos. And it does exactly what I want it to do. And I’m finally happy. (Available here for what it’s worth)
Another thingy: I have to set the clocks on some devices manually. Daylight saving time, clock drift, you name it. One of my recent old-lady whinges was “Why the hell doesn’t Windows even have an analog clock anymore?” I just prefer to have a clock that has both number display (to set the time) and analog clock face with a second hand so I can time the button press better visually. …so I made one. Because I’ve never written an analog clock before. First, I made one in Processing. Then, a second version, because I’m in process of learning Godot.
I’m not exactly opposed to romantasy as a concept. I like that it has brought a lot of women to fantasy genre as readers and authors. Also, maybe this would lead to more interesting takes on romance and sexuality in fantasy literature, because, suffice to say, that could use some improvements.
But I’m kinda worried about the current situation where romantasy is basically just the marketing hype thing. The Popular Thing Right Now. A lot of the stuff doesn’t get written because the authors like to enrich fantasy literature, it gets written because they realised can make money off of the TikTok crowd.
…I mean, I guess it’s not a new problem, the same thing happened with horror when Twilight was big.
Back in the day, you could slap a math coprocessor on your system so it could do floating point maths real gud.
Now, you slap in some card that does floating point maths even guder, but also in parallel in yuge vectors.
So my proposed name is “It’s like an old Cray supercomputer but real tiny”
“I’m not super familiar with the lifestyles of the rich and famous. What, exactly, does a pool boy even do?”
“Uhhhh… The wife.”
Like all Point-Haired Bosses through the history, Elon has not heard of (or consciously chooses to ignore) one of the fundamental laws of computing: garbage in, garbage out
You either use Debian, or Debian With Extra Steps, so I went with Debian
And this is different from the usual YouTube jank how, exactly? I can’t block ads on the YouTube TV app and it’s a buggy mess and I have no idea why one of the major tech companies in the world allowed that to happen.
Organisational inertia. Planes are expensive, and getting them and qualified personnel to fly and maintain them is a long and complicated process for the airline companies (and the governments supporting the airlines).
They get the news about Boeing being crap, but they can’t just reverse a decision in one day, because the decision to go with Boeing was made years or decades ago.
“systemd is the worst implementation of init, except all those other inits that have been tried from time to time” -Churchill, if he had been a nerd
What I was trying to communicate was that Wikipedia has plenty of photographs that illustrate various concepts. This is a photo that displays typical turtle behaviour, which I didn’t think I implied that I was unaware of and I don’t know how you came to that conclusion. Anyway, it’s the sort of photo you wouldn’t need to include in an article but it clearly is suitable for the purpose.
I did post this picture and all of the rambling while drunk and I’m having a bit of a mild anxiety breakdown right now and I just don’t know what I was saying. I’m terribly ashamed of posting this if this caused anyone any confusion.
Yeah it kinda makes sense, turtles are, after all, the tanks of the nature!
However, in this photo, the roles are kind of reversed, aren’t they? These are just Nature’s Tanks, which are unduly harassed by some random thing that literally flew in from the sky!
Events that happen on nature rarely have immediate and direct tangible interpretations on political policy, is what I’m getting at.
Well, technically, Twitter has employees, so in very strict sense, they’re “manned”. However, thanks to these weird incomprehensible things called “current legislation” and “capitalism”, no employee is in fact personally responsible for the fuckups. And neither is the company as a whole! …Isn’t this great?